Being inside on the hottest day of the year, when publishers are certainly observing the summer Friday, has led to my finally doing a few updates.  The new header is one; I’ve also deleted the annoying category cloud, and provided links to client blogs.

And now for the piece of news with the most interest and of the most relevance to 99.9% of this blog’s readers; I have opened to e-mail queries at JABberwocky.

My e-mail address for query letters is queryeddie [at] awfulagent [dot] com.  Any unsolicited e-mail query sent to any other address will be deleted, unread.  Likewise, don’t send any attachments; any synopsis must be included below the cover letter in the body of your e-mail.

Now, why the change?  Two reasons.

The first is that, although I’m expecting we’ll get hit with a wave of material worse than what we’d see in print, we’re also finding that many people e-mail first, and send letters once they’ve finished e-mailing. If a query is good, we’re put at a competitive disadvantage, because other people get more time to read. The second is that we get fewer queries from authors who live outside the US.  This cuts us off from a good portion of the UK, South African and ANZ markets (we’ve always had many letters from Canada, though), among many others, and making it necessary for people to hunt down IRCs seemed foolish to me, after I thought about it.

So, enjoy! Let your writer friends know I’m now open to e-mail queries.

I used to feel like I should have a blog.  My first site popped up some time around 2000, before ‘blog’ came into parlance, and I’ve had stop-start relationships with self-expression on the internet ever since.  I thought it would be good for me to have some site where I posted the many brilliant things careening through my capacious brain, but at some point in the last couple years, I lost this hubris, and at least as I type this post, it seems to be gone.

Ironically, now I feel like I want to have a blog.  It could be a dangerous thing to have (you can read ham-fisted warnings all over the internet from HR types), and countless people have sanitized their Facebook pages, but that’s not something I have to worry about with my employer, and apocryphally, also rings hollow to me.  There are things I think I want to share with the internet, gears to grind, opinions to share, and I’d rather do it from my own domain than through something like Facebook or Twitter, which are constraining, limiting, and exist to profit off their users (this doesn’t stop me from having accounts, though).  Wordpress, which I’m using right now, seems to function as a utility, so I have no beef with it.

So, here’s what to expect:

1. A less godawful header graphic (what was I thinking?)

2. I’ll continue on with the 100 Sentences project (and maybe retitle it to something sexier — if you’ve got an idea, feel free to comment. Thankfully, I don’t have trolls the way better bloggers do.)

3. More opinion, provided I don’t give a painfully diplomatic presentation of my subject (always a risk, with me)

4. Visual art?  We’ll see.  I like to draw, and every once in a while, something turns out not-half-bad.

That sounds like a lot, given past behavior.  We’ll see where this goes.

One of these caught my attention: Transit-oriented residences, which would amount to high-density developments based near rail stations. Here’s an artist’s rendering of the Mashpee Commons from Mashpee, Massachusetts:

Rendering of Mashpee Commons

As we see here, high-density neighborhoods can look really nice.  The rendering reminds me a bit of Cambridge, MA, which I’ve visited, and also looks more than a little like a college campus (Notre Dame or the Univ. of Toronto, specifically).  To put a business district and a rail station in the neighborhood would make for a really nice place to live.

The rendering reminds me of something else, as well:  Sim City.  When I was a kid, I would try to build neighborhoods with railways and was always forced to retrofit them to roads, no matter how many stations I made.  I’ve always preferred trains to cars, and I still prefer the former — you have your hands free on the train, and can read a book or play Game Boy or fart around with your Blackberry without having to concern yourself with traffic or weather conditions.

That being said, I like walking best, which is why I live down the street from my office.  My commute consists of a five-minute walk to and from work — and lunch, some days.

What do you think?

Would you want to live in a railway suburb?  How do you think our transportation system will change as we wean ourselves off of petroleum?

Singularity University Campus

As Boing Boing reported earlier this morning, Singularity University is to be unveiled today.

The singularity, if you’re unfamiliar, is a term coined by Vernor Vinge that refers to the rapid acceleration of technological change*.  For an example, think of how quickly computers have evolved.  Here’s a graph of the exponential growth in mass use of inventions, courtesy of Ray Kurzweil:

As the singularity approaches, mass use of inventions increases exponentially

Funded by Google and NASA, the college will start out with 9-week programs on the following topics (and even shorter ‘executive seminars,’ presumably for the b-school kids who want to monetize the singularity rather than get into the nuts and bolts of it):

1. Future Studies & Forecasting
2. Networks & Computing Systems
3. Biotechnology & Bioinformatics
4. Nanotechnology
5. Medicine, Neuroscience & Human Enhancement
6. AI, Robotics, & Cognitive Computing
7. Energy & Ecological Systems
8. Space & Physical Sciences
9. Policy, Law & Ethics
10. Finance & Entrepreneurship

I checked my calendar before typing this all up, as this sounds like the sort of thing Google would try to pull as an April Fools’ Day joke. (Remember paper Gmail?)

The thing is, it’s not.  If you actually get into the program, you can go and study nanobots or cognitive computing for a couple months with some of the brightest folk around.

Just don’t be surprised if the place renames itself Robot State (or Tech Tech, as #1 quipped) after the machines take over the campus.

In the thousands and thousands of pieces of writing I’ve read over the last couple years, a pattern has started to emerge, and while I haven’t approached these in anything resembling a scientific manner, I do think, based on the improperly gathered evidence, that there is a hierarchy of needs related to narratives, and that the more of these needs are met, the more successful a narrative will be.

For simplicity’s sake, I’ve tentatively called it the CASE Hierarchy. You’ll see why after the jump.

Okay, you jumped! That’s so nice of you!

Before I begin, let me remind you that I’m looking for feedback. If this seems too off base, too ivory tower white male, or too much like the inspired lunacy in Rivka Galchen’s Atmospheric Disturbances, shoot me a reply:

For a story to function to the best of its ability, there are four primary areas of consideration to which its author must pay attention, beginning from the most fundamental and building from there. These stages are: Creativity, Articulation, Storytelling, and Engagement.

At the most basic level, in order for a narrative work to be truly successful, its author has to have creative ideas. A short story, novella, or novel that doesn’t demonstrate creativity on the part of the author cannot hold the interest of the reader and cannot be an artistic success on its own merits (though the connectedness of the author, nepotism, or severely lowered reader expectations through a programmatic approach to reading might make it a commercial success anyway, provided that there is in fact something resembling a linear story).

If the author of a narrative demonstrates creativity, this does not necessarily mean that this narrative will succeed — only that the author is capable of generating ideas that could be used effectively. The author must also be able to articulate those ideas through the skillful use of language. This requires developing an understanding of prose style, grammar, and a broad enough vocabulary to be able to choose words that accurately communicate what the author intends to say.

While the results of this level of understanding can potentially be interesting, they do not necessarily guarantee a successful narrative. A series of vignettes, for instance, can merit attention and inspire a reader to think, but if they remain unconnected, they don’t communicate the ideas as well as a work does that is capable of building these into a story.

The next step is the most important, structurally. In order for a narrative to be successful, it must function as a story. To do this, a narrative is required to have some central conflict, that is resolved. This does not mean that the conflict or its resolution are necessarily straightforward, merely that they exist. It is possible that in some narratives, the central question might appear to be whether or not the reader can identify the narrative itself.

While the prior example could theoretically work in the hands of a particularly skillful author, most narratives are more compelling when they have a central conflict with a greater degree of tangibility than a story in line with the above example would likely provide.

For many readers, it seems enough to have an engaging narrative that differentiates itself creatively from other narratives and communicates both the story and the ideas within it well. While narratives of this type are functional, there is a further level of development that is required to make a narrative function to its greatest potential: engagement with the philosophical concepts that underlie human civilization.

While sometimes ideas that occur at the basic creative level of development can flirt with these larger themes, or readers might, in their pondering on philosophical topics, attribute things to a narrative that weren’t deliberately put there, they do not necessarily do so.

At this highest level, there is a balancing act that the writer has to perform. If he or she presents too much of an agenda with philosophical or ideological ideas, the ideas run the risk of overwhelming a narrative, as in most of Ayn Rand’s fiction. But there also has to be enough there for the reader to be able to work with to feel he or she is engaged, and it has to be intrinsic enough to the work for readers from other cultures and time periods to get it (unlike Finnegan’s Wake, which virtually requires a knowledge of cryptography to make sense of its nonsense).

And if a writer manages to pull everything in the hierarchy off, the result is a masterpiece.

(Most of this was written on my phone, so apologies if the language is especially choppy.)

So, thoughts?