Beyond the Elements of Style

Need Funding? Try Kickstarter!

Are you a writer, an artist, or a playwright looking for help funding a special project? Instead of going to your local bank, you might want to try another way of endowing your work. Kickstarter is a new way of funding artistic endeavors and other worthy causes. From the website:

We believe that…
• A good idea, communicated well, can spread fast and wide.
• A large group of people can be a tremendous source of money and encouragement.

REWARDS! Project creators inspire people to open their wallets by offering smart, fun, and tangible rewards (products, benefits, and experiences).

ALL-OR-NOTHING FUNDING! Every Kickstarter project must be fully funded before its time expires or no money changes hands. (It’s less risk for everyone. If you need $5,000, it’s tough having $2,000 and a bunch of people expecting you to complete a $5,000 project. It allows people to test concepts (or conditionally sell stuff) without risk. If you don’t receive the support you want, you’re not compelled to follow through. This is huge! It motivates. If people want to see a project come to life, they’re going to spread the word.

STORIES! Kickstarter projects are efforts by real people to do something they love, something fun, or at least something of note. These stories unfold through blog posts, pics, and videos as people bring their ideas to life. Take a peek around the site and see what we’re talking about. Stories abound.

You need to be absolutely clear about what your needs are and where the money will go, but if you have a business plan for your project (um, you do have a business plan for your project, right?) and feel that it’s possible to get it completed within the time allotted by Kickstarter, this may be the way to go. It’s certainly an interesting concept.

And if you’re actually looking for a project to fund, looking through the available opportunities is a lot of fun. It just goes to show how many creative people there are working out there.

Consider different and unusual ways of getting your project to see the light of day. And then you’ll be .. beyond the elements of style!

The Internet Archive

I keep thinking I know my way around the Net, but this one was new to me:

The Internet Archive, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, we provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, and the general public.

I’ve just begun to explore it, but it seems to be a grand resource for writers … Here’s more about it:

Libraries exist to preserve society’s cultural artifacts and to provide access to them. If libraries are to continue to foster education and scholarship in this era of digital technology, it’s essential for them to extend those functions into the digital world.

Many early movies were recycled to recover the silver in the film. The Library of Alexandria – an ancient center of learning containing a copy of every book in the world – was eventually burned to the ground. Even now, at the turn of the 21st century, no comprehensive archives of television or radio programs exist.

But without cultural artifacts, civilization has no memory and no mechanism to learn from its successes and failures. And paradoxically, with the explosion of the Internet, we live in what Danny Hillis has referred to as our “digital dark age.”

The Internet Archive is working to prevent the Internet – a new medium with major historical significance – and other “born-digital” materials from disappearing into the past. Collaborating with institutions including the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian, we are working to preserve a record for generations to come.

Open and free access to literature and other writings has long been considered essential to education and to the maintenance of an open society. Public and philanthropic enterprises have supported it through the ages.

The Internet Archive is opening its collections to researchers, historians, and scholars. The Archive has no vested interest in the discoveries of the users of its collections, nor is it a grant-making organization.

At present, the size of our Web collection is such that using it requires programming skills. However, we are hopeful about the development of tools and methods that will give the general public easy and meaningful access to our collective history. In addition to developing our own collections, we are working to promote the formation of other Internet libraries in the United States and elsewhere.

As both a writer and historian, I’m very much in favor of the Internet Archive’s mission, particularly this statement: “without cultural artifacts, civilization has no memory and no mechanism to learn from its successes and failures.” We can all benefit from these cultural artifacts, whether to learn from them, write about them, or be enlightened by them. Visit the archives soon, and often, at archive.org. And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

Where Am I? Who Knows?

As the internet continues to grow and absorb more and more of our time and energy, it behooves us to take a step back and see what really is out there. So I’m going to write a series of articles here about the web, and how you can put it to use for you … instead of just letting it use you.

Because the reality is that your name is out there. Perhaps you’ve worked hard to get it out there, and this is a good thing. Perhaps you have no idea where it is, who might be talking about you, referencing you, mentioning you. Perhaps you don’t remember that forum in which you lost your temper one night and berated someone more explicitly than might have been appropriate. Words have power; isn’t it time to see where yours have ended up?

The first step is something that is occasionally and unfortunately called egosurfing. It’s simply looking to see how many places on the web your name appears. On Google and most other search engines, simply enter your name surrounded by double quotes in the search field (like this: “Your Name”). You may be surprised to discover that you’re famous on someone’s webpage or that the local committee meeting report you helped write got put on the web.

Check it out and see where you are. And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

Resources for Magazine/Freelance Writers

Need to do some market research? Find new venues for your work? Here are a couple of places you can start:

A lot of magazine writers subscribe (for a fee) to
Freelance Success, partly for its market guides,
guides to various markets (individual publications, what they want, who to pitch to, etc.), based on interviews.

Similar market guides are available from the American Society of Journalists & Authors (ASJA), which is more expensive to join (and not always easy to get into).

Writers Weekly has a great list of both jobs and gigs for freelance writers.

The Great Britain-based Burry Man Writing Center not only has gigs but hosts a terrific networking site for writers called Inked-In.

One of the best resources for finding magazine and journal submission requirements that are up to date is subscription-based, but well worth the cost: it’s Meg Weaver’s Wooden Horse Database.

These reources are a great place to start … and I’ll share more as I come across them. Remember that diligence and Google are your friends! And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

Times Online!

The Times of London recently made its 200-year archive available at the Times Archives.

The presentation is very user-friendly: you can use the site search functionality, of course, but you can also click on a scrolling timeline, which allows you to browse for something that may be of interest. As a historical novelist myself, I’m very excited about the potential here, both for research and also — frankly — for trolling for ideas!

You’ll also see a separate photograph archive, some featured articles, the ability to do a single-day search (along the lines of “this day in history”), and Times recommendations.

Why am I so excited? After all, the History Channel’s been offering something similar on its site for years.

The point is that this is primary source material. It’s not someone’s account of what may have happened, it’s what the newspaper reported happening. Authentic, not too biased (no reports are completely unbiased), and arranged in such a way that the user can get information quickly and easily.

Note that there is currently a free introductory period for use of the archives; it’s unclear what the cost will be later on down the line, but it’s sure to be well worth it to those of us needing the resource. It has my vote for Site of the Month, that’s for sure! Check it out yourself, and you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

ADDENDUM: My colleague and friend Dick Margulis (he of Ampers&Virgule fame) has helpfully noted that “The date widget is day-month-year rather than the American-style month-day-year. So if someone is looking for news on a particular date, they should be careful to enter it in the right order.”

(You can tell that he’s beyond the elements of style!) Thank you, Dick!