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William Gibson on Blogging
The Ape With No Name writes "With Pattern Recognition now out, Gibson talks to the Guardian about blogging, which ones he's looking at and why he may have to quit blogging himself. He's quoted as saying '...if I'm ever going to write another book, I'm going to have to quit doing my blog as I have a hunch it interferes with the ecology of being a novelist.'"
Could going back to the stream of consciousness style actually screw you up when trying to write a novel??
No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow. - Cmdr. Susan Ivanova
is too much Amateur Philosophy.
...but the internet in general. His fav sites, his thoughts on the blogging phenomenon, even googling, while we're at it.
In fact, the gist of the article is about sites he likes and visits often...
Err, and it's not even an article per se... shouldn't this be categorized under Interviews instead?
Welley Corporation - SLM Scammers
William Gibson's blog is located here: http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/blog/blog.asp
At first I considered a blog as somekind of diary people would keep online. The main reason people would read blogs was inspired by some kind of voyeurism. Nowadays most blogs are just a view on todays (or yesterdays) news. People nowadays read blogs to read the headlines and possibly different opinions .
;-)
I've once started a blog myself. Didn't last too long. The process of starting on including installing etc. was more fun to me than writing in it every day
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Actually, one thing I like about Gibson's style is how he uses invented terms - some you can guess from their morphology what they mean, others you can't.
So you form an idea of what each word seems to mean out of the context - like you do when you hear a novel word.
Finally most if not all of the new terms are explained a little while after they are first used, giving an interesting experience of how your deduced meaning matches the intended one.
...is simply being able to remember your goal.
Blogging is the antithesis of goal driven composition, and it's about time this was understood.
I can get a google search with porn turned off; why can't I get blogs turned off too?
Does blogging aversely affect the professional writer's writing? The Guardian interview touches on an important question, but only briefly - this is one that should probably be tackled by a team of researchers. When I started up a simple blog-on-a-Wiki last December, I was a bit plagued by a similar question:
Why would writers write in their free time?
For me, as long as I can get away with taking one or even two week breaks from the blog, it is not a problem. "Write when you need to, blog when you can," is about where I find myself at the moment.
Don't waste your time. Actually, if you're a big fan of his older stuff (Neuromancer, Mona Lisa Overdrive, Burning Chrome, etc) then you'll probably hate it. I thought he started losing it around the time of All Tomorrow's Parties (but I doubt anyone here would agree with me) and this book continues in the same wandering, aimless, boring prose. Gone is his trademark mile-a-minute, high tech crime and criminals, ultra-cool underworld, replaced with a cleaner view of tomorrow.
Come on. It's based on the premise of someone releasing video clips onto the internet and people finding them. There's a whole cult following, and a marketing mogul catches wind of it and finances the main character so she can get to the root of it. Bor-ing. But since ATP was so bad, I decided to give him another chance. Never again, Mr. Gibson. At least I have the older books to remember when he was great.
BTW nazi mods, this isn't a troll. Take it with a grain of salt.
I am supposed to writing a ten page history paper right now, but no, what am I doing, posting on Slashdot instead. Blogging, posting to forums, watching Bill O'Reilly just to get angry, they are all more interesting distractions than writing a book or a paper because they are easier and don't require as much energy. If you get all your emotion out on the little stuff, you have nothing left for the book.
*yawn*
The kind of article/interview that would put anyone off Gibson forever. I'm so glad i just finished reading the brilliant Virtual Light trilogy, before finding out that he visits bbc, cnn and google. If those were the most interesting sites he could think of, it probably means he sticks to surfing pr0n only.
if I'm ever going to write another book, I'm going to have to quit doing my blog as I have a hunch it interferes with the ecology of being a novelist
Personally I found this pretentious bollox. Smacks more of an author trying to cash in on the current albeit dying fad of blogging to help promote his new book.
Newsflash William. Writing juvenile gibberish on a web page is not a form of higher art. Stick to the novels.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
He mentioned this before at least at the book signing in Birmingham if not before then too.
He said it's difficult because the 'blog provides an outlet for your thoughts and material, it doesn't have chance to accumulate.
So he doesn't 'blog when he is writing, that gives him chance to fill a store of thought enough to fill a book.
Don't blame me - this
IMHO:
I find that in his latest books, namely All Tomorrow's Parties and Pattern Recognition, Gibson has moved away from his previous style of "dark cyberpunk". Instead, he explores in detail how technology has social reprecussions.
In ATP, it was a basically about how the matrix of that future made it possible for certain individuals to see future change:ie. Laney. He doesn't emphasize it very much, but what this change in ATP was the advent of nano-fabrication, which is why in the last chapter he talks about how a watch is restored using nano-technology.
In Pattern Recogniton, it is all about the Internet. How messageboards/forums appeal to introverts like Cayce. Even key events, such as the list of numbers hidden in the fragments of the video clips were obtained through F:F:F.
Remember the girl who Taki thought was a japanese school girl but was actually a bartender they took a picture of to get him to give Cayce the numbers? Later on this girl (Judy Tsuzuki) finds out about the whole scam and falls in love with Taki, or so she professes. Someone she has never met before.
And in the ending, he reveals to us that Cayce has hooked up with Parkaboy in a boy-girl relationship. So, i feel that Pattern Recognition is more a commentary on how the Internet has allowed introverts to go about forming human relationships in a non-conventional way, rather than a dark and sharp cyberpunk thriller.
Be kind. There are too many mean people out there already.
The article's small and content free because it's designed to be not much more than a sidebar: the Guardian (Britain's major left-liberal daily) publishes one of these micro-interviews every week, with the same sort of blah questions ("Most useful site?" "Google", invariably). It makes more sense in the print version of its tech supplement, where it acts as normal space-filling journalism, and usually a plug for book, album, site, whatever.
Also, The Guardian is absolutely obsessed with blogs. Every week, the supplement will feature one of the following articles: "Are Blogs the new Journalism?", "Wi-Fi Blogging - Is this the Future for Reporting?", "Blogging - Journalism for Everyone?", etc., ad nauseam.
The last decent one I remember is Dave Green being cynical.
Part of his 'dark cyberpunk' appeal in his past books was indeed the social repercussions of technology and how it affected both micro and macrocosms. In Neuromancer, Case was a loner, a hacker and a drug addict and ended up getting fried trying to crack a system. Alot of his friends ended up getting flatlined also. This paralleled the do-no-harm crackers back in the day (think Free Kevin) that really didn't damage systems, just explored them and exploited them. Ultimately Case wasn't in it for the money, he was in it for the challenge, the thrill of the hunt. 99% of real 'hackers' are in it for the same reason (and yes I know the difference between hacker and cracker). Gibson really distilled the cracker/hacker ethic at the time of that novel and focused it into a well-rounded character.
;)
Gibson has always been about exploring social connotations of technical evolution; hell, the whole genre is about that. Asimov had his decades of exploring the concept of humans living with robots and the pitfalls and joys they might encounter. Gibson now seems to be taking less the position of fortune teller and more the position of commentator on our times. Unless you're living in a coma, PR won't come as a surprise, and it's version of tomorrow could literally be tomorrow.
Call me old fashioned, but I liked his writing better when he wrote about the gritty, dirty underworld of the supercool. Maybe he SHOULD stop blogging.
There is another aspect to blogging that I haven't seen mentioned in this discussion. Blogs can be a good way to see what it is like to pursue something you are considering. That is why I keep my blog. When I figured out what I want ed to study for graduate school, I went out and tried to find some first person accounts of what it is like to become a Nurse Anesthetist. I bet most of you have not even heard of one. Anyway, it was difficult at best, to hook up with one, let alone find out how school was for them. So When I started school, I started a blog to let people know what anesthesia school was like.
Anyway, I guess I am trying to say that not all blogs are just random thoughts about how someones school lunch smelled like a nursing home.
The most important thing about blogging IMO is that it allows the average person to easily be a producer on the net instead of just a passive consumer (ala TV). Weblogs also allow for the publication of very obscure and specific content that would not exist otherwise (such as a weblog about various things to wget and curl).
Sure, there is a lot of crap in blogs, but everyone has something worthwhile to say once in a while. There are a lot of very smart people who write weblogs.
Those who think blogging is pretentious should read the following entry on Dave Winer's Scripting News.
Those in power always resist something new that empowers the masses in what was formerly their exclusive domain (such as news organizations suppressing the weblogs of reporters, and elitist intellectuals who think expressing opinion should be their privilege only).