Kris has a good post today, down below so make sure to visit it too, but we have the results for last week’s contest, courtesy of random.org.
*drum roll*
The Mermaid’s Madnesswill be finding a home with: Carol Lawrence
On the Edge is going to: Amanda
And a bonus book: Succubus Blues, by Richelle Mead is going out to Deedles
Winners please email us at realitybypass at gmail dot com with your addresses and we’ll get your books sent out this week.
Everyone thank you for visiting and joining our contest. I had a great birthday and I’m happy to be able to share some birthday joy out there. Come back frequently, cause I promise we’ll be sending more books out in to the world soon!
I’m in a class called Literary Theory, which is driving me crazy. I tend to be fairly practical minded so the idea of worrying about questions that will never have answers bothers me. Most recently we read Michel Foucault’s “What is an author” and Roland Barthes’ “Death of the author”. In short these essays tried to define a value for the ‘author’ and if who wrote something matters as much as what is written?
It left me thinking several things:
The act of ‘selling’ books has made the author more important, because it’s a sale-able commodity giving rights and ownership of a text to the author becomes important.
Names sell. In Homer’s time stories sold… but now, having a name to link to a work tends to sell more than a type of work. The question is, how do you get a name known.
Would we still want to sell our stories if once they were published, our names were stripped from them? Even if we use a pseudonym, it’s still an “identity’ we associate with our writing.
The idea that the author’s personality and personal worldview doesn’t affect the production of a text bothers me. I know that there’s a little bit of my personality in almost any character I write, so I have trouble believing that’s not the case with most authors. It reminds me more of the episode “The Chase” from Star Trek, where Picard tells Riker about the Kurline civilization and the belief of one individual being more a “community” of voices. Check it out, it starts at about 3:00 – 3:30.
