L’esprit d’escalier

Just got a whiff of something — someone’s hand cream, maybe, or a perfume, I’m not really sure, can’t quite identify what I’m smelling.  Vaguely floral, maybe, I think.

Whatever it was, it sent me reeling back more than ten years, to the late spring/early summer days when I first started gaming, flipping through the pages of Mage: The Ascension (2nd edition 4-eva!), and trying to wrap my head around the rules of this incredible new world, the anticipation of what kind of character I’d play, who she’d be.**

I can’t even identify why that particular smell makes me flash back to it — maybe there was some kind of shampoo or lotion or soap I used to use, or… I dunno.  Something, from the where and when of those days.

But yeah, I’m sitting here, on a February day suddenly feeling like it’s May or June, like I’m at my parents’ kitchen table trying to explain the whole concept of table top gaming to my mother, insisting that no, I’m not going to end up in a ditch in six months’ time, sacrificed to some dark D&D gods.

I’m cramming the concepts of avatar and sphere and gilgul and Tradition into my head, hoping I get the idea of quintessence right, and don’t fuck up so badly on my first night that I accrue enough paradox to be sent into Quiet.

Turns out, I didn’t need to worry about any of those things, really, though they were all important in different ways.  Those first few sessions were vastly different than what I’d imagined they’d be, and thank god, really.  If we’d started out by diving into a world filled with Tradition politics and intrigue, I’d have been in way over my head.  Instead, we started small, just the PCs getting themselves in trouble, chased by the bad guys and getting away, getting into more trouble the next time, the world slowly expanding as I figured it out.

In later years, we’d get into the bigger picture — not just affected by Tradition politics but eventually affecting them ourselves, sometimes with those same characters, but mostly with others (though those original ones had cameos in other games, long after those first adventures were finished.  We could never quite let them go).

Anyway, whoever it was that smelled all flowery has walked away.  Scent’s gone, memory remains.

**And, to be honest, I look back at her concept and /facepalm a bit, amazed that the gents didn’t take one look at the character sheet and backstory and declare me unfit for their troupe.  She had a lot of potential to be a Mary Sue.  I think I managed to keep her from being one entirely, but eek.

Since the recent release of Amazon’s Kindle 2, there’s been a bit of a controversy regarding the device’s Text-to-Speech feature.  I’ve followed the story on my own, but when it showed up in a friend’s gchat status this morning, and another friend linked it to me not long after, I figured it was time to post.

First, background:  the Authors’ Guild has taken issue with the Text-to-Speech feature Amazon built into the Kindle 2, which can take your ebooks and read them aloud in your choice of voices, male or female.  It’s been met with cheers and jeers, the jeers especially from people who see it as a greedy ploy on the part of the Authors’ Guild to jack up prices of books for the Kindle.

Things to peek at:

• Cory Doctorow, with whom I usually agree on issues such as DRM and putting content up for free, is very vocally against the Authors’ Guild’s statement.  You can see some of his reaction here.

• Authors’ Guild president Roy Blount, Jr.’s rebuttal in the New York Times, “The Kindle Swindle?”

• Cory Doctorow’s rebuttal to the rebuttal, on BoingBoing, “Authors’ Guild vs. reality: Kindles and read-aloud”

They’re quick enough reads, go check them out. I’ll wait.

Okay, good?  Good.

Let me talk a bit about how rights work in publishing.  (The usual disclaimers apply: I am neither an agent nor an editor, but I’ve gleaned enough from people who DO know these things that I think I can spell it out pretty accurately for those of you who don’t eat, sleep and breathe book contracts.)

When a publisher picks up a book and puts it under contract, they negotiate for certain kinds of rights to publish that book.  The obvious ones are print editions, but that is far from the extent of it.  There are foreign rights to consider, should publishers in other countries wish to put out editions of the title.  There’s “first serial” rights, that get worked out with whichever magazine might wish to print the first few chapters as a preview.  There are ebook rights, and, of course, audio rights.

The publisher doesn’t have to pick up the audio rights when they make an offer on the book.  Not every single title is right for that format.  If the publisher doesn’t think they’ll sell an audio edition, the author’s agent is free to shop those rights around to other publishers.  Famous example of this for you:  the Harry Potter series is published in printed form by Scholastic.  The highly-acclaimed audio versions, read by Jim Dale, are published by Listening Library, which is part of Random House.

As Blount says, audiobooks are a thriving part of the industry.  They’re great for listening to during the commute to and from work.  They make great companions on long flights.  They keep you awake during long road trips.

Anecdote time GO!

A few years ago, three of us drove down to Dragon*Con — about a 20 hour ride from Boston to Atlanta when you factor in traffic and leg-stretching breaks.  I’d brought an audiobook with me to listen to when it was my turn to drive on the way home, figuring the guys would spend the time sleeping.  I popped the CD in (J.R. Moehringer’s The Tender Bar, for the curious), drove for about an hour, then got my ass kicked by a migraine and had to switch out.  While I lay whimpering in the back seat, the guys sat up front and let the book go, engrossed in the story.  Next thing I knew, we were on the Mass Pike with the sun coming up.  It wasn’t until the last CD ended that the fatigue hit the driver and I took the wheel again.

It was read by the author, and I truly believe that the reader can make or break the audio version.  I’ve had some that I’ve had to eject after a chapter because the plodding monotone was putting me to sleep.  I’ve had others that have made the miles fly past.  Some of the best readers give each character his or her own personality, so you get to know who’s speaking by the narrator’s portrayal without needing to hear “…said Jack/said Sally” at the end of the dialoguey bits.  The Kindle 2 can’t put that emotional inflection into the story.  It can’t sound winded when a character’s been running from the bad guys or angry when there’s a shouting match going on.  It can’t drop down to a hush when the scene calls for a hint of awe.  It can’t affect an accent.  (I wonder how it handles text wherein the author tries to approximate a spoken accent.  How does something like, “Look ‘ere, guv’na!” sound?  But I digress.)

But if you listen to the top clip here, you’ll see that it’s also not entirely unlistenable, either:

The way the Read-to-Me feature on the Kindle 2 is being advertised is, at the very least, pointed right at the same people who enjoy audio books while travelling (bolding mine):

Now Kindle can read to you. With the new Text-to-Speech feature, Kindle can read every book, blog, magazine, and newspaper out loud to you. You can switch back and forth between reading and listening, and your spot is automatically saved. Pages automatically turn while the content is being read, so you can listen hands-free. You can choose from both male and female voices which can be sped up or slowed down to suit your preference. Anything you can read on Kindle, Kindle can read to you, including books, newspapers, magazines, blogs and even personal documents. In the middle of a great book or article but have to jump in the car? Simply turn on Text-to-Speech and listen on the go.

Consider that feature in this economy.  Books on the Kindle go for about $9.99.  Audiobooks from the publisher are creeping into the $30 range for abridged versions and into the $40s or higher for unabridged.  Even the versions you’ll find through iTunes or Audible.com (outside of special offers), start around $20.

Are you going to pay $9.99 for the text on the Kindle and then shell out another $20-$50 for an audio version of the book?  Or are you going to push the Read-to-Me button and listen to the lower-quality version?

Pushing that button is potentially a lost audio sale for an author.  I don’t have numbers on how many people who buy the audio version of a book also buy it in its printed form.  My guess is that most people choose one or the other, maybe picking up the printed version if they especially loved the audio.  But how many people are going to opt to buy the $9.99 Kindle ebook with the express intention of using to the Read-to-Me feature, thus saving themselves the extra $10-$40 they’d have spent on the publisher’s audiobook?

It’s money that the authors don’t get to see.  They get the royalty for the ebook, certainly, but I do think the potential is there for audiobooks to take a serious hit from this, thus affecting the authors’ incomes.

Doctorow’s argument — that if the Authors’ Guild is going after the Kindle 2, they open it up to going after all software that can read things aloud, ever, including software for the blind — feels like a slippery slope to me.  I absolutely understand his point — hell, one of the reasons I loved his Little Brother so much was because it shows how far and how badly things can go when it comes to relinquishing personal freedoms in the name of “being safer.”  But at the same time, I think he’s reading sinister intent where there isn’t any.

Again, being unpublished, I don’t know all the history behind the Authors’ Guild — they may very well have taken some questionable actions in the past.  But my feeling on their actions in this instance is that they’re not going after (as Doctorow puts it) “the World Blind Union, phone makers, free software authors, ebook makers, and a whole host of people engaged in teaching computers to talk.”  He asks, “…does [Blount] think that iPhones shouldn’t be able to read your email to you as you jog?” Obviously, I can’t answer for Blount, but my guess would be no, he’s not thinking that way at all.  No one loses out on royalties if your iPhone reads your email aloud.  That projects a bit too much moustache-twirling onto the guild.

It would definitely be a bad idea for the Authors’ Guild to demand that all text-to-speech software that exists or is in development be halted.  Whatever language they do come up with to settle this will have to be very carefully worded, precisely so Doctorow’s worst case scenarios don’t become real.  But I just can’t see it as a bad thing that the authors be given a say in whether or not their books are Read-to-Me enabled, if there’s an audio version out there.

No, we can’t stop Text-to-Speech technology.  We shouldn’t.  But when Amazon is marketing the feature as a built-in audiobook (even though they don’t come right out and call it that), they are dancing very close to the edge of infringing on copyright, if they haven’t waltzed right off the cliff already.

I don’t have a good solution for this, by the by.  I wish I did, but I’m nowhere near tech savvy enough to know what would and wouldn’t work.  I’d think that, with the Kindle having wireless internet built right in, they’d be able to disable the Read-to-Me feature somehow for certain titles.  My proposal would be to leave it on by default, so people can have their newspapers, blogs, etc read aloud to them as they pleased.

Books would be a different matter.  Like Thomas said to me this morning, and I agree:  it’s not fair to charge customers for a feature they might not even use.  But on the flip side of that, leaving it enabled and free-of-charge to all customers invites abuse in the form of buying the ebook for the cheap audio feature.  So why not set it up so the customer buys the text-only ebook for the usual $9.99, and if they wish to enable Read-to-Me at any time, add a one-time fee, and ensure that the author gets royalties from that fee?

Taking that a step further, I wonder if Creative Commons licenses could factor into that, somehow.  Say, if the author permits it, the one-time Read-to-Me fee would be waived on his/her books, or even automatically enabled upon download?

What do you cats and kittens think about it?  What questions did I leave unanswered, or what new ones did I open up that I might be able to address?

Torteya has a post on songs you blow out your voice to, usually in the car.  Rather than clutter up his comments with youtube links, I figured I’d treat you to some of mine.

Every now and then, work sends me somewhere within driving distance — a conference, a trade show, the occasional face-to-face sales call.  I actually prefer these to the ones further away that require me to get on a plane.  You’d never know it by how often I make Greg drive, but I actually don’t mind solo car trips.  I take my time getting where I’m going, I bring music I love, and I just kind of… go.

Road trips with other people are all kinds of fun, too, don’t get me wrong.  But in addition to singing until I’m hoarse, when I’m by myself I’ll also take a long stretch of highway to work out a scene in a story I’m writing.  Yep, I’m the chick behind the wheel in the next car over talking to herself, working out beats in dialogue to make sure it doesn’t sound awkward or ring false.  I do it in my head on the walk from work to the train station, too, but, well, you start talking to yourself out loud where others can hear you, even in Boston, you get funny looks.

But!  The weird shit I do for writing is another post for another time.  This one’s about the songs most likely to leave me voiceless when I get to my destination.

First, “Anna Begins.”

The song has this slow build, from low, stilted, and insistent to the higher, drawn out “her kindness bangs a gong/ it’s moving me along/ and Anna begins to fade away.”  I’ve always, always loved this song, from my first listen of August and Everything After.  There is only one Crows song that tops it, and that’ll be on this list, don’t you worry.

Funny thing about “Anna Begins.”  The name makes it sound like an obvious choice for the playlist for one of my WoW characters, Annalea, but I didn’t think of it as an Anna-song for a long time.  I do now, and finally caved and added it to her list.  I’m still not sure if in-game events made it hers, or if it’s always been hers and has always informed the character and I’ve just been denying it.

Next.  “Another Horsedreamer’s Blues.”

Something you might not know if you didn’t spend way too much time on Counting Crows message boards once upon a time (though this may be more common knowledge now, ten-plus years since Recovering the Satellites was released):  there’s a kind of unofficial trilogy comprised of “Anna Begins,” “Another Horsedreamer’s Blues,” and “Margery.”  I can’t seem to find “Margery” on youtube, so you’ll have to live with the lyrics for now.  The version from Flying Demos is a weird cross of pop and country and not at all the version I’d want you to hear.  For one thing, Adam’s voice is way too reedy in it.  Should you go looking, find the version from Sleeping in a Perfect Blue from August of ’94.  Or ask me.

Anyway, the connection is in “Margery,” here:

I looked up at Anna
She turned back to look at me
It’s best to kill the ones that matter
Render blind the ones who see

But oh, Margery
Takes the blade and walks away from me

Those lines give me chills every time.

I’d guess that a good part of my love for “Another Horsedreamer’s Blues” is, aside from wailing along with the ba-da, ba-da-da at the end, the song’s story refers to a play by one of my favorite playwrights — Sam Shepard’s “Geography of a Horsedreamer.”  I’d love to see it onstage.  There’s a man who can dream the outcomes of horse races, but (and it’s been years since I’ve read it, so forgive any inaccuracy in the summary) the bookie? mob boss? he’s been working for has pretty much drained him of any joy he took from it, keeping him locked in a room and demanding the dreams all the time.  By the time the play starts, he can barely even dream about the horses; the best he can do is predict the dog races.

Time to dig that off of my bookshelf and add it to the reread pile.

Onward, then, to my all-time favorite Counting Crows song, forever and ever:  “A Murder of One.”

There are at least six versions of this in my mp3 folder, plus uncounted ones on bootlegs I have yet to rip.  No two are quite the same.  The band tends to take out the “I’ve walked along these hillsides” lines in concert and add in any number of other things, all of which give the song a slightly different meaning.  And there is not one of them I hate.

I do, however, have a favorite, and the only version of it I have is on a cassette tape that cuts off at the end of the song.  My mom and I went to see them in October of 1999, and… oh my god.

If you listen, at about 4:38-4:39 mark, there’s this little riff.  Three notes you might not even really pay all that much attention to.  I don’t have my guitar available, and I’m awful with picking things out by ear so far, so I couldn’t tell you the notes (Torteya, halp!), but they are, in most versions of the song, just a neat little thing going on in the background.

In the show we saw, they became so much more.  From the lyrics to the Sordid Humor song, “Doris Day,” then softly, so softly, that little riff became melody.  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry now.  I’m sorry, sorry now.”  Which, here you go, from 2007:

Five minutes in, they go into “Doris Day,” then the “I’m sorry,” but not with that same melody.  Hell, I’ve never heard it the way they played it in 1999 ever again, not even in a bootleg of a show they put on two days after the one I saw.  Most of the time the sorries are nearly screamed.  But that one time, that tiny little bit of melody.  Ohgodperfection.

If I ever manage to get that version off of the cassette and onto a CD, my vocal cords are doomed.

BSG spoilers abound.  Don’t clicky if you’re not caught up.

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Because my boss has to leave early today, the usual afternoon birthday cakery got moved to pre-lunch.

This is what I had for elevensies:

Wooo cake!

And in honor of the Blizzard of ’78, during which I was born, there are snowflakes on it.

So adorable your head might asplode.  Fair warning.

Tiger Cubs in the Snow

But I would love to do this.

Only not, y’know, in the middle of a bookstore.