Invasion of The Skunk People

Feb 7

Posted by Tony Burton in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

There is an animal called the skunk, sometimes mistakenly called a polecat. The skunk is a member of the mustelidae family, which family also includes stoats, ferrets, and weasels, among others. Warner Brothers has created a lovable, if misguided, cartoon version of the skunk and named him Pepé Le Pew.

Skunks are myopic, and often perceive any moving thing that they don’t see clearly as an enemy. Since their vision is so short-range, that can include a lot of things.

Because they have such bad vision, Nature has gifted them with an extraordinary method of defense: when threatened, they first raise their tail to expose their backside, and stomp their front feet as a warning. If this warning is ignored, they hike their buttocks into the air and spray a foul stench (chemically, 1-butanethiol) that tends to clear the area of anyone, enemy or not.

Essentially, a skunk stomps petulantly, shows its backside, and raises a stink.

I have this feeling that somehow, back in time, the DNA of a few people in this world somehow became contaminated by skunk DNA. They exhibit very similar characteristics:

  • Their vision (physical or mental) is so impaired that they have trouble seeing just about anything clearly.
  • Anything they can’t see clearly or understand is immediately wrong, evil, or threatening.
  • Their first reaction to anything perceived as threatening (whether it really is or not) is to show their worst side and make noisy threats.
  • If the perceived threat doesn’t go away, they show their butts even more and raise an unholy stink that is both disgusting and indiscriminate as to who it effects.

Sadly, these Skunk People are not so charming and debonaire as Pepé Le Pew.

If you think you know someone like this, or maybe a group of people like this, I’d like to know. Leave a comment here, and if you feel so inclined, name the person or group you feel has those skunky characteristics. (I take no resposibility for libelous comments—you’re on your own!)

I write like…

Jul 19

Posted by Tony Burton in Humor, Writing well | No Comments

Well, maybe I shouldn’t leave that all open-ended like that.  Some who don’t like my  work might choose to fill in the blank with their own idea of an appropriate noun or adjective.

But there really is a very interesting website that Radine Trees Nehring pointed out to me today.  It’s called “I Write Like”, and found at http://iwl.me/

The premise is that every writer has certain patterns they tend to follow: sentence length, number of adjectives, verbs, nouns, etc., in a sentence, how much dialogue, how choppy or protracted the dialogue is, etc.  At this site you put in a fairly large representative sample of your writing, and it compares it to a database of famous writers’ writing.  Then, it tells you who you write like!

I was excited and pleased to see that my prose is similar to Raymond Chandler’s! (I can only hope that it does NOT mean that I write like a dead guy.)

Why not drop by there, put some of your prose into the system, and see what it tells you?

I write like
Raymond Chandler

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Copyrights, collective works, and misunderstandings

Jul 12

Posted by Tony Burton in Publishing, The business of writing | 1 Comment

If you have investigated the Wolfmont website, you know that I have published quite a few anthologies.  It’s because I like the short story form, and believe it is a real challenge to write a short, succinct story that engages and entertains the listener–perhaps more challenging even than writing a decent novel.

The first anthology I ever published (2006) was titled Seven By Seven, and was an anthology of 49 flash fiction stories by seven different authors, all focused on the seven deadly sins as described by the Church. It was a success, earned a fair amount of money for all the authors, and in fact is still in print.

As I say, this was in 2006, and since I was new to the publishing business, I was not thinking of ebooks at the time, so there was no specific mention of this in the contract.  Along came the Kindle, and the publishing world started to change.  Early this year, I decided to put the book into Kindle and ePub format, primarily because people had been asking me if my company’s books were available in ebook format.  It was a lot of trouble, since I didn’t have the original word processing files for Seven By Seven, but ultimately I got it done.

The book didn’t do as well in ebook format–selling only three copies for a total of $5.25 in revenue.  But recently two of the authors from the original cadre of Seven By Seven contributors took issue with my conversion into ebook format, and began to make a public spectacle of it.

Now, I’ll admit right now that I was mistaken about copyright law in this, but it is an innocent mistake.  Before I did the ebook conversion, I had read what I thought were the relevant sections of law in the United States Copyright rules, as they apply to collective works. The book is copyrighted to my company, and my understanding was that the copyright applies to the entire work, in any format, although the copyright to the individual stories still remained with the original authors. So, I had proceeded with the conversion.  (Believe me, if I had not thought I was right, I would not have gone to the trouble of converting and restoring the word processing files!)

After the two authors contacted me, I called the US Copyright Office, and when I spoke with someone at the USCO, I asked them if copyright meant the entire work was copyrighted to me in any form, and the person I spoke with said yes, that it was.  They do say they will not offer legal advice, but they will answer basic questions about the rules.  I had also communicated with an intellectual property lawyer via the Internet, told him the problem, and he had agreed that my stance was correct. However, in order to try to stop the issue from escalating, I removed the Kindle version from Amazon and requested that Apple remove the ePub version from their iBookstore.

This morning, I called one more IP lawyer and spoke with him over the phone.  He was gracious enough to give me a few minutes of his time without payment, and I encourage anyone needing an IP lawyer to get in touch with Terry Williamson. Now, the truth is, what he told me didn’t make me happy, but at least it did clarify matters.

The world of publishing, especially digital publishing, is a rapidly changing one.  Ebooks present a new field of endeavor for lawyers and courts as they decide how to work with old assumptions about copyrights, print rights, and so forth. What it came down to, regardless of what the previous lawyer told me, and regardless of what the representative of the USCO may have said over the phone, copyright to a book in print form does not necessarily give the publisher the right to publish the book in any other format.  It appears that the publisher has this right, from the verbiage set down in the United States Code, but my guess is that this is an older rule and needs to be modified somehow to take newer ways of producing collective works into account.

In short, I was wrong.  It was an innocent mistake, but I was wrong.  The contract I had with those authors did not give me the right to publish the original book in any other form, no matter what I thought and no matter what the other IP lawyer had told me.

In my defense, I had researched the problem and thought I was in the right. I asked a lawyer, and I asked the source of the rules, the United States Copyright Office. Even before I spoke with the attorney today, I took the offending work off the Kindle platform, and as soon as Apple complies with my request, it should be off the Apple iBookstore platform as well (it has never sold a copy there, anyway.) And if they want it, I’ll be happy to send each of the seven authors seventy-five cents via PayPal, which is one-seventh of the total $5.25 I made from selling the ebook form.

Now, the truth is, I daresay that if I asked ten different IP lawyers about this issue, I’d get at least three different opinions, simply because this is such a new area of endeavor. But in the end, in this case at least, it is simpler to let it go.  After all, from a purely financial standpoint, I’ve already spent almost six times as much as I made on the ebook, simply to get an erroneous legal opinion from someone!

The exchange between that author and myself became particularly rancorous, primarily because the individual “went public” with the dispute, and made a lot of implications that I was trying to harm authors, that I was trying to steal from them, etc.  To me, this is something that should have been handled privately and without noising it about in a public forum.  That is tacky.

The dust has yet to settle, and whether or not this will be a lasting blow to Wolfmont’s reputation, I have no idea.  But I have learned from it, and in the end, that is a good thing.

Copyright 2010 Tony Burton

Literary Porn Drawing Winner

May 30

Posted by Tony Burton in Humor, Writing well | 3 Comments

Well, the time is up and, even though I didn’t get as many entrants into the “Write Your Own Literary Porn” contest as I would have liked, I did get a fewparticipants.  (I think a lot of people were chicken!)

The randomly drawn winner is… Barb Goffman.  Here is her entry:

“My breath quickened. It was nearly time. Our weekly rendezvous. In moments we’d be together, and I’d melt into the pleasure, tuning out everything else. Sometimes I wish we had more time together, more time to for me to explore. But a part of me relished our limitations. They made every moment more precious. One day soon, we’ll have to part, but not now. Not today. Now I turn on my TV, ‘Lost’ comes on, and I sigh in ecstasy.”

Sadly, her true love is now a thing of the past, only memories now, but she does receive a nice, crisp copy of The Writer’s Journey Journal, as promised.

Congratulations, Barb!

Literary Porn

May 17

Posted by Tony Burton in The business of writing, Writing ideas from life, Writing well | 19 Comments

No, NO!  It’s not what you think!  I’m not talking about Hemingway writing about a three-way, or Michener writing… well, never mind what Michener might write.  The mind boggles.

What I’m talking about is a topic that arose recently on the Dorothy-L listserv, the idea that some people write about particular topics with such passion and descriptive phrases that show a love… nay, a lust for a particular pastime or object.  We’re talking about things like car porn, gun porn, airplane porn, food porn, desert racing porn, tool porn and even debt porn.  (I have to admit that last one is beyond me….)

One Dorothy-L subscriber mentioned that an article in Washington Monthly said this about Tom Clancy: “Tom Clancy may not be able to write a good love scene between a man and a woman, but he can certainly write a good love scene between a man and a weapons system.”

But, I confess: when someone complained that a few people had labeled his choices of crime fiction as spy porn and he felt aggrieved about that, I was the one who suggested that the people who made that observation were not talking about sex in the traditional sense, but rather that the books he liked glorified the action and technique of spying, revelled in it, got into the depths of it and rolled around in the clandestine nature of it in fits of ecstasy.  (Well, maybe I didn’t say it quite that way, but that’s what I meant.)  The television show “24″ is a great example of spy porn.

So, in defense of those who may attach a label of “___________ porn” to any form of literature, I offered my own off-the-cuff version of a short passage of literary knife porn.  For your reading enjoyment, here it is.  (Oh, and unless you are in a strangely controlling work environment, it is Safe For Work.)

“Ronnie held the sleek Gerber Mark II in his hand, feeling the hilt warm to his touch. As he turned it, light from the street lamp outside the window glinted on the blade and seemed to travel along the polished, razor-sharp edge, at last flashing at the needle-like point like a star breaking through the firmament. He smiled and nodded.  This was the one.  He took up the sheath and slid the weapon into it, his lips slightly parted as the steel slipped home between the snugly caressing folds of leather. He pulled on his jacket, covering the sheath hanging beneath his arm and embraced it to him as a lover. No one else would know it was there… but he would. He could feel it.”

A few people wrote me off-list and told me they really liked it, and a couple said they felt strangely excited by reading it.  I made a mental note of those folks and decided not to ever turn my back on them when there were sharp objects lying around.  (I don’t have a Gerber Mark II, but I have held one before and they are very nice blades.  I have a few knives, though, and probably the scariest one is my latest acquisition, a SOG SEAL Team knife, once called the SOG SEAL Knife 2000.)

Here’s what I’d love: If you are a writer, pick some subject or object you are really passionate about, and write a short “porn” piece about it—maybe 50 to 75 words—and post it here as a comment.  Remember, this is NOT real porn, so descriptions of personal plumbing or reproductive/pleasuring are NOT what I’m interested in.  I want to see how you can turn your hand to writing a short scene that evokes a feeling of passion… focus… perhaps even an obsession about an object or activity.  See if you can make the readers here start to fan themselves.

If you are NOT a writer, I’ll bet you have read a piece somewhere that is a porn piece.  Maybe it’s someone waxing rhapsodic about a particular car, or drooling over a certain computer.  Show us that piece, either by typing it into the comment area, C&P’ing it in, or giving us a link to it.

Come on people, show us just how much verbal sensuality you can dredge up!  And I make this offer: I will send a copy of The Writer’s Journey Journal to one of those who submits a sample of his or her own personal literary porn, chosen by a random drawing from among the names of those who submit samples.  I will draw from among those names next week, and announce the winner here.

As someone once said, “Let the bloodbath begin….”

Copyright 2010  Tony Burton