The Rogue Scholar

A New Project

I’m writing a science fiction book. Actually, I’ve written the book already. Actually, I’ve shown the manuscript to an editor, and she likes it. She liked earlier versions of the script, made some suggestions, and now she likes it even more. She wants to see it in print, and so do I. So that’s good news.

The bad news is the sheer tedium of the process of turning a manuscript (idea) into a book (product). There are meetings: with the editor, with the editor’s boss, another with the editor, then with the editor’s other boss.  There are conversations: with the editor, then between the editor and the agent, then between the editor, the editor’s other boss, and the other boss’s lawyer, then with the editor, the editor’s boss’s lawyer and the boss’s agent—then with the new agent—then with the new new agent—and you get the idea. It’s a process. A slow, ugly, infuriating process, that reminds one of why we rarely enjoy finding out how the sausages are made. But at the end is a book on a shelf in a book store with my name on it. That’s the plan. More news as it happens, but this is a long-term project.

In the mean time, I decided to take on a few other tasks. First, I'm planning on moving this blog from its current Typepad account to a self-hosted Wordpress.org one. I had a few reasons for that: first, I needed a reason to improve my coding skills. Having my own sandbox forces me to improve my HTML, CSS, and PHP. If all goes according to schedule, I'll have the new site up and running by the end of June. I'll keep you informed as new things happen.

If you want to take a look at what's already there, be my guest. Just be aware that it's a work in progress, and there's a lot more work to do. I haven't transferred the link lists over yet, or set up menu bars. I need a better looking banner. The end result will look different but have the same essential functionality. (Comments and suggestions are welcome.)

Beyond that, I'm supposed to send an article about stress management to a different editor within two weeks, so that's taking my time. Oh, and Lara and I have decided to try our hand at e-publishing. That will be a blast, especially considering that her brother's small press, Ig Publishing, just celebrated its tenth anniversary.

And in the immediate future, I'm going to do my best to keep to this new posting schedule: new posts on Tuesdays and Thursdays at a minimum. It keeps me focused. I need that.

Banned Book Week 2011 Begins

As I wrote earlier today, it’s Banned Book Week. (Yay!) As part of an agreement with Sheila DeChantal over at the Book Journey blog, I'm reviewing  a banned book.

Last week, I took an extremely informal poll on my Facebook page and asked people to vote on which book I would review this week. The possibilities were limited to books that I felt that I knew well enough to write competently about, namely The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier, The Diary of Anne Frank, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, or Steinbeck’s classic, The Grapes of Wrath. All four selections got at least one vote each, but the contenders turned out to be Atwood or Anne Frank. 

I decided on Atwood for several reasons. First, the controversy over The Diary of Anne Frank is generally more limited when it surfaces at all, mostly over sexually explicit scenes. The Handmaid’s Tale gets a lot more flak a lot more often over it's treatment of sex, violence and politics. Also, I’ve never reviewed Handmaid.

Thursday around noon is when this review will be up, if you want to mark your calendar. If you are reading this and want me to comment on any particular aspect of the book, just leave a comment below and I’ll do my best to comply.

See you Thursday.

When You're Sick, Ask for a Librarian

This bit from Stever Robbins is pure gold as he makes a point that gets made far too rarely . . . you need librarians, you just haven't realized it yet. In Stever's own words:

Librarians are information scientists. While doctors may do a little to keep up with current research, they’re primarily educated by pharma companies with a vested interest in presenting research and information that encourages doctors to prescribe drugs. While their intentions are no doubt good, there’s so much research about how unconscious bias controls our behavior that I just don’t believe the pharma reps are presenting unbiased health information to the doctors.

The librarians, however, are trained to seek out the latest information and understand the quality of that information. While doctors are busy seeing patients, librarians are busy learning the latest. In-hospital librarians then serve as a resource to medical teams to make sure they are aware of the latest and best information about treatments and research right when they need it.

Take a moment to read the whole thing--it's not long (promise!) And thanks to Rhonda Allard for alerting me to it.

Slouching Toward "Social Networking"

I admit it: I'm not as quick on the draw as at least a few of my friends and co-workers think I am.  The immediately relevant case in point is that fact that I'm having a bear of a time learning how to navigate the NetworkedBlogs application on Facebook.  Facebook is itself easy enough to figure out.  The NetworkedBlogs app is actually kind of nifty, and the preliminary work of registering this blog on it was simplicity itself.  The vetting process--where they demand 10 friends' confirmations as you (me) as the author, and a minimum 'fan' base of 20 to enter the feed in cascading posts--while less than efficient (I'll explain why shortly) at least makes sense.

The real problem is getting the RSS feeds to transfer from Feedburner.com (which I use) to Facebook. I managed a few manual posts and link, no problem.  But when I checked the staus of the RS Blog on Networked Blogs, I saw error messages in the feed status area.  Which is a fancy was of saying that Facebook didn't recognize what Feedburner was sending it.  I don't know why this is--I hope it's a simple matter of me giving it the wrong URL. (I've just fixed it, so if that was the problem, it'll be corrected shortly.  I hope.)

The efficiency matter I just mentioned is more of a pet peeve than a real design flaw.  On Facebook, you have the ability to launch applications more or less at will, and a lot of these are geared toward signing your friends up for wacky good and services, like joining a game of Knighthood, or getting a digital Mushroom, or starting a digital garden, or whatever.  If you have more than a few friends on this thing (I managed to gather 54 in the past month, don't ask how) these gifts, requests and such like are going to back up.  Facebook has, to its credit, anticipated this, and segregated the older requests-in-waiting from the newer ones.  But they don't seem to have anticipated the probability that faced with, say, 6,452,744 outstanding requests, most people will just ignore that darned button and after a few minutes, not even think about it.  (My wife who is a case in point, had over 100 of these requests gathering dust and it never occurred to her to clear them out.)

My point is merely this: Facebook is not quite the untapped wellspring of fame and prosperity I'd been led to believe "social networking" sites are. At the very least, using them effectively takes skills that I don't have (yet).  Obviously, this is not to say that there's no value to Facebook-based applications (if a creep like Michelle Malkin can get 300+ freaks and weirdos to read her stuff there's every chance I can get a bunch to read mine.)  I think it is to say that there's clearly a learning curve involved in dealing with this type of tech and the hype there, like everywhere else, needs to be cut through first before one can become productive using it.

On the positive side, the RSS feed to this blog is available on Livejournal.com--that took two minutes to set up--but the lack of formatting in the text is something I'm not that happy with.  Still, it's there.  And if you're on Facebook and want to subscribe to the feed there, you can do that here.  Heck, become a fan and/or confirm I own this silly place.  (I'd be grateful.)  I'm dealing easily enough with LinkedIn and I don't know enough people on MySpace to create a profile there, but . . . we'll see.

Next, I try to install Google Analytics . . .

Now Back to Our Regularly Scheduled Librarian

I am hoping now that the election is over (more or less) and Barack Obama is safely considered the U.S. President elect that I can back to dealing primarily with library-related issues, ideas and articles. That's not to say that politics is boring or unimportant. Neither is it to say that I'll now refrain from posting things of a non-library nature I find genuinely interesting, but enough is enough.

On that note, I'd like to point out Denise O'Shea's FDU Library Technology News weblog. I just found it after losing contact with Denise some time ago (we worked together at NYAM for a while and she is now the Systems Librarian/Tech Support Specialist at Fairleigh Dickinson University.) It (and she) promises to be an amazing resource for those interested in systems librarianship. You can find this link in the Library Blogs typelist in the left margin.

Enjoy!

Worldcat Love & the BiblioblatherBlog

A coworker mentioned the Biblioblather Blog to me at lunch, and, being the inquisitive type of paranoiac that I am, I tuned in and found a really nifty string of links. Not the least ofwhich is one to WorldCat Lookup which the Biblioblatherblogger has already described in prose so exemplary, I could only chew my own spleen in hate and envy at this person (who I don't even know) who obviously writes so much better than I do, and who, I'll just bet, does not have procelain laminate orthodonture that broadcasts their every move to the CIA, like mine does.

At any rate (and I suppose I'll have to forgive the Biblioblathering person for writing better than I do, although it pains me mightily) I'm putting this into the Library Blog Typelist for y'all. Enjoy!

Resource Shelf = Da Bomb!

I don't know when or if Gary Price actually sleeps, but I'm glad he doesn't (or sddesn't seem to, anyway.) His Resource Shelf website is one of the best things I've seen in online Libraryland in a long while. (Not that I get out that often but when I do, and I find something like this, it's doubly cool.)

Price and his editors have made it their goal to seek out and report on every single reference source on every subject known to mankind, and make all these links available to poor time-starved slobs like you and me (well . . . okay, like me. I'm sure you are not a slob . . . and if, on the remote chance that you are a slob, I'm positive that you manage your time a helluva lot better than I manage mine. That's probably why people are not coming up to you on the street, flashing shiny gold bages in your face, demanding answers to questions like "What's Number 6 up to? We know you know, now tell us!") And if that's not enough for you (and if it's not, then what kind of freak are you anyway?), they have a weekly e-mail service that dumps the latest week of daily links and annotation into your mailbox every Thursday.

This is one of the best sites ever.

At any rate, I'm linking this site to the Library Resources typelist . . . NOW!