Joshua Palmatier, whose first two books I enjoyed, and probably ought to booklog, has organized the “Plot Synopsis Project,” in which a bunch of published SF authors post copies of the plot synopses they sent with their successful novel pitches, and talk about the writing process. Most of them have lists of the participants posted, but here’s a link to Tobias Buckell’s post because he has just the list, independent of his plot summary, so you don’t need to worry about accidentally reading spoilers.
This is a terrific idea, as the plot synopsis thing is one of the more mysterious and intimidating parts of the whole try-to-sell-a-novel process. I don’t have a novel to try to sell, but I’ve always found it very helpful to have a few examples to look at before trying to write in a form that’s new to me, so I’m sure this will be very useful to aspiring writers.
There’s just one problem: It’s been put together by a person from LiveJournal, and people in LiveJournal land have never really grasped the concept of the permanent link. Possibly because the default settings for the software make it fairly difficult to find the correct URL, or maybe because that have that little feature that automatically inserts a link given only a username. Whatever the reason, LiveJournal people tend to just link to the front page of whatever journal they’re pointing to, and it drives me nuts.
Take, for example, C.E. Murphy. Her plot synopsis post, for her novel Urban Shaman (which I also enjoyed, but haven’t posted about) is here. The link in Toby’s post, however, goes to the front page of her LiveJournal, where the plot synopsis is already the third post down. It’s not even on the first screen on my fairly large monitor.
Somebody going there to look for the plot synopsis is going to have to scroll down to find it, mere hours after it was posted. Somebody going there to look for it a three days from now will probably have to sift back through the archives. Or, more likely, they’ll just surf away again, because it’s a hassle to find the relevant post.
Why this particular behavior is so prevalent on LiveJournal, I have no idea. Regular blogs long ago got used to the idea of linking directly to archive pages, and while linkrot is still a problem (particularly since both Blogspot and Movable Type are prone to trashing site databases), they’re almost always good for a few weeks or a month. LiveJournal has never gotten the memo, though, and it’s maddening. If I go out of town for two days, I don’t even bother trying to follow links in most LiveJournal posts, because none of them go anywhere useful.
This is not a knock on Joshua Palmatier specifically, or any of the other authors involved– I applaud what they’ve done with this. The problem is, the way these links have been posted turns what could be a really good resource for aspiring writers into a really good resource with the shelf life of unpasteurized milk.
But that’s just how things are done in LiveJournal land.
LiveJournal isn’t really designed for producing a long-term archive of content. I mean, it’s not even really searchable. It’s pretty much just long-form Twitter.
It’s perfectly easy to tweak one’s journal settings so that the permalink is displayed in a useful position (and even to make it say “Permalink” instead of the rather opaque default “Link”). Granted, GenericGirl McEmo is not going to do this, but I would have thought that people who use LJ for more serious purposes would have this covered. Apparently not.
I think it’s partly because conversations move on so fast, and partly because it is easier to use than blogs–some of the people I know who tend not to use permalinks are not particularly computer-savvy. Also partly because the lj-user code is so easy.
(Plus this particular list must have been put together ahead of time.)
But it drives me nuts too. I usually post the permalinks in comments for the use of those who come later.
ahem
Perhaps you should change that to “some (or even most) people in LiveJournal land.”
I think you’re right…the majority of people I know on there are actually writers/English majors. But there are a few hold-outs. 🙂 I suspect they don’t think to look at the actual post and copy and paste the URL…perhaps because many don’t actually use HTML directly.
I’m an LJ user and I don’t do that. Of course, it took me quite a while to figure out how to *find* the permalink as I don’t recall seeing it in the FAQs. Though I suppose I might have missed it or it may have been added since. What you have to do to get the permalink is go to the comments page which is not necessarily obvious to the casual observer.
MKK
Hmm, I noticed I was the only one with a full URL in that list, I think it had more to do with JP’s trying to get the whole list up on the same day, so he wouldn’t have known ahead of time what full URLs were going to be generated until the list had gone live, as this list was passed around ahead of time…
When I was investigating blogging sites to decide where to start my blog a couple months ago, I rejected LiveJournal right away because I disliked a number of things about the interface of most blogs I’ve read there. I realize that plenty of LJ users have modified their sites so as to provide a better interface, but it seems to suggest the software is not entirely conducive to a number of things many bloggers take for granted.
I’m completely jumping off the topic at hand. I haven’t heard of Movable Type trashing a database since MT stopped supporting BerkeleyDB as a data storage option (but mostly since people stopped using BerkeleyDB in favor of mysql or sqlite for just that reason). As for permalinks, MT lets you choose whatever permalink format you like. I’m personally a fan of yyyy/mm/post-name/, mostly for googleability.