Cyber Monday calls for Regretsy

Many of Drawing In's regular readership are fans of (and contributors) to the Etsy website, where craftsmen and women sell their homemade goods.  It is nice that the cottage industry has an outlet, and people can connect in that way we hoped the Internet would.

Miss Bender recommends you try some Etsy shopping for this holiday drive, especially if you are not so crafty yourself.  And if, along the way, you discover that Etsy submissions are not juried... there is an outlet for that too.

presenting:
Regretsy - a museum that explores the idea whether everyone who likes "to craft" really should.

Neatly categorized and easily browsed, Regretsy brings together everything we love about Engrish, the "Blog" of Unneccessary Quotation Marks, Found, and Real Corporate Email (not online, only in my heart), with the Gothic Pathos that tears out your heart on PostSecret.

All of these will give you plenty to do besides shop.  But everyone will think you are, and won't interrupt because it's a surprise.  Oh, I got a surprise, all right....

Watch this space

Miss Bender needs a break from her strenuous downtime, and is going on vacation --- offline.

Because she knows you need your blog-fix, and because she honors the commitments of Can't Blog No Mo, you can continue to count on daily updates.  Some will be more entertaining than others; none will be more pedestrian than this one is so far.

So let me try to find an interesting topic to leave you with, to justify your clicking over here instead of spending 4 hours on You-Chube, which I know you can.

I read this advertorial in Vanity Fair that tried to claim that Louis Cartier invented the wristwatch, and I found that suspect.  It seemed like the wristwatch was around before WWI, and I had once heard a story that it was invented for the war because everyone was up to their fob-chains in muck.  I had also once heard that it was originally a signal among urban homosexuals in a time when most gentleman still wore their watches in their pockets. 

On closer reading, as I began to circle and underline key lines of page 104, I realized that they (Laura Jacobs) are/is claiming that Cartier invented the "modern" wristwatch, taking it beyond "just a pocket watch on a strap."  Oh, Ok.  The Tank is the watch in question, which is celebrating a 90th anniversary.  The traditional 90th anniversary gift, of course, is life support.

Sources tell a few versions of the original story, but what they share is this timeline:
- wrist watches are for ladies
- wrist watches are for soldiers
- wrist watches are the norm
- people tell time off their phone

An open content article on eZines (Short History of the Wristwatch) recounts a legend of a busy nanny who strapped a watchface on her wrist with a ribbon.  Possible, but household staff of this kind tended to wear the pendant-style timepiece, upside-down so they could read it.  According to Masterpiece Theatre, anyway, where I get all my information about the Victorian/Edwardian area.

Sources agree on the WWI angle, though Qualitytyme credits the Boer War for introducing it earlier, and cites a 1900 catalog testimonial to back them up.

Cartier does deserve some credit for classing up the watch.  Alberto Santos Dumont was a manly-man adventurer who made wearing a Cartier watch desirable, and the mark of a Modern Man.  We are very fortunate his hat didn't have this same effect.  I am unable to find a portrait of him wearing a watch.

 To quote wikipedia: "Alberto Santos Dumont asked his friend Louis Cartier to come up with an alternative that would allow him to keep both hands on the controls while timing his performances during flight. Cartier and his master watchmaker, Edmond Jaeger soon came up with the first prototype for a man's wristwatch called the Santos wristwatch. The Santos first went on sale in 1911, the date of Cartier's first production of wristwatches."

I was unable to verify the "gay signal" story, but if one folows the watches-for-ladies/fashion-for-fops connection, you could see how such a story might start.

Here is a handsome gift item for the man you love -- or the man he loves. 

Also, if you search for a keyword set like "wrist watches gay history," you will be offered this story.

The rise of self-publishing

From Crains: "E-book giant flies in a dozen top NYC book agents to Seattle to play down its Darth Vader image. Talks described as “freewheeling, frank and contentious.”

Another brick in the wall between authors and their publication is knocked loose.

When I was a child-author, I had 2 frequent daydreams.  One was my appearance on Oprah, long before she was in the bookclub business.  The other was opening a box filled with the hardbound copies of my book.  It seemed the culmination of the painfully long and humiliating process of getting noticed, read, and printed.  I pictured publishing houses as giant printing press mills, the size of Russian blast furnaces, where guys chewed unlit cigars and studied folio pages with a raised eyebrow "not bad" look of approval.

Please remember when I tell you these stories that I am well under 18 when they take place.

My freshman advisor says I was the only student she ever worked with who arrived with a novel in a box.  I find this hard to believe at the finest writing program in The South, but maybe it had just never happened to her before.

Vanity Publishing was possible in those days, but of course it was called vanity publishing, meaning no one in the business liked it enough to publish it, and "certain" people could always get their work published.  In today's market, self-publishing will still cost you, but players like Amazon are happy to produce "on demand" as sales are made, rather than a 1000 print run that was required in the old days to justify the effort of machinery.  They will also happily make you available by Kindle, because more is more for the Kindle library, and Kindling costs even less.

They look good, these self-published books. The covers are clearly not Wendell Minor, but they are colorful and sturdy, trade paperback size with good typeface.

One of my blog acquaintances punched out a novel in a few months, made the necessary rounds of agents, and learned that without vampires, an unknown writer was too high a risk to take.  So he published it on his own, and launched an aggressive viral campaign to get noticed. 

Another blog acquaintance has an idea for a coffee table book featuring photographs of roadkill.  There did not appear to be another hook, such as vampire roadkill, Tuesdays with Roadkill, or Oprah-approved roadkill.  I can not imagine who the audience is for this book, but if she finds one, she does not need to convince Random House that revenue will exceed costs.  I said, "I did not learn much in publishing school, but I did learn that your book needs to be cheap to produce but look expensive, arrive right-on-fad and not overrun."  (I got a little excited that I was able to quote all that, to tell you the truth.)  "OR...you can publish it yourself."

Makes the perfect Christmas gift.

Placeholder post

Dear Readership - it is November 19, and I have no post idea.  I have a lot of post ideas, but I don't feel like crafting them.  I feel like crafting them, but I am sleepy.  And I still have to solve the dilemma of scheduling posts for next week.  I had a plan for that, which was to write them early in the month.  But I didn't.  Because I didn't feel like it.  I felt like it, but I didn't do it.  I started it, but I didn't finish.

This is what Gertrude Stein's blog would look like.  Who are we kidding - Gertrude Stein would be on Myspace.

Blog from my ass.  Alas, alas.

Your Thanksgiving playlist

.... from the girls who have been turned out.

1.  9 to 5 (Dolly Parton)

2. Morning Train (Sheena Easton)

3. Cowboy's Work is Never Done (Sonny & Cher)

4. It's My Job (Jimmy Buffett)

5.  Millworker (Emmylou Harris)

6. Banana Boat Song (Harry Belafonte)

7.  Working for the Weekend (Loverboy)

8.  Take this Job (Johnny Paycheck)

9.  Bread and Roses (John Denver)

10.  New Jerusalem (Carly Simon)