Moody: the works

A list of links to all my non-tech writings:

Essays

Glanglish - with audio versions - new post

Travel writings

Moody's Black Notebook Travels - new post

Walks with Lorenzetti

A Partial India

Novels

Doing the Business

Egyptian Romance

Glanglish, and other Weekly Essays

In 1990, before I had a go at writing a couple of novels, I put together Glanglish, a collection of short essays.  They are about nothing in particular, and were more in the nature of five-finger exercises for my writing (and thinking).  I aim to post one a week, which I'll add to the list below.

Glanglish

Contents

The weekly essay - with audio

Chiral asymmetries - with audio
Wallpaper - with audio
The knife's deity - with audio
Ludwig van who? - with audio
Rubbish - with audio
The new Jesuits - with audio
Systemic dis-ease - with audio
Weird messages - with audio
Looking at glass - with audio
Placing words in English - with audio
The plane truth - with audio
Meta-physicality - with audio
Accidents and substance - with audio
Colonising names - with audio
The crown in the jewel - with audio
The Turing point - with audio
Thoughts for your pennies - with audio
Repeatability - with audio
Intraviewing - with audio
Socratic wisdom - with audio
Invisible royalty - with audio
The oscillating universe - with audio
Digital reality - with audio
Forever Eden - with audio
Pravda - with audio
Glanglish - with audio
Scarlatti's cat - with audio

The check-out - with audio
The finite brain - with audio
8.8.88 - with audio
Silly farts - with audio
The contingent apple - with audio
The profit of the beard - with audio
What masterpiece? - with audio
Spot the similarity - with audio
Cacography - with audio
Windy city - with audio
Corporeal integrity - with audio
Counting the cost - with audio
Dire diary - with audio
Three sciences - with audio
Antics - with audio
God in the body - with audio
The insolence of the inanimate - with audio
Hoardings - with audio
Stargazing - with audio
Truckling on - with audio
Nostalgia for Brezhnev - with audio
Dalliance - with audio
Booting up - with audio
Getting the idea - with audio

Foreworld as Foretaste

I'm am currently staggering to the end of Neal Stephenson's The Confusion, loving every minute of this impossible, wandering, hyperbolic, anachronistic, shaggy-dog story. So I was naturally delighted to see that he (along with a band of fellow creators) is not only working on yet another huge, outrageously-ambitious epic, The Mongoliad, but one that pushes story-telling in new directions by using technology:

Our story unfolds in weekly installments over the course of a year. We've planned out a true epic—the last great epic of the middle ages, in fact--and written a fine chunk of the tale, but much depends on you. We’re hoping you’ll ultimately interact with our artists and writers and share in the story’s creation.

When we can, we'll include extra tidbits of art, video, music and history. Those extras will be made available to premium subscribers, an excellent value--less than the price of a hardback book for a year's worth of story and mixed-media entertainment. We’ll soon be taking subscriptions for app delivery to some of the most popular mobile devices and are working hard to add more.

The user-editable Foreworld 'Pedia is the ultimate repository of all information about our world. Some of it coincides with the world you know. Some does not. We welcome your additions.

I was particularly heartened to find the following intelligent approach to DRM - or lack of it:

We put in a lot of effort on an ongoing basis to ensure that the best value our fans can get out of our stuff is by participating interactively with us and each other, and enjoying our interwoven content in context, in the way it was meant to be enjoyed. So, we think that if people take our content without our permission, their experience will be suboptimal, and given our modest prices, we think most people will be happy to pay us, thereby enabling this experiment to keep evolving. That said, the bits that can be copied and pasted and put into a torrent are still going to be fun, and people are going to end up redistributing those bits without our permission and against our wishes. However, we still don't use DRM.

The reasoning is absolutely spot-on:

The biggest reason is that DRM is futile, and we don't like to waste our time doing things that aren't going to be effective, and which are just going to annoy our legit supporters. Our concentration is on providing great experiences and great customer service to our customers, and we trust that those people who really appreciate what we are doing will become our customers. Because it's part of our ethos to be constantly producing and expanding and improving our work, the pirated content people may find elsewhere online will be static and out-of-date copies; we think that when people find this stuff it may give them a taste of what the full experience is like; hopefully, that taste will be enough that they'll want more, and in seeking out more, will become happy (and paying) customers of ours. We like that.

That is, piracy isn't a real problem if you *out-innovate* the pirates, making your paid-for offering better than their free one. Indeed, if you do, pirated copies become like tasters, encouraging people to upgrade and pay for the full, latest version. Similarly, by the sound of it, part of the strength of this project will be the interweaving of other elements into the text - again, something that pirates can't offer.

But I think this is slightly off the mark:

However, we don't believe that pirates are doing us any favors, and our not using DRM is not an invitation to cadge our stuff. Because of the way intellectual property law in this country (and most other jurisdictions) works, we are obligated to defend our copyrights, trademarks, and other IP--otherwise we lose them: if we find piracy we will try to stop it; if we find unauthorized use of our IP at commercial scale and/or commercial intent, we will come after it with vigor, because we have to.

That may be true for trademarks, but not, I think, for copyright: it's not something you have to "defend". Still, quibbles, aside, I'm looking forward to seeing what Stephenson and his fellow creators get up to here. I also hope that this new Foreworld proves something of a foretaste of future extended novels - not least in terms of dropping DRM.

As for reading it, well, I have the small matter of The Baroque Cycle to finish first: I may be gone some time...

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

A Million Penguins: Novel or Not?

Well, it had to happen:

So is the novel immune from being swept up into the fashion for collaborative activity? Well, this is what we are going to try and discover with A Million Penguins, a collaborative, wiki-based creative writing exercise. We should go into this with the best spirit of scientific endeavour - the experiment is going live, the lab is under construction, the subjects are out there. And the results? We’ll see in a couple of months.

At least they chose a good title.