Monday 9 November 2015

UCLPub2015 - Term 1: Week 5 [2nd-6th Nov]

We're almost half way through already! This week was our last week before Reading Week (in which I will be doing my utmost best to get on top of all of the work we've been set in the first half of term. Though this was our last week before a fun (read: stressful) week off, our lectures did not let up.
We kicked off Tuesday morning's Publishing Skills lecture with every Publishing student's worst nightmare: finance. Fortunately our guest speaker Richard Balkwill from Copytrain did a top job of making it as understandable as possible and not horrendously confusing us for 3 hours. 

Tuesday afternoon was pitch time for our Publishing Projects. I think we were all quite pleased with the way it went and are very excited to find out which one of our pitches was successful.

Author Management on Thursday morning was on copyright and intellectual property. Once Mal and Rachel had given us an overview, Richard Mollet, lobbyist and CEO of the Publishers' Association, gave us a really interesting look at the importance and future of copyright in the digital age. Richard kept us all interested and made the subject - which had the potential to be ridiculously overwhelming and confusing to us novices - really accessible. With the rise of digital media, copyright laws and the need for revisions are becoming more and more important, so we were all very grateful to learn about it all from such a capable speaker.

Thursday afternoon was a great end to the week with a super interactive session with Mel on the evolution of authorship. Using what we'd learnt from our readings of Foucault and Barthes' works on the author, we had a mock debate with one half of the class arguing that the author is a collaborator while the other argued that the author is an original genius. I was on the side that argued that the author is an original genius and we took the stance that while an author's idea may not be entirely his own (a truly original idea is near impossible) every time he puts pen to paper - or finger to keyboard - he creates an original piece that only he could write. Unfortunately it was not the winning argument, though I would say that was more down to our sub-standard debating skills rather than an inadequate argument.

So as I've said we're at our reading week now so I won't be posting an update. Once I've done all my work I may be able to get a review up after I've (hopefully successfully) squeezed Patrick Rothfuss' The Name of the Wind in around my work.

Thanks for reading,
Naomi Joy x


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