While Apple and Amazon wage price wars over hardware and e-books, the new Spanish-based firm 24Symbols aims to use their gadgets’ own Wi-Fi connections against them.

Using the Kindle and iPad’s internet browsers, 24Symbols promises totally free e-books. Readers will be served advertisements in return for free access to a wide-ranging catalogue, from comic books to novels. Springwise.com recently highlighted the new firm by linking it to popular free ad-based serving platforms in the music world:

Just as ad-supported sites like Pandora and Spotify let music lovers listen to and share their favourite music for free, so Spanish 24symbols is gearing up to do something similar for electronic books.

With the Wall Street Journal already reporting that Amazon is patenting its own ad-serving technology, 24Symbols isn’t jumping the gun so much as firing a more potent bullet: their free ad-based e-books should be more attractive to consumers than Amazon’s for-pay ad-based e-books. And with 24Symbols users able to buy print and electronic versions from within its operating system, the new firm might do more than pick away at Kindle’s e-marketshare.

Of course, selection will reign supreme, and the Big Five will need to like what they see from a revenue-sharing perspective before they open the content vault. In the end, though, “free” can never be ignored, and this could spell good things for recession-hit readers.

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In an essay for the New York Times, professor of logic Timothy Williamson examines the connections between imagination and reality—and comes to some counterintuitive conclusions:

On further reflection, imagining turns out to be much more reality-directed than the stereotype implies. If a child imagines the life of a slave in ancient Rome as mainly spent watching sports on TV, with occasional household chores, they are imagining it wrong. That is not what it was like to be a slave. The imagination is not just a random idea generator. The test is how close you can come to imagining the life of a slave as it really was, not how far you can deviate from reality.

Fiction and reality, Williamson appears to argue, are intricately intertwined. Fiction may help us better negotiate reality —and it can also help us expand our understanding, and vice versa:

Even imagining things contrary to our knowledge contributes to the growth of knowledge, for example in learning from our mistakes. Surprised at the bad outcomes of our actions, we may learn how to do better by imagining what would have happened if we had acted differently from how we know only too well we did act.

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If you decide to follow the tunnel, turn to page 151. If you decide to cross the bridge, turn to page 12.

Remember the Choose Your Own Adventure books? Now you can enjoy the series in ebook format with the new iPhone app U-Ventures. The app was created by Edward Packard, one of the authors of the original Choose Your Own Adventure series and creator of U-Ventures.

In an interview with NPR host Neal Conan, Packard comments on some of the narrative changes made possible by the new digital format. First there are the obvious bells and whistles that ebooks allow:

CONAN: Well, these were obviously interactive books. Clearly these are a natural for dig.

Mr. PACKARD: They were. And so, when we decided to put it into app form with Simon and Schuster, we had to get a developer expanded app out in L.A. and develop it really – which is more than just transferring it into digital form, because we wanted to add a lot of tricks and things and features that the app could perform that you would never have been able to have in the printed book. [...]

CONAN: Books can’t make sounds and that sort of things, yeah.

But there are less obvious point-of-view changes, as well:

[PACKARD:] My original first book, I – first one of these that I wrote, I wasn’t able to sell it, but I got a small publisher to publish it, and we decided we’d have it – try to have a unisex you, so – but even that, it wasn’t too satisfactory. And the publishers, Bantam, when they started bringing out the series in a big way, they said, you know, we have to represent it with somebody as you, the reader. And this somebody turned out to be a white boy, looking like sort of a junior James Bond. And this didn’t sit too well with a lot of people, especially girls.

And so we decided, with these apps, we’re not going to have that problem. We’re going to make it point-of-view, the reader. And as you go through your adventures, all the illustrations show things as you see them with your own eyes.

Listen to the full story here, and if you’ve tried the U-ventures app, let us know what you think of it.

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So say you’ve decided to unplug for a while. That doesn’t mean you have to go completely low-tech. The new liquid pencil from Sharpie, for example, seems like an ingenious new invention.

Wait, you may be saying. A pencil from Sharpie? Aren’t those polar opposites? As it turns out, no. The pencil’s “ink,” made from liquid graphite, can be erased like an ordinary pencil—for three days. After that, the ink becomes permanent. I’ve always liked writing in pencil, and to me, this sounds like it might offer all the benefits (erasability, flexibility of expression) without the downsides (smudging and ineveitable illegibility over time).

The pencils aren’t available for a few more days (”September 2010,” says Sharpie), but you can order them online now in a few places.

Anyone out there tried these? What’s the verdict?

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Take a day off to write next week. Or maybe just an afternoon. Either way, you can disconnect for a few hours, put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard, and in the process help raise money for Dzanc Books. Each year Dzanc holds a Write-a-Thon to raise money for their Writer-in-Residence Program and the Dzanc Prize. These charitable programs help put writers into schools and other places like VA hospitals, prisons, and refugee communities. So you’ll not only be helping a great nonprofit organization, but also setting aside some time for yourself and your work. As someone who’s participated in the past, I can say that this is a great excuse to turn off everything but the word program on your computer. In fact, the most recent story I published (”What We Can,” which appeared in the Summer 2010 issue of Glimmer Train) was written almost in its entirety during the 2008 Write-a-Thon, which had the theme of “change” as a prompt. So I hope you’ll join me for this year’s event.

The 2010 Write-a-Thon will take place September 2nd-5th. Choose a day, choose an afternoon, or choose just a few hours to set aside. As always, a prompt will be supplied if you’d like a theme to write on (though this is certainly not an obligation). And if you choose to write during more than one day, you will receive variations on the prompt.

Participating is very easy:

Send an email stating your interest to info@dzancbooks.org. This is not a commitment, simply a way to register so that you’ll receive the daily prompt and have access to the website.

Promote the event via email or Facebook or on your blog, with the hopes of both spreading the word and finding sponsors. Sponsors can donate as little or as much as they’d like, and it can either be a single amount or based on the number of hours that you end up writing. Whatever they prefer.

At the end of the day, send in your work to the email above. Once the Write-a-Thon has finished, Dzanc will create a special pdf of collected work that they’ll send to participants and sponsors as a digital anthology. Note: you can state whether you want your work included or not.

The writer whose sponsors donate the most will receive a full run of the 2010 Dzanc titles:

Further Adventures in the Restless Universe, stories by Dawn Raffel

The Taste of Penny, stories by Jeff Parker

The Best of the Web 2010, guest edited by Kathy Fish

Pirate Talk or Mermalade, a novel by Terese Svoboda

Asunder, stories by Robert Lopez

For questions, please contact Dan Wickett: wickettd@yahoo.com

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Friend of FWR (and very talented writer) Elizabeth Ames Staudt reflects in the Kenyon Review on writing about children and one’s children becoming writers:

Do writers want their babies to be writers? I feel like, in the way-too–many-celebrity-profiles I’ve read, most famous people hope their progeny will not head Hollywood-wards, but are quick to add that they will support them unflaggingly should they ultimately choose that dangerously glittery path. Except Britney Spears. I’m pretty sure she was quoted saying that she’d lock her sons in a room until they changed their minds. Okay, she really said she would lock them up until they were thirty. Is it worse that I knew the first part without googling? Or that I spent thirty seconds fact-checking Britney Spears’s parenting policies?

Read the full essay at the Kenyon Review blog. And congratulations to the recipient of that precious onesie: future writer or no, may there be plenty of love—and little hurt—in your life.

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The more MFA programs spring up, the more people seem to look down on them—as if some kind of MFA-inflation and devaluation were taking place. Novelist Lev Raphael, however, recently wrote about why he found his MFA program valuable:

I was at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst MFA program for two and a half years back when it was rated in the top ten, for whatever that’s worth. The workshops kept me writing and turning in stories, even when I wasn’t in the mood, a good lesson to learn for a writer like me who later ended up doing a lot of print reviewing on tight deadlines.

I enjoyed the company of my fellow students in what was in effect a giant writers group. Were they all good writers or even good critics of each other’s work? No. But the enthusiasm for writing and reading was powerful. I can still remember finding a friend at lunch who was glowing because she’d been reading Richard Wilbur’s “The Mind-Reader.” I only knew him through his Moliere translations, and was thrilled myself by the poem when I read it right there at the cafeteria table. But that was only one POV; another friend said after a reading Wilbur did in Amherst: “God, he uses so many old words!” We definitely didn’t march in lock step.

Certainly there can be downsides to an MFA program as well—and Raphael admits that. But the reason for attending an MFA program that I hear most often involves not practical help with writing but something more psychological. As Raphael puts it, “Taking those two and a half years for the program was taking myself seriously.”

Judging by the passionate response to this essay, though, it’s likely that the debate over MFA programs (worth it, or waste?) will continue for some time.

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That’s what Pamela Paul wants to know in her recent New York Times essay. Observes Paul:

image credit: Ross McDonald, New York Times

But big type and short, plot-driven chapters aside, the erosion of age-­determined book categories, initiated by Harry Potter, has been hastened along by an influx of crossover authors like Stephenie Meyer and interlopers like Sherman Alexie, James Patterson, Francine Prose, Carl Hiaasen and John Grisham, to name just a few stars from across the spectrum of adult fiction who have turned to writing Y.A. According to surveys by the Codex Group, a consultant to the publishing industry, 47 percent of 18- to 24-year-old women and 24 percent of same-aged men say most of the books they buy are classified as young adult. The percentage of female Y.A. fans between the ages of 25 and 44 has nearly doubled in the past four years. Today, nearly one in five 35- to 44-year-olds say they most frequently buy Y.A. books. For themselves.

Moreover, the lines between YA and “Grownup lit” (for lack of a better term) grow increasingly blurred. On a recent bookstore trip, I spotted Yann Martel’s Life of Pi on a high school reading list. Stieg Larsson’s Millenium Trilogy is only the latest example of novels with wide age appeal. Perhaps, as Paul suggests in her essay, the answer lies in the power of an old-fashioned story:

“A lot of contemporary adult literature is characterized by a real distrust of plot,” [TIME book critic Lev] Grossman said. “I think young adult fiction is one of the few areas of literature right now where storytelling really thrives.”

We’ve long been fans of smart YA here at Fiction Writers Review. So it’s refreshing to hear others agree: serious literary discussions can indeed follow from young adult–oriented literature.

* For those of you apparently too old, YA stands for “Young Adult lit.”

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Author Elizabeth Benedict, editor of the recent anthology Mentors, Muses, & Monsters, discusses her experience being forced to unplug:

Finding this blank book already so full of hope and history — from Hemingway’s to my beloved sister-in-law’s — was a bit like encountering a bear in the woods: it was just the two of us, and it was up to me to save my skin. I couldn’t hide, couldn’t escape to the computer or connect anywhere but in its cream-colored pages. I began by rereading the manuscript pages from the novel — and I winced two dozen times. It was all too complicated, and there was no through line. There were voices but no story — or too many stories, and I only needed one — one with enough power to drive a novel. [...]

I wrote three pages. By hand. With a pen. Later that day, I wrote two more. I woke up early every day for two weeks and wrote this way. It was primitive and thrilling, like cooking over a campfire, like celestial navigation. I wasn’t sure where I was going, but I was on a journey, and it felt natural, instead of cramped, for the first time in years.

In my own experience, I find it harder to write by hand than to type; because writing longhand is much slower than typing, I can’t get the words on paper fast enough and end up losing my train of thought. But Benedict’s essay may encourage me to try again sometime.

What about you? Do you ever feel the need to disconnect—from the Internet, from cell phones, from your computer itself? If faced with nothing but a blank Moleskine and a pen, do you think your writing would benefit?

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Subways are not known for being bright and cheerful—but Moscow’s new Dostoevsky-themed station takes subway gloom to a new level. The Dostoevskaya Station opened in June in northern Moscow as a tribute to the famed Russian author and features murals based on his works. Here’s one from Crime and Punishment:

But some worry that the grim, black-and-white murals will have negative psychological effects on subway riders. NPR reports:

Mikhail Vinogradov, who heads a psychological help center in Moscow, went on Russian TV to complain that the murals will make people “afraid to ride the subway.” Like other psychologists who raised concerns in Russia and abroad, Vinogradov says gripping images can induce violent behavior — and a subway station is the last place for that.

“There will be suicides more often,” he says. “I can’t rule out people will commit murders or attacks.”

But Natalia Semyonova, another clinical psychologist in Moscow, defended the artist and the author, whose books she uses in lectures and to treat patients.

“We try to jump into these books and try to understand once more the motives of human behavior, the motives of human suffering, how to overcome, how to find a sense of life, and so on,” Semyonova says.

Using powerful literature to help overcome challenges in one’s own life, she says, is very Russian.

And the artist behind the murals defends his work:

Since the station opened its doors, Nikolayev, the artist of the murals, has been asked repeatedly whether the mural of Raskolnikov from Crime and Punishment, in particular, was over the top.

His answer comes in the form of another question: “If someone handed you Dostoevsky’s own manuscript, would you just go cross out this scene from the novel?”

Grim or not, can you imagine if we had author-themed train or bus stations in the U.S.? Whose station would you most like to visit, and what would the decor be like?

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