Beginning a New Year

It's been nearly one year since I posted anything on this blog. I took it off the web page and let it simmer for awhile. I notice every comment I get on it is spam. That's something I noted would plague this thing. "If it's too good to be true then it probably is."

I notice my posts on this are sincere and not too shabby. I have more blogs over at Type Pad.

I don't sense my enthusiasm for this medium waning but it is one huge freaking mess and won't clean itself up. The writer should be prudent on this thing, test it, probe it, keep his or her own self-interest uppermost. The ones who have made money from it are 'C' writers so it makes you wonder.

They call'm files, I prefer pages.....

Yes, we re-designed the jobs page a bit. Change is good, it creates a spot of adrenaline.

I also improved the Writer
Resource page. The old page was getting too crowded and I wanted a nice graphic to highlight the page.

There are over 800 pages at Sunoasis.com. They call them files but I prefer pages because they need the same care and attention that printed material have for their pages. Each page means something. Each page carries its own weight.

We stll love simplicity and keep it as a guiding principle.

I am using High Beam Research now and it helps in preparing Sunoasis X 2005.

For writers, the Net is a wonderment we have yet to fathom. It has its stink side no question. Writers have to learn to be more resourceful, to cut through alienation, cut through resistence to business, and write at supreme levels.

Don't let the culture take you down.

It makes me feel kind of old to say that but I say it. The young will produce great legacies on the beast.

Blogs, ideas, and stories

I've been told, "blogs are not essays!" I like to think they are what the writer makes them to be. The writer has that right and the people have the right to choose what they want. For blogs to be an art though, the writer must know everything he has not said, everything that should be said, communicate it without saying anything, and
still say something.

Blogs then would be a form of poetry or cut-up prose rather than a kind of romanticism that projects egotism against the page.

Sometimes writing is simply a clump of sod torn out of the hairy Earth and sprinkled on the hand to see what shape it takes.

Do writers struggle to "make something out of an idea," as Thomas Mann suggested? If you define idea as anything that is possible and all that is impossible I would say yes. If a dream has shown us a possibility it is
an idea even if the intention on the part of the unconscious is something else.

There are ideas and then there are ideas. I have an idea for a greeting card. Is that equal to an idea on how the people of Iraq will have a democracy?

Well, equality has nothing to do with it. The ideas have their constituents and should pursue their ideas with passion.

Passion is a good term and can mean any number of things. It's certainly associated with a few acts. I suppose it is ardent belief that this is true, that this is right.

I recommended to a young woman that if she wanted
a promotion in a magazine she show passion for her magazine, for the magazine industry, and for the position she wants to move into. In other words, if this is what she wants her passion will take her there.

If it doesn't then she reflects at some point and comes to the realization that, after all, she is interested in something else. She was passionate about getting out of her old job perhaps and projected it into a new one.

One of the great human dramas occurs when passion confronts disillusionment.

On that note we will stop and reflect on the nature of ideas and stories that emerge from them.

The New Year

Ah, the New Year! I remember from my readings in anthropology
that ancient peoples used to ritually destroy the previous year and all its stupidity, tragedy, hopelessness in a kind of drunken orgy of mass hypnotism. They would literally kill off the old memories and re-initiate themselves back into the pristine state by calling on the gods to teach them, once more, how to do even the simplest things.

One thing that will continue is the Q and A
portion of Sunoasis.com.

Over the past three years we've received thousands of questions and tried to answer them as completely as possible.

Some of the more memorable questions came from an editor in NY City, hired to a new magazine, and wondering if she was being low-balled in her salary negotiations. She was. Or the weatherman on a TV news program who wanted to be a freelance writer. Or the woman from India whose son had written
"the next Harry Potter," and "what should I do next?" Or the Dutch woman relocating to New York and wondering if she would be able to find a job comparable to the job she was leaving.

Recently, we've received some questions about self-publishing. This is a favorite subject of ours and there are excellent spirits dedicated to explain these things.
The best are the Ross's, Tom and Marilyn, whose Complete Guide to Self-Publishing is the "bible," in my opinion. It's a good read, even if you don't plan on self-publishing,
to get inside knowledge of what happens in book publishing.

It's interesting to speculate what will happen when anyone who wants to publish will be able to. Will it cheapen the idea of publishing? Will there be fiercer barriers to the upper reaches of publishing to keep the masses out?

My view has been that the Web will become the publisher of first order and the vast majority of written material will jet along new channels of distribution in the digital system.

And like most phenonmena today, writing will be consumed and perish quickly. However, gems will appear that have long-lasting value and those will be converted into hard
bound books. So, in the front end of the system will be digital publishing but at the back-end, the value-laden end, will be print publishing. And the book, then, will regain its place as a cultural icon, a rare thing, a significant thing.

Most writers, including myself, are introverts. We avoid messes. We avoid the necessary tasks. This is a prime habit in the life of writers. In too many cases self-publishing is seen as an end around all the drudgery of finding a publisher or agent and dealing with people who know more about the system than oneself.

But, self-publishing is much more arduous a prospect than trying to connect with a publisher or agent. Not only must the writer deal with many different people and do things she normally doesn't do, but they can not sit on their hands hoping the book promotes itself.

Every month on Sunoasis we do try and provide links to stories of those who are self-publishing labors of love. Go ahead and subscribe.

It's free.

Good jobs

What is a good job? That depends, of course, on who you ask and what stage of development they happen to be in. Generally, a good job is one that challenges
the full potential of the person, stretching him or herself past the point they thought they could go and giving them more responsibility for the success of the operation.

There are moments, of course, when any job is a good job. And I was always taught that any job is a good one; there are no such things as bad jobs. And that is true as long as one continually moves in the direction of his or her deepest intention.

For instance, I think of the jobs I had when younger and how bad they seemed to me.

But, looking back I can see each job taught me something very valuable and introduced me to people who I hadn't known before.

Sunoasis.com has always been about resource, that rich sounding word that means to enable someone to do something.

Once people figure out they are here to do things
and to find that which enables them to do it well, they are off in the right direction.

Without introducing politics we can make this example. Had President Bush availed himself of the resources that indicated how hard it would be to sustain peace in Iraq he could have, at least, planned differently. The absense of the resource disabled him in that sense.

So, a job notice is a great enabler or potentially so, as is the information that will permit
you to get to the next step. These allow for the enabling acts that make us free and whole.

The internet is supreme precisely because it enables on a high and rich level. From the very first time I got on the net in early 1996 I knew that it was made for editors.

It would turn writers into editors, since writers possess resource. It would turn librarians into editors. So, we happily pluck out the best resources for the moment and open door and windows that would stay shut in many lives.

We do have a couple of good jobs fresh on Sunoasis
Jobs.

One is from Stanford University and the others from QVC. These jobs can be career makers.

Thoughts about Journalism:

Journalism is a public art, not poetry. It is part of "the literary system," that includes book publishing, reviewing, bookstores and other forms of distribution, writers, and readers. The public has a fairly dim view of journalists, putting them behind auto mechanics for honesty. This should
shake the effects of delusive wine that has stirred some to think that journalism will be reformed by the "citizen journalist."

The "citizens" themselves are not exactly credible either. Look at the pop culture they support; porn, gambling, violence, propaganda, hysterical claims, conspiracy, and many other weird fantasies of the putative "free people."
Surely the journalists jest when they think they can, out of that motley group, produce a "we media" of some sort.

In some ways its comparable to making Iraq a democracy. Well, when
the people are prepared for such a thing, maybe. Start with the democratic person and then proceed.

Journalism works when a trained person is able to make a livlihood by researching, interviewing, writing, fact-checking stories that his or her editor says to do.

Nonetheless, "we media" and blogging are all part of a fascinating new adventure we can term "the remaking of the literary system."

So, we are supportive of it; weary and skeptical of the claims we've heard elsewhere, in other years.

Stephen King's experiment with e-books excited everyone but it didn't really transform anything.

Yet, the transformation will take place through time.

The exciting thing is that in this new digital literary system, the writer will have a major role. It will not simply be the art of communication but the art of editing.

What else is a great storehouse of information and knowledge but a pleasure palace for the editor?

Blogging

The blogging universe is a continually fascinating one with a lot of talents, a lot of energy. It has lifted off from where the web was in 1997 or so and continues the main principles that was so prevelant during that time. Free-ranging mind and
spirit in the midst of the crowded, dirty, dangerous world. The colonists with nothing in the midle of the Empire and its army of dark wraiths. The rag-tag revolutionaries ducking behind rocks and bridges as the trained, austere, cold-blooded troops mass in front of the village green. It's all that has been good and human about America.

The assistance to freed slaves; the schooling to the illiterate immigrant. It can be at any rate. It's a lot of hype as well.

It reminds me that amatuers, dedicated and devoted, are the ones who usually start the new science. We might like to think it's the "system" but it rarely is. The "system" comes in later and imposes the new order on everything.

And I'm certain that kiddies will learn blogging in elementary school if they aren't already.

False hierarchies are already being established. Bloggers are in conflict over whether they are in-training for the big-leagues or a new game in town.

The American Journalism Review, which is better than the Columbia Journalism Review, always says something about blogging. Journalists are envious and fascinated and encourage the bloggers to develop resources that the real journalists can use.

One thing to note: The vast public knows little about blogging, could care less, wouldn't know how to use blogs, and see the internet as, at best, a portal into AOL so they can retrieve e-mail. Even subscribers to Sunoasis have written to me, "what's all this blog thing?"

So, you have the same phenomena as occured in the early stages of both the computer and internet innovations: A group of people adapting very quickly to the innovation, making a beachhead, then rolled over by time as the institutions and general public catch up.

Ignore the false hierarchies, the false channels that now impose themselves by fiat because no one is competing with them.

Why would the blogs escape the fate of all other good things the net has served up?

The book, "We Media," is getting a lot of reviews I notice. I've read a few chapters in it and it's worth looking through. However, I have a hard time seeing armies of citizen-journalists out there working on a daily basis to improve the lot of the community. I do see pr types, marketers, conmen, and other low-lifes using the blogs or "we media" as a way to cast nets further into the community. When I got online
usenet was the big thing; what is being said about blogs was said about usenet. And that, last I looked, has fallen to the very bottom of the barrel of porn and con. Next on the list were the mailing lists. Mailing lists that are maintained in a strict environment and monitored are still ok. But many have gone by the wayside because of their misuse.

E-mail is in the middle of a titanic struggle against spam and virus's. E-mail has become a necessity for many but it is in danger of going the way of usenet. RSS feeds are touted
because they by-pass e-mail. Why blogs will have a different fate is beyond me. The serious, literate, original blogs will be marginalized; the spam, porn blogs will crowd
everything out and get the money. And instead of delivering a new medium that creates a perfect democracy you will have the perfect demonstration of mob rule. The internet will be utterly destroyed as a populist medium and be fully controlled by corporations.

That I believe is the sorry fate.

However, we go on. And do our best. And try to point a few things out. And be honest.

And funny. And rational.