Posts Tagged "He Edits"

Hand Made High Tech

Posted by The Author on 20 Dec, 2011 in Digital Publishing, He Edits, Stuff That Happens | 1 comment

Throughout 2011, if:book Australia commissioned essays from ten Australian writers on the future of writing and reading in a future tilted towards the digital. Each writer drew on his or her experience in fields diverse as publishing, transmedia, gaming, and comics to observe the changes taking place in ‘books’ and discussing where this might lead for authors, readers, and reading culture.

Originally posted at the if:book web site, the articles have now been compiled (some updated) into a single volume under the title Hand Made High Tech with an introduction by me and a brilliant cover design by Daniel Neville.

It’s free to download in any format or to read online. If you have any interest in books and publishing futures, it’s worth a read. Check it out.

The Karinthy Connection

Posted by The Author on 21 Sep, 2011 in Stuff That Happens | Comments Off

Few people know of Hungarian writer and poet Frigyes Karinthy, but you would know the phrase he coined, “six degrees of separation”.

Every Tuesday after 5.30pm, a music lover is invited onto Drive with Bernadette Young to continue a musical chain called The Karinthy Connection.

Yesterday was my turn. I had to pick up from where Brendan Gallagher left off last week with B.B. King. So here’s my six degrees.

Upcoming Book: Off the Record

Posted by The Author on 9 Jul, 2010 in Featured Articles, Stuff That Happens | 2 comments

With Sean Sennett, I have just completed co-editing an anthology of music interviews from Australian street press.

Off the Record: 25 Years of Music Street Press will be published on 25th October 2010 by UQP and features interviews with ninety-five artists from 1986 to 2010—from bands on the cusp of greatness to megastars at the height of their powers—all imbued with street press indie sensibility.

We won’t reveal yet which bands made it into the book. All in good time.

I will post some thoughts on the editing process in the coming months, but for now feel free to get excited in anticipation. After all, this will be huge.

Twelves Part Twelve – Bête Noire

Posted by The Author on 25 Nov, 2009 in He Writes | 5 comments

You know those little words and phrases that seem to come from nowhere and suddenly pop up all around you like virulent pustules for where there is no known ointment? Do you have your own set of bête noires that haunt you and cause your ears to bleed and your eyeballs to pop out as you heckle the speaker regardless of whether that speaker can hear you or not?

Maybe that’s just me.

For my sins, I have written and edited in the halls of both academia and corporatus alike. Both worlds are rife with the kind of jargon, buzzwords, cant, and plain stupidity that makes one want to do something highly illegal to the perpetrators, preferably with knitting needles.

And so I present a rather surly twelve: a bête noire for every occasion. Some of these I was reacquainted with through Don Watson’s awesome and hilarious Dictionary of Weasel Words, but others are my own work and all are universally appalling.

And if you use any in the comments to my blog, I will publicly humiliate you. You’ve been warned.

• ‘Definately’
• ‘Independant’
• ‘Enhance’
• ‘De’-anything (motivate, conflict, friend)
• ‘In terms of…’
• ‘Embolden’
• ‘Pedagogy’
• ‘Aging’
• Any noun turned into a verb (‘to friend’, ‘to leverage’, ‘to service’)
• ‘Differently-abled’
• ‘Going forward’
• ‘Key’

‘Definately’, will be familiar to anyone who has read a bad blog post or an ill-informed comment to a bad blog post, or indeed three out of four Facebook status updates. My advice? It’s not a word. Stop using it.

I used to work for a place called the Independent Living Centre. The place changed its name to stop morons using the aggravating ‘independant’*. I repeat, it’s not a word! It’s not a word! Is it that hard to learn the correct spelling?

* Not actually true.

Enhance means to intensify or raise the value of. Here’s a rule of thumb: you can’t ‘enhance’ outcomes.

Demotivate will just scrape muster with me. ‘De-friend’ makes me want to reach for a rusty razor blade (mostly because it violates two of the twelve—see below).

Will somebody tell me what ‘…in terms of…’ means other than ‘[I don't know what I'm going to say next, so I'll use these nonsensical syllables to buy myself some time until I come with the right...ah...I've got it]‘?

When you say ‘embolden’, you sound like you’re about to vomit up a whole nectarine. Need I say more?

Pedagogy. Education jargon I find particularly galling. These people are teachers. Surely they know better. But no. From the world of education bureaucracy comes this little polished turd of inscrutability. It even looks ridiculous, like it should rhyme with foggy, which more than aptly describes the reader’s state of mind when they encounter the word.

True, ‘aging’ is the American spelling (which earns it a few ‘de’-merit points from the get go), but American spelling is a ‘de’ facto standard, especially online. In any case, the word has a similar effect in writing to the ‘foggy’ effect. It looks like it should be pronounced ‘agging’. It does make academic articles sound hilarious when you use the ‘agging’ pronunciation. Try it.

I suspect people who use a nouns as a verbs think they’re being kind of cool: a coinage trendsetter perhaps, who secretly hopes that you will be more likely to ‘friend’ them if they ‘appendage’ their language with something that sounds like thing kind of thing teenagers say. Teenagers do much more than mangle language, you know. Next time you hear a grownup sprouting this nonsense, let them know that they sound like they’re awfully fond of ‘pleasuring’ themselves.

I’ve worked for many years with people who have a disability and I included the next one more for the sake of clarity than anything else. I’m not going to lie, the language of disability is a minefield, not least because of the tendency for legitimate and socially acceptable words to be co-opted by snot-nose school yard brats for their next taunt (see ‘spastic’ especially). The goalposts had a tendency to move quickly in the past (see ‘handicap’), but I think things have settled quite nicely in the last twenty years or so. I can’t stress enough, if you’re writing anything to do with disability issues or about people with a disability, refer to the excellent resources from Disability Services. Alright, I’ve put the soapbox away.

Name me a single sentence that can justify the words ‘going forward’. We think we will be more successful going forward, rather than backward, sideways, or indeed attempting to use yogic techniques to stick our collective head up our collective rectum. That one works.

And to number twelve. Critical, essential, vital. There are three adjectives from the top of my head that render the word ‘key’ useless. ‘Strategic thinking is key.’ Somebody said that to me once, shortly before I laughed at him. Closely related to ‘key’ is the very strange word ‘turnkey’. I usually read it as ‘turkey’ and you should too: ‘This is a turkey opportunity’. See? Much better. I confess, I had to look up what ‘turnkey’ actually means (fortunately my dictionaries—even Watson’s—were no help so I turned to some godawful glossary somewhere) and the results were not particularly enlightening. I prefer to think that use of the word ‘turnkey’ reveals the author as someone afraid of being caught out as a fraud and a shyster. Take note the next time you hear this word from the mouth of a politician and don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Collaborate

Posted by The Author on 21 Jul, 2009 in He Writes | 2 comments

Among the ridiculous number of simultaneous projects I currently have on the go, a quick thought on collaborations.

I used to play in a band. A duo really, but we wrote a lot of music together, always collaboratively. Sometimes we split the music and lyrics (I rarely wrote lyrics by the way, I’m very much a prose writer), but usually we collaborated on everything. One of us would come to a rehearsal with an idea and we’d piece the song together bit by bit. Usually we came up with something that sounded better than if we had worked alone. I depend on that sounding board to write music and one of the reasons I don’t any more is because I don’t have a collaborator.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot of late because I’ve just completed work on my first collaborative piece of fiction with my brother Darren.

We have tried collaboration before a few times. We tried taking alternate chapters. We tried taking on different characters. Nothing really worked and I consigned the whole endeavour to the ‘revisit one of these days’ file. Little did I know Darren was hatching his own variation on the concept.

Despite its prevalence in other arts, collaboration is an unusual idea in fiction. I can’t think of more than a handful of collaborative novels. And yet all writing is a collaboration to some extent, even if it’s just a writer-editor effort.

What we eventually hit on was taking alternate drafts. The result was similar to writer-editor only with the editor taking a far more active role adding character layers and additional narrative. Our model was less ’50 per cent text each’ and something more like what Joel and Ethan Cohen do: share the writing credits where one or the other might take the lead on any individual project. Seems to work well for them. Why not us? We are already brothers after all.

Darren is spruiking ‘Concentrate’: the debut novel for young readers by the Brothers Groth over on his site so check it out.