When writing a short description of your novel that provides a “hook” for agents and publishers, it’s often best to start with “When,” according to AgentQuery (via MissSnark):

For example:

The Corrections
When family patriarch, Alfred Lambert, enters his final decline, his wife and three adult children must face the failures, secrets, and long-buried hurts that haunt them as a family if they are to make the corrections that each desperately needs.

And then the site cautions:

As you can see, we’re a fan of the when formula: “When such and such event happens, your main character—a descriptive adjective, age, professional occupation—must confront further conflict and triumph in his or her own special way. Sure, it’s a formula, but it’s a formula that works.

However, be warned…everyone and their grandmother who reads this site will try using our “when” formula, so we recommend simply using it as a starting point.

My question is, are people reaching for the apparently surefire “When” formula in coming up with a snappy description of their novels — or does it also influence how people construct plots? I feel as though I see a lot of novels these days where the protagonist has a nice, stable life — until something happens. He or she has it all, until a parent dies or a hot air balloon drops a ballast bag on his/her head, or he/she inherits a haunted house… whatever. You get the sense that the protagonist would have gone on having a totally boring, satisfactory life for decades and decades, had the “When” thing not happened. I’ve already blogged before about the prevalence of “character forced to confront past” novels, and
especially “city character forced to confront rural past” novels.

My problem: doesn’t this make for somewhat boring protagonists? Stupid, lazy, unmotivated idiots who will just carry on having it all indefinitely unless prodded by outside forces. Maybe I’m especially sensitive to this issue because I started out writing a lot of science fiction stories, and it’s very tempting always to do the Arthur Dent thing, having a totally normal person who gets plunged into a world of strangeness. It’s not so bad when Douglas Adams does it, but it gets a bit dull when the rest of us rely on it too.

Of course, real life has a way of dropping ballast bags on your head, and sometimes you learn more about people by seeing how they respond to unexpected shit. Life has a way of derailing your fondest plans. I guess all I’m saying is, your protagonist should have some plans for life to derail. Why not have your protagonist launch yourstory by making a startling life decision? And then drop the ballast bag on her head.

Annalee Newitz and I have co-edited a new anthology, She’s Such A Geek: Women Write About Science, Technology and Other Nerdy Stuff. It’s published by Seal Press, and copies should be available any time now even though the official publication date is in January. And now we’ve launched an official site for the new book at http://www.shessuchageek.com, including a blog where we’ll have discussions of women in geeky areas. Add it to your blogroll and RSS feeds now! And don’t forget to check out the book too!

I just came across this entertaining translation on a bilingual (mostly in Spanish) poetry blog:

y yo les dije a ellos, A propósito, vieron la otra noche en FOX aquella peli porno de ciencia ficción sobre esas criaturas fálicas del espacio exterior que invaden la tierra y se cogen a todos, humanos, animales, varones y hembras, hasta objetos, ellos vienen de un planeta descubierto recientemente en la vía láctea por el reconocido astrónomo Premio Nobel de la Universidad de Yale, Verga Caliente, que lo bautizó como Planeta Esperma X9, bueno…

Follow the link for the full text in Spanish and English. But here’s the English for my small excerpt, so y’all will see why I was so amused:

Oh by the way did you guys watch on FOX the other night that fantastic porno sci-fi flick about these phallic creatures from out of space who invade earth and fuck everything, humans, animals, male and female, even objects, they come from a planet recently discovered in the milky way by the famous Nobel Prize Winner astronomer from Yale, Horny Hardon, which he named, Planet Sperm X9, well…

Right! Just go memorize this to quote it at your non-tv-watching friends, or print it up on tiny slips of paper to hand out!

A quick search led me to the original, by a guy named Raymond Federman. Check out his email virus attack, “Journey to the End of Night”. Textually unsafe for work, unless you work in the glass booth at the Lusty Lady.

X-comics guru Paul O’Brien has obviously been training his brain scanalyzer on my alpha waves, because he verbalized something I’ve been thinking for a while:

Many people like interesting failures, and would rather read an experiment that didn’t quite work than an unambitious project that succeeded. I’m generally among them. Critics tend to jump at this sort of thing because it provides plenty of material to write about. If you’re interested in the craft of comics then you’re going to enjoy comics that explore new techniques.

(This from a post about the final issue of Grant Morrison’s Seven Soldiers project, which O’Brien deems an interesting failure.) I’ve been obsessing a lot lately about the value of interesting failures, and how maybe the artist’s duty is to overreach. Maybe more on this later.

Meanwhile, my random thought of the day: what good is the Internet if I can’t find a video file of the Felicity Kendal exercise video that I’ve been hearing Britcom fans rhapsodize about for years, as immotalized in this song? I would say Google paid about $10 billion too much for Youtube, since there’s no Felicity Kendal sweating to the 80s hits!

I finally got around to getting some more stories from past issues of other online. Now you can read:

• The New Other America by Doug Henwood. How do we really calculate poverty (and wealth) in America today?
• My Summer Vacation by Diane Goldberg. How George Bush ruined her vacation plans in Iraq.
• I Am Bill’s Butt by Bill Brent. Ever wondered what it would be like to be Bill Brent’s ass? Now you’ll know!
• Two Cubans by John Bowker. The deeper meaning of diversity in Cuban sandwiches.
• Can’t Buy Like by Annalee Newitz. Why can’t community web sites sell out?
• Decimal Universe by Chaim Bertman. The secrets of Melvil Dewey, inventor of the Dewey Decimal System.
• The Brown Sound by Jonathan Sterne. The brown sound enters the ear and exits the rear.
• Brain Damage by Annalee Newitz. The rise of neuroscience fiction.

I’ll try and get more content up in the next few days. Enjoy!

Every election year since I moved to San Francisco I’ve been feeling helpless. Californians always return our Democrats to the two houses so Congressional races are so … boring, especially in a mid-term election where we don’t get to waste our votes against a Shrub, and where we’re forced to watch a (nother) movie star hijack the centrist agenda so he can get those coveted Sacramento parking spaces for his Hummers. But I digress.

I moved to California to be around the like-minded, but being isolated in a liberal oasis has meant that I can’t affect the course of national politics a whit … hasn’t it? Well, as it turns out, I can.

Here comes the pitch: I’ve been volunteering for Moveon.org’s current campaign, called Call for Change. The campaign is simple:

1. Moveon early identified 30 congressional races around the country where the seats are heavily contested.
2. They put together phone lists of progressive voters in those districts who seemed unlikely to turn out for a mid-term election (and they got these lists the hard way, through much research).
3. They’re recruiting moveon.org members, who live in areas where the congressional races are not contested or vulnerable, and having them call these apathetic voters in contested districts and remind them to get out and vote.

The efficacy of a reminder call in turning out the vote is demonstrated. The closer to the election you call, the more likely the voter is to actually vote. If you call the day of the election, the voter is almost 100% likely to go vote.

So now it’s up to those of us in “safe” districts to call those in contested districts and make sure they get their butts out the door on Nov. 7. You don’t have to go anywhere to do it: you can do it from home! There are a lot of people to call, so if you can make even a single hour of calls between now and the election, you’ll be affecting at least 10 voters, which, as we know from the previous two elections, can well be the deciding difference.

Click here to sign up to make calls from home.

Now, the disclaimer: I do not represent moveon.org. Other Magazine does not endorse any political party or candidate. All I’m doin’ here is getting progressives to turn out other progressives. … *whistle* *looks around*

While South Dakotans debate whether marijuana can be medicine, it’s pretty clear on the other hand that medicine is increasingly a substitute for marijuana. For the first time ever, there were more new abusers of prescription drugs than new marijuana users, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration reports. Around 2.7 million people started using prescription drugs for nonmedical uses, compared with 2.1 million who started using pot. One reason for the change? It’s way way easier to get your hands on oxycontin, percocet, vicodin or prescription amphetamines from your family or friends. The fastest rising age group misusing meds was 18-25, followed by 12-17 year olds. In Maine, 35.3 percent of violent crimes were related to prescription meds, up from around 26 percent in 2002. So what are we doing about it? Well, we’re indicting medical marijuana advocate Ed Rosenthal for a second time, for starters. That’ll show ‘em.

Wow. You must read this article from the UK Guardian about abortion. Zoe Williams not only wants to end the sanctimoniousness about abortion, she wants to be able to joke about it:

Why are there never any abortion jokes? Why is it unthinkable to discuss it without prefacing everything with “of course, it’s terribly traumatic, no woman enters into this lightly”? I found it no more traumatic than any other operation I have ever had, no more psychologically scarring, way less painful than anything involving my teeth…

I was not saying abortions are, in and of themselves, hilarious. I was asking why they never crop up in jokes. Cancer does, cheese does, shagging and gonorrhoea and disabilities and dogs and flowers and terrible, terrible diseases, and all other foodstuffs, and all other genres of people … There are taboos in political rhetoric, yes, tonnes of them, but in comedy, even in very mainstream comedy, there are almost no taboos. You could make a joke about September 11 before you could make a joke about abortion. And this is not irrelevant, it is not as if the right is inviolable, and the joking is a side issue. If you allow a taboo to hold, you leave all the cultural space open to anti-abortionists.

Kevin Drum is right. No U.S. paper would have ever printed this.

Based on watching the first two episodes, it’s going to be hard to like Torchwood, the new Doctor Who spinoff currently airing in the UK. On the plus side, virtually all the men in the show appear to be gay or bisexual. And it’s nice to see the swashbuckling Captain Jack again. But on the minus side, both episodes had serious pacing problems and the Captain Jack/Gwen dynamic is so obviously a recap of the Doctor/Rose dynamic that it’s sort of painful to watch. Another strong know-it-all man and another impetuous woman. (There’s even a moment where Jack says, “Go home, Gwen Cooper,” in exactly the same tone that the Doctor says “Go home, Rose Tyler” in “Rose.”) The only difference is Gwen isn’t nearly as strong as Rose. And the “mystery” of Gwen finding out who Jack and Torchwood are isn’t terribly interesting for anyone who’s seen the episodes of Doctor Who that revealed all. But in homage to superblogger Graeme Macmillan, here’s some amusing message board discussion about the show, in case you wanted some opinions other than mine:

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Kim Pearson pointed me towards this Reporters Without Borders protest. I’ll definitely participate in this demonstration of support for the anti-censorship movement. Join in by visiting the RSF site on November 8th!