Books & Blogs

More bloggers are writing books and vice versa - it's a nice combination. And more bloggers are being approached to review the books.

Last night, I attended a launch party with other members of the media and tech companies, sponsored by the Horn Group for Charlene Li & Josh Bernoff's new book, Groundswell. Li and Bernoff are Forrester analysts and Li is a contributing writer for the Silicon Valley Moms Blog. I'm really looking forward to reading this book - it shows companies how to utilize social networking tools for their benefit.

The next book I've been given to review via the MOMocrats is Arianna Huffington's Right is Wrong. I love the subtitle: "How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution, and Made Us All Less Safe (And What You Need to Know to End the Madness)". Nice way to hone in on your audience... Here's one way I know to end the madness without reading all 331 pages: vote for Obama. Seriously though, she did some hefty research for this book - the source notes alone are impressive. I enjoyed On Becoming Fearless and although this is a totally different kind of book, Huffington's writing is always witty and interesting, whether you agree with her or not.

The other book I look forward to perusing is Writing Motherhood, by Lisa Garrigues. On first glance, it looks like a combination memoir and instruction manual for moms to hold onto a) themselves, b) the precious moments with their (our) little ones, and c) their careers through writing. After just finishing Writer Mama by Christina Katz, this should be an interesting contrast. Writer Mama is a primer for making freelancing work while parenting. As a fairly experienced writer, I already knew most of what was in that book, but it has some fabulous resources that I was able to compile into a comprehensive list.

In other news, I met Kathleen Sebelius on Friday. Here's the full report from that.

Six Degrees of Tom Perkins

I hosted a book club meeting for the first time last night and the book I chose was a little different than the novels we've read in the past. The book club is for my (relatively new, as of a little over a year ago) neighborhood and the group is largely social, but also highly intelligent, well-read, well-traveled, and full of interesting people. I'd read some good reviews about Valley Boy, Tom Perkins's autobiographical book, and had made it through a few chapters when I made the selection. Some of the neighbors who came to my home liked it; others didn't, no big surprise, but nearly everyone had some kind of connection to the book either through people they knew, places they had traveled or worked.

Perkins, founder of Kleiner Perkins (later to become Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers), the most well-known venture capital firm in the world, wrote about everything from sailing to IPOs, and he wrote it well. Various people had their opinions of Perkins and his opinions after reading the book, of course, but everyone thought his take on the HP-Compaq merger was interesting as well as his philanthropic endeavors and what he wrote of his love life. (For those who don't know, he was involved with the San Francisco Ballet board, he lost his wife of many years to cancer, and he was briefly wed to Danielle Steel.) He also helped build Tandem Computers and Genentech. He's now on the board of News Corp.

Here is a bit of a bio and a recent photo of Perkins, here is the publisher's info, and here is his Wikipedia entry. Even if you're not a fan but you find these topics of interest, check the book out at the library - it's an interesting read.

Late Night Amusement - Russian Spam

I get the best Russian spam late at night these days - somehow it's evading both of my spam filters - but instead of deleting it, I'm using it as a chance to brush up on my reading in Russian. And the messages are a great combination of really basic words that I know, complex words that I'm able to discern meaning from given a basic understanding of spam, and cognates, which are always fun.

Yeah, so I have better things to do with my time and reading short stories or Russian newspapers would probably be better training, but this way I get a little every day to keep those neurons active in preparation for Sochi 2014. If you are interested in any great Russian spam, just drop me a line - I'd be happy to forward...

RIP Arthur Clarke, One of Sci-Fi's Greatest

He turned Jupiter into a second sun and now he's gone. At age 90, one of science fiction's greatest, Arthur C. Clarke, has died. He passed his last years in Sri Lanka, this Brit served in the Royal Air Force in WWII, survived polio, designed preliminary modern satellites, and wrote classics like 2001: A Space Odyssey. That's quite a life.

The Washington Post has a nice write-up, and Space.com wrote about the industry response. USA Today covers his body of work in impressive detail.

I recall vividly the first time I read 2001: A Space Odyssey the realism of his ideas and how they affected me. He was a visionary. Arthur C. Clarke will be missed, but not forgotten, with 80 books and 500 essays.

Bloggers and Writers - Use Creative Commons Licenses - Here's Why

I had the pleasure of getting to know Cory Doctorow while I was volunteering for theEFF one summer. He is an extraordinary writer and networker, and his work is brilliant. So rather than trying to paraphrase his writing, I'll just quote it directly. It is, after all, under Creative Commons license:

"My writing career and Creative Commons are inextricably bound together. My first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, was published by Tor, the largest science fiction publisher in the world, on January 9, 2003, just a few days after CC launched its first licenses. I was the first author to use the licenses, applying them to my book and releasing it for free online on the same day it appeared in stores. Today, the book has been through more printings than I can keep track of, been translated into more languages than I know, and has been downloaded more than 750,000 times from my site alone (I don’t know the total number of downloads, because, of course, anyone is free to redistribute it)."

More...

"CC turns my books from nouns into verbs. My books *do stuff*, get passed around and recut and remade to suit the needs of each reader, turned to their hand the way that humans always have adapted their tools and stories to fit their circumstances. As Tim O’Reilly says, my problem is not piracy, it’s obscurity, and CC licenses turn my books into dandelion seeds, able to blow in the wind and find every crack in every sidewalk, sprouting up in unexpected places. Each seed is a possibility, an opportunity for someone out there to buy a physical copy of the book, to commission work from me, to bring me in for a speech. I once sold a reprint of an article of mine to an editor who saw it in a spam message — the spammer had pasted it into the “word salad” at the bottom of his boner-pill pitch to get past the filters. The editor read the piece, liked it, googled me, and sent me a check."

"CC lets me be financially successful, but it also lets me attain artistic and ethical success. Ethical in the sense that CC licenses give my readers a legal framework to do what readers have always done in meatspace: pass the works they love back and forth, telling each other stories the way humans do. Artistic because we live in the era of copying, the era when restricting copying is a fool’s errand, and by CC gives me an artistic framework to embrace copying rather than damning it."

"Writers all over the world are adopting CC licenses, creating an artistic movement that treats copying as a feature, not a bug. As a science fiction writer, this is enormously satisfying: here we have artists who are acting as though they live in the future, not the past. CC is changing the world, making it safe for copying, and just in time, too."

Make it so. See Cory's post and select your license here.

If You Want to Write a Novel, There's No Time Like November

National Novel Writing Month, aka NaNoWriMo, begins again this Thursday, November 1st. It's a month-long journey into the experience of speed fiction, and tens of thousands (perhaps more?) have participated to date. "The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30." Loads of people do it, and they love it. The idea is to focus on quantity, not quality, and to come to the end and say: "hey, I wrote a novel."

NaNoWriMo was founded by Chris Baty, who also came up with my nickname, Sairy. He's a friend from high school and he now runs the nonprofit, the Office of Letters and Light, which manages NaNoWriMo, Script Frenzy, and more based in Oakland. Chris also authored No Plot? No Problem! the handbook and kit for writing novels quickly. Chris is a brilliant writer, and NaNoWriMo has enjoyed significant success to date.

In any case, if you've ever wanted to write a novel, this is a great environment - supportive, fun, and low key. Best wishes to everyone who participates in NaNoWriMo this year!

Water Tables, Wasps, Web & Warfare

I can't keep track of everything going on, but amidst trying to order a water play table for my daughter, keep wasps (actually yellow jackets, I guess) away from her swingset, and follow news about how the Chinese are planning to attack us online (wtf?) along with all of the SVMoms' political activity after a week in the North Woods, I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed.

It's all thrilling, but I get off the plane going through email on my iPhone just trying to keep up on the most urgent. Honestly I feel like I'm in the middle of a Presidential campaign again. (Yeah, I know we are, but I'm not working 100 hours a week just on that this time around... at least not right now.)

Watching how the campaigns are doing, it's all good - Hillary is rocking in the print magazines, Edwards' online campaign is on fire, Barack is getting the newspapers going, and I'm hearing more about Thompson and Giuliani every day (although I might add that the Elle magazine article I read on the plane about Rudy's ways with women wasn't all that positive.) Keep up with the tech news about the campaigns at TechPresident or Politics Online. And in terms of national security, Gary Hart has launched a new organization - the American Security Project. I'm very excited about this. I'll blog more about it soon.

Back in the parenting world, plastics are everywhere and although the sky isn't falling, the oceans may be. My dad gave me this frightening chapter from Alan Weisman's book to read while I was in Minnesota. Our oceans are literally drowning in these toxic plastics everybody's ranting about being dangerous to children and fertility, affecting our planetary water table.

William Gibson's Latest Novel

Spook Country, I read in a recent Wired interview that William Gibson's latest is more of a spy novel than sci-fi, so I decided to pick it up one day at the Stanford Bookstore and start reading... it had been a few years since my last foray of Gibson's work - Idoru, I think it was - and I thought it was about time to pick up another. I've always been a fan, since Neuromancer first came out, but this book seemed to come from a different genre all together. Until I began reading.

The character who Gibson first introduces the reader to is a woman journalist who is technically astute and a risk-taker. I like her already. She finds herself in unpredictable circumstances, as do many of Gibson's characters, and although it's a book set now rather than in the near future cyberpunk timeframe, the world he creates around these characters still has a similarly gritty feel because of the way he crafts the language as well as the story. It fascinates me.

Gibson has an essence in his writing that I always loved. Somehow through the depth of his character creation and his ability to craft stories through a mellifluous cornucopia of language, he develops novels of a deeper quality than most modern authors. I've noticed two types of successful authors - type a) churning out 1-2 books a year, following a formula, providing wonderful stories that entertain a broad audience and type b) developing through great detail in research and/or language more complex chronicles. Gibson falls into the b category. Neither, in my opinion, is better than the other; they are different styles that work for different writers. Isaac Asimov was type a. He wasn't trying to be James Joyce. Nor, I'm guessing, is Gibson, but he seems to fit more into type b. I like both.

Anyway, I digress. I haven't finished Spook Country yet, but I shall report back when I do. So far, it doesn't disappoint.

YouTube Videos a Vast Right Wing Conspiracy

I know their strategy - I've figured it out. The Republicans are the ones really behind the videos like "1984", "Obama Girl" and "I Feel Pretty" (or whatever it's called - aka, Edwards's hair). They purposely chose images and audio that would get stuck in our heads and cause psychological trauma in order to weaken us, and it's working. Now every time I have a quiet moment or read an article where Barack Obama's name is mentioned, that infernal song immediately forces itself into my mind. It's like Voldemort to Harry Potter or the ring to Frodo - I just can't shake the thing. So my only conclusion must be that it's a vast right wing conspiracy. The only recourse I have is to then start singing "I Feel Pretty" and picturing Julie Andrews in my head instead of the Presidential candidates. Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi. You're my only hope.

Celebrate Live Earth & 77 Survival Skills

So Live Earth started 3 hours ago in Australia and will continue around the globe all day today. Some of my favorite musicians are performing all over the world, but if I had to choose, I'd be in London where Genesis, Madonna and Metallica will all be on stage. Quite a mix. But if you can't be in any of the great cities where the concerts are happening, they're all on XM Radio and many will be broadcast on the Sundance Channel. Better yet, MoveOn.org is hosting a global "Party for the Planet" care of anyone who wants to throw one. Bonus track: Presidential candidates preview their plans for the environment. (See their site for more info.)

As Nadine mentioned, the Global Warming Survival Handbook contains some great tips for what we can all do to be green, good, sustainable and responsible. I reserved my copy and got it in the mail last week - it's very well written, with a brief synopsis of ten easy things we can all do at the beginning, and then a 2-page spread for each of the 77 things throughout the book. Some of them are funny, a la the Worst Case Scenario handbooks, but they get the point across: act now or suffer the consequences later. See some of the "Climate Crisis Solutions" online.

I urge everyone to read Al Gore's article from the New York Times about where we are now, how urgent the climate crisis is, and how the U.S. government must act in order to save the planet over the next ten years. And sign the Live Earth pledge and learn more at algore.com about how to get involved.

Mother Jones on Digital Democracy

Thanks to Farber's IP list, I learned of this collection of articles and interviews on "Digital Democracy" in Mother Jones magazine, online. It takes into account where we were in the last election, what kind of progress we've made, and where we're really going now - arguing that MySpace isn't necessarily all it's cracked-up to be in terms of motivating communities to act in a political sense but also introducing other areas that are making waves online. (And I have to say I love some of the article titles like "10,000 Deaniacs: Where are they now?")

I haven't had time to read it all yet, but the one comment I have so far is they only mention two women from what I've seen - Esther Dyson and Morra Aarons. Both worthy of noting, to be sure, but there are more of us in this space - consultants, bloggers, techies, entrepreneurs, lawyers - with expertise, like Joan Blades, co-founder of MoveOn and MomsRising.org, Jennifer Granick & Lauren Gelman at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, and Madeline Stanionis of Watershed just to name a few here in the Bay Area. See also: Shesource.org for other resources. I'd like to see more women interviewed in general on this topic.

Recent Posts on SVMoms Blog & SFBayStyle

FWIW, I've been writing a lot of posts other places in the past couple of weeks. Here's a sampling:

On SFBayStyle...



• Closet Obsession - My husband may be one of the few metrosexual males who groked this post but it covers why I find closets fascinating.


• Fall/Winter 2007 Fashion Trends List - Published each season, my list covers all that I've read and viewed in magazines and online about the coming season's fashion trends.


• Wilkes Bashford & SF Symphony Present Fashion Show - I attended a fashion show last week for the SF Symphony and a local high-end retailer that was a lot of fun. Includes photos.



On the Silicon Valley Moms Blog...



• The Dreaded Daycare Dilemma - For those of you not from the Bay Area, you may not understand how hard it is to get kids into pre-school here but I had to get my daughter on a list when I was pregnant to get a spot just now for the coming fall; however, the decision wasn't so easy so I enlisted the help of my fellow mommybloggers while making the decision.


• Four Inspirational Moms on Perserverence - About a book co-written by 4 women, including former California Senator Jackie Speier, this tells a little about my experience with Jackie and what her book covers.


• Confessions of a Sugarholic... - A new shop opened in Menlo Park, the "Sugar Shack" and this post chronicles my own battles with sugar (it always wins) and how I feel about this exciting new business.


• Great Summer Reading - A book review of Momzillas, new well-written, hilarious chick lit.

Silicon Valley Moms No Longer In Infancy

In addition to blogging here and a couple of other places, I contribute to the Silicon Valley Moms Blog. The founders of the blog, Jill Asher, Pamela Hornik, Beth Blecherman & Tekla Nee started the blog April 4th, 2006, so yesterday they celebrated their anniversary with a plethora of posts. I wrote one as did many other contributors. (I've been writing for them since early last fall.)

Continuing on with the Silicon Valley theme, I posted another today about The Official Silicon Valley Guy Handbook that I read way back when... very funny book. Anyway, if you haven't yet checked out the Silicon Valley Moms Blog - even if you're not a parent but if you're curious about Silicon Valley life at all, check it out.

Technolinguists

I thought I was being creative coming up with the term, 'technolinguist', but then I discovered it's already being used in a variety of locations - the word nerds and Languate Technologies Research Centre in Canada as two of them. Several individuals use the term as an alias on various blogs as well. In any case, I think the word should be used more frequently in the context of explaining technology to the masses.

Searchable Printable Downloadable & Pocket-Sized Books Google Style

There are many wonderful medical websites that can be found online, and these types of sites can help you find all kinds of great health information whether it is pregnancy information you are seeking or articles and facts about type 1 diabetes.
...

The masterminds behind Google have been working on the concept of putting books online and searching them for over ten years now - since before Google began. When I was at UofM with Larry Page, I remember him talking about wanting to put the entire Library of Congress online. Through Google, he's gradually been developing partnerships with universities, publishers and other corporations to make this happen, ending for a result that allows people to download books online.

Slashdot discussed this today, calling what Google wants to do as creating an "iPod/iTunes for Books". That would be the next level with a handheld hardware gizmo. The Times Online (UK) says "Google plots e-books coup." Yeah, right. I doubt they're trying to corner the market in this one - they just want to be the first ones to do it. (And they will do it - just give it time.)

Google's not the only group to come up with this concept. Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive (who also knows Larry through some other UofM people in a roundabout Silicon Valley two degrees way), created theBookmobile that is a vehicle that can print books in the public domain. These are books that are already out of copyright and are online like Alice in Wonderland. Unfortunately the Bookmobile itself is out of print now, but the link above explains how to build one yourself.

Woody Allen Never Ceases to Amuse

The New Yorker is one of my favorite magazines and most definitely it's one of a kind. Each time I open it, I'm surprised by something new and the October 2nd edition was no exception. We had just renewed our lapsed subscription so I had forgotten how much I enjoy the short fiction presented and that week's held a priceless piece by Woody Allen, entitled "Pinchuck's Law".

Not knowing exactly what to expect, I dove into the piece like a hungry wolf as it had been years since I'd actually read anything by Allen, although I'd certainly viewed his films. In a story that begins like a classic murder mystery, he took me down twists and turns of comedic surprise and creative excellence. It was just what I needed after an unusually difficult week to have some unpredictable laughs and soak in a true master's way with words. I highly recommend taking the time to read it.

Vacuum Packed Books From Blogs, Isaac Asimov & NaNoWriMo

Vacuum, an e-mail list I'm on, has all sorts of interesting discussions and today's topic initiated by Ed Vielmetti, was on turning blogs into books and whether it's possible. Several people commented on the concept noting that the two are very different animals, but it got me thinking so I decided not only to respond to the thread but also to post what I wrote here:

I'm curently in the process of writing a nonfiction book (well, a few chapters - just beginning the agent & publisher search) and posting to a couple of blogs. I'm also a new mom so I find myself with smaller chunks of time to work with than I previously had. I was one of those people who could stay up all night and write a chapter or two, or a few scenes of a play, at a time. But now I don't have that kind of time.

I have discovered that I can actually write for my book the same way I write for my blog in terms of organizing a thought, knowing how much space I need to fill, writing that copy, rewriting and posting. Therefore, I think turning a blog into a book would be theoretically possible, but it would require a great deal more effort and planning before beginning.

Basically you would be writing one page at a time - maybe two - instead of a chapter at a time (15-25 pages). It wouldn't be as well-done as a book because it wouldn't have the same editorial process including the opportunity to go back and rearrange things that might be ordered differently. For example, the chapter I'm working on currently I had organized one way and I decided it would logically flow better with a different layout of sections. If I were writing it in a blog, it would have already been too late because I would've published the first section before I realized it should be reordered.

What I think is interesting that I discovered while editing a few books is that sometimes chapters are presented to the editors out of order and never revisited by the author before printing, so nonfiction books can be pieced together rather haphazardly not unlike blogs. That actually bothered me because I like to look at each work I produce as a whole. Writing this kind of book requires a detailed outline from the beginning, but that doesn't necessarily mean the author will stay true to it 100%. If you built a book from a blog, there would be no room for deviation.

The other concern is style. Most bloggers are more casual in their writing style on a blog; whereas most books are a bit more formal. I think that's both a result of the different audiences targeted and the forum. However, if I wrote what I'm writing for my book in my blog, I think it would have less interest as a sum of its parts than it would as a whole. But that wouldn't necessarily be the case in a diary-type book.

I think the metaphor of serial vs. parallel processing also applies. The traditional book development process is more like parallel whereas the blog style (also as in serialized articles, just with smaller parts) is more linear. However, I recall reading once that Isaac Asimov typed every single book he wrote on a typewriter, never correcting, as he wrote. Maybe he developed that style as a result of his medium. I suppose with fiction it could be easier also to just let the characters take you wherever they want to go, but I can't imagine remembering all of the little details about them without some additional character guide not unlike an outline. In any case, it's still an impressive feat.

One last note - a friend of mine from high school, Chris Baty, started the NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) phenomenon a few years back and it's done annually - coming up again in November. If you want to try your hand at writing a novel, the goal is volume/quantity over quality. They figure you can always polish the final product after it's done. The goal is total number of words (over 50,000 constitutes a "novel"), presented at the author's leisure so some people do it a chapter at a time and others wait until the end.

Hart at Stanford Wednesday

Gary Hart is doing a book signing at the Stanford Bookstore at 6pm on Wednesday evening, Sept. 27 for his new book, The Courage of Our Convictions: A Manifesto for Democrats. (See my related post from a few weeks ago and see also: today's CBS News article.) I'm hoping to make it. The last one of these I attended was more of a Q&A than a reading from the manuscript. I expect high-level questions and intellectual banter with the Stanford crowd.

For those curious about how I know so much about Gary Hart, I hate to disappoint that I'm not one of the psycho-political pandering followers that some of these guys attract over the years. My interaction with Senator Hart was initially due to nepositm: he and my dad grew up together in Ottawa, Kansas.

The first time I met Gary was during the '88 campaign - he was on a float for the 30th class reunion from their high school, Ottawa High. He and my dad are both coming up on their 70th birthdays in the next couple of months. Born in 1936 during the Depression, they were small town scruffy boys running around with dogs playing baseball in the street, later to become lawyers via Yale and Stanford, respectively. (This is important because that's what brought my family to the Bay Area initially.) My dad, a registered Republican, helped Gary with a couple of his campaigns. He was interviewed for What It Takes, a fascinating behemoth of a book about the '88 race.

When I heard whisperings that Gary might consider running in '04, I used a few different vehicles to try and get involved, persisting until I heard back and then I dove head-first into the pre-campaign mush, first working on speeches then eventually managing the entire online effort. I'll write more about this some other time, but that experience led me to develop some great friendships with the others involved, one of whom is still Gary's publicist which brings us back to the book signing.

Gary Hart's Latest Book Tells Democrats to Grow a Spine

Released today, former Senator Gary Hart's latest book, The Courage of Our Convictions: A Manifesto for Democrats, is full of nuggets blasting both parties for their ineptness. He challenges Dems to rise to the occasion in 2006 and 2008, refocus on the core principles that made the party strong - "commitment to the common good; internationalism; civic duty and participation; equality for all" and hold to their convictions rather than nearly always bending toward centrism.

See an excerpt at the Huffington Post. Hart writes: "security has become more intricate, and simply punching someone in the nose or unilaterally invading his country may not achieve it."

I had the unique opportunity to work for Senator Hart in 2003 during his "testing the waters" campaign for President. He decided not to run, but during the six months I worked on developing the Internet campaign, I read and a lot of his writing and learned that this man - no matter whether you agree with him or not - is a brilliant scholar and prolific writer.

Princess Leia Turning 50 With a Smirk

I fell in love with Carrie Fisher at age 4 when "Star Wars" hit the scene. At the time, I just thought she was the coolest heroine in the universe, but over the years, I've grown to love her even more.

"When Harry Met Sally" and "Hannah and Her Sisters" showcased her evolving skills as an actor. Then gradually she began to focus on her writing more by releasing "Postcards from the Edge" and working behind the scenes of the Oscars, and that caught my attention as well. Little known are her essays and infrequent articles, but I treasure each one I find.

Today I had some good chuckles reading her piece, "Fifty -- Bring It On" in September's Harper's Bazaar (page 316). Grabbing me from the beginning as always, she uses her knack for witty sarcasm to reel me in further. "You are not aging like wine; [she says] whoever said that didn't know his or her liquor." Quotes like that are priceless.

Princess Leia turns 50 on October 21st. I heard her joke somewhere once about how a different crew member got to rip the tape off her breasts each day after shooting the first "Star Wars" film. (The tape was there to keep them in place under the white dress for fear some little kid might see jiggling.) Now I'm sure she would be the first to remark about how the tape might come in handy at 50. Aging gracefully with spunk, I highly recommend savoring her work.