KALLISTI

Words unclear on the concept

2011-10-21T19:29:00.002-04:00

Perspicuous: (pr-spky-s)

adj.

1. Clearly expressed or presented; easy to understand: perspicuous prose.

2. Expressing oneself clearly and effectively: a perspicuous lecturer.

I admit it - I never looked this one up. But Zizek did. Leave it to the philosophers to use an obscure, difficult-to-pronounce term to mean "communicate clearly and effectively."

Research your criminals

2011-09-22T16:28:00.000-04:00

Last night I attended a talk by Peter James, "Britain's #1 bestselling crime author," at the offices of HarperCollins Canada. It was, appropriately, a dark and stormy night, which we had a great view of from the floor-to-ceiling windows in HCC's fabulous 20th-storey offices.

James spoke to an intimate audience of crime writers and fans about his writing process, his sources of inspiration, and the effect on his psyche of writing about gory murders all day. (Apparently the antidote is vodka martinis.)

To add realism to his stories, James has been cultivating relationships with police, criminals, and victims for decades. He goes out on patrol, witnesses arrests, hangs out in jails...the whole bit.

While not all authors have the luxury of totally immersing themselves in the world of their stories, I think any author could benefit from the general lesson of seeking inspiration through research. So often in manuscripts I find that the very best writing comes from what the author knows best, that the most developed characters and settings are the ones that are clear stand-ins from the author's life experience, and that the characters and plot points that are the most "made up" are the haziest, even if the author means them to be interesting and important.

The best thing about this is that it's an infallible excuse for field trips! So go feed into that author stereotype thing where you get to do all kinds of weird, fun things because it's "research for your book." I think I am going to start researching a book about a horseback-riding ballerina who hangs out in tea shops reading her brand-new stack of British crime thrillers now.

Also, he's totally talking to me in this picture. I am Britain's #1 crime author by association.

#i'mprocrastinatingpacking

2011-08-24T17:02:00.000-04:00

I was rapturizing yesterday about the # thing in Twitter and how it seems to have filled some kind of linguistic void for people. It was meant to do a fairly simple thing (group posts about the same event, like blog post tags), but people en masse have adopted it and started using it for a less easily defined, but still very specific effect in both Twitter and the outside world. This is the same process by which any artificially introduced element of language turns into a real part of the language, and... it's just kind of weird. Because it's not really a word or a grammatical arrangement or anything you'd normally think of as being an element of language.

Here is an article that is pretty good about it: How Twitter's Hashtag is Changing Communication. Though I think more proper linguistic study could be done about it. And no doubt is being done right now by the next crop of linguistics thesis students.

And, of course, there's a part about people making a # hand-gesture that reminded me of something I read in the Onion almost a decade ago, proving that really a lot of my brain storage space is...doing very important work: Finger-Quotes Lady Now Doing Hand Parentheses

Great editing checklist from Romance University

2011-07-24T11:46:00.001-04:00

I think this is an exceptionally good editing post - and don't be fooled by the "romance" thing - the advice holds regardless of the type of writing you're doing.

I especially love the tip of isolating all the scenes that your major character is in to make sure their actions flow sensibly and they don't ever stagnate or go off on a weird tangent. I've definitely encouraged writers to do this in the past, but I think this "Theresa Stevens" character explains it better.

Check it out!
http://romanceuniversity.org/2011/07/22/ask-an-editor-by-theresa-stevens/

Comprehensive (?) list of e-readers

2011-07-21T12:04:00.001-04:00

I came across this list of e-readers/tablet things that people read on. And as a big fan of lists, I thought I would pass it along. I haven't even heard of a bunch of these and will have to look them up.

**************************
Adam (Notion Ink)
AS 100 (Toshiba)
iPad (Apple)
CherryPad (Cherrypal)
Cruz (Velocity Metro)
Cybook (Bookeen)
Galaxy Tab (Samsung)
eDGe (enTourage)
Eee Pad (Asus)
EliteBook (HP)
IdeaPad (Lenovo)
Inspiron (Dell)
Kindle (any version)
Kobo (Borders)
Kyros (Coby)
LifeBook (Fujitsu)
Navigator (Netbook)
NOOK
NOOKcolor
Pavilion (HP)
PlayBook (Blackberry)
Protégé (Toshiba)
PC Tablet (Archos)
Skiff Reader (Hearst)
Slate (HP)
Sony Reader (any version)
Streak (Dell)
ThinkPad Tablet (Lenovo)
TouchPad (HP)
TouchSmart (HP)
WISEreader (Hanvon)
ViewPad (ViewSonic)
XOOM (Motorola)

Blog revivalism

2011-07-15T13:10:00.000-04:00

Oh, hello!

I've been off running about for the past year, pursuing a graduate certificate in book and magazine publishing in Toronto. That's all done now, which in theory makes me an accredited publishing professional, which is a lovely thing to be!

I've learned a lot about the publishing industry in the past year, and I'm looking forward to taking that out into the world now. At the moment I am freelancing and job-hunting, and that is what I will be blogging about. Soon.

Beware the Twitter glitch

2010-09-28T11:47:00.000-04:00

Ah...good times. It's absolutely pouring buckets out there. I don't have class till 4:30 this afternoon, so hopefully the sky will get itself sorted out by then.

And it's cold in my temporary home! I wish I had the beautiful Latvian-knitting-pattern fingerless gloves that Emma made for me the last time she visited. But alas, they are one of the many necessities that are tied up in all of my belongings that are still in Montreal. Soon.

The real purpose of this post is to inform anyone who may have looked at my Twitter feed recently that I wasn't the author of that delightful tweet. I changed the address of my Twitter feed (it's now http://twitter.com/ErininToronto), and somebody else took my old name, and of course anywhere I've linked my Twitter feed by address...her tweet got posted. So to the poor girl who is "Utterly frutrated and tired! Going to bed. Tomarrow is going to rock!! . . .Because i said it will. It will!" ...I hope your "tomarrow" was way better! :)

Back to School

2010-09-07T17:05:00.000-04:00

It's been a busy couple of weeks! I discovered a graduate certificate program in Book and Magazine Publishing through Centennial College in Toronto. This is one of just a couple good publishing programs offered in Canada, and it's very well established and respected. How I'd managed to miss hearing about it for so long is beyond me.

So I packed up a few things and headed down to Toronto - a good friend here was lovely enough to let me house-sit her gorgeous downtown apartment while she was away over the last two weeks, so I've had a chance to unwind and get to know the city a little bit before school is full swing!

I was a (very) late applicant - I had my entrance interview this past Friday, and classes start tomorrow. But I got in! Apparently they have over 200 applicants for just over 60 spots, so I'm thrilled to have squeezed in at such late notice.

So, this is going to be exciting! I will review lots of things, and learn lots more new things. I'll get to do an industry internship, and participate in putting out a magazine. Happily, the editing classes are going with Chicago style, so at least I'll have a head start there!

Business-wise, this means that I won't be taking on new clients for a while. There's a month from mid-December to mid-January where I might be able to squeeze in some projects, but other than that I'm going to keep my slate clear so I can concentrate on school.

It's very strange to be a student again, but I'm looking forward to it. If you happen to know anything fun to do in Toronto, or better yet, if you have information that could lead to me having an apartment anytime soon, let me know! I probably won't be updating this blog during the school year - though maybe I'll put up a few tidbits if I learn anything interesting! Thank you for reading, and feel free to keep in touch! I'd love to hear how everyone's projects are going.

What we can learn about writing from...Canadian-content television

2010-08-18T10:04:00.004-04:00

I recently interviewed the young star of a Canadian TV show for the newspaper. Out of curiosity, I watched the first few episodes of his show - a family comedy/drama set in Winnipeg, Manitoba called Less Than Kind - and was completely smitten.

The thing you have to understand about Canadian programming is...well. It's like the BBC in many ways. The government mandates that a certain number of hours of Canadian shows need to be aired in order for stations to also carry all the American hits that actually pull in the viewers. So the government-sponsored channel pumps out some shows, and there's money out there to produce other ones, but in general these shows have a reputation for being under-produced, amateurish, silly little messes. They deal with heartwarming Canadian issues, take place in foggy prairies, involve beer-drinking characters who are down on their luck but still have the spark deep within...you know.

What I'm saying is, Canadian-content TV is extremely similar to the indy publishing landscape. Nobody expects it to be very good, and most of it isn't. Most of it deals with the same few boring issues that nobody actually wants to be entertained by. The product is sub-par. The sets and costumes are budget. Nobody exactly knows what they're doing.

Too many of these shows are laughably bad, because they go all high-concept and, when the execution isn't there, fall flat.

But then, there are gems. Like Less Than Kind. There's a spark. Sure, it may be a little rough around the edges, but people still gravitate towards it, get addicted to the characters, fall in love with the story, want to know what happens next. That's what you want your book to be, and that's the way to get it to stand out from the crowd.

PS - Oh, and, Shakespeare reference in the title! Just like I know you want to sneak wonderful, erudite little tidbits into your work. Do it!

Launch party!

2010-08-03T13:19:00.001-04:00

I'm tickled pink to announce that Blood & Ashes, the debut novel by the charming and talented Mark Loeffelholz, has been released into the wild this week. A detective novel of the hard-boiled variety, Blood & Ashes is set in Miami Beach, just after the Pearl Harbor bombing. Tension! Violence! Femmes fatales! 1935 Ford Roadsters in high-speed chases!

Ahem. This book was a pleasure to edit, and I thoroughly advocate visiting the website at www.oscarjade.com, where you can pick up a copy and support a talented author who I look forward to working with again in the future.

What we can learn about writing from...Inception

2010-07-22T10:52:00.004-04:00

I sure did like Inception. Yessiree, I did. The projector or something broke during the screening we saw, which added a bizarre extra dimension - blurring those damn lines between fiction and reality, you know. The cinema had to give us all free passes, which was pretty sweet...and it was an opening-Friday showing, too, so the room was completely packed.

So, aside from the fact that Joseph Gordon-Levitt is a total babe, what can we learn from Inception?

People really like weirdness. But especially weirdness they can connect to - all of that weird stuff is actually completely normal dream behavior that everyone can relate to. And that's what made it so delicious - the properties of dreams feel so unique and private, something that taps our subconscious and we never really talk about, but there it all was, being played with beautifully on screen.
Further to that, this is a great example of doing something creative with an idea that seems, in its most basic form, to be supremely cliché. You can't get much more cliché than "what if bad guys invaded our dreams and manipulated us while we slept?" In fact, I coincidentally started this book The Manual of Detection at the same time, and it's pretty much the same basic idea, just executed in a completely different way. So it's not the idea, it's how you run with it, and how you execute it.
If what happens is cool enough, why it happens is secondary to irrelevant.
Tantalizing gradual reveals are wonderful. What's actually being revealed...well, it helps if it's something scandalous, but it doesn't really have to be that deep. This is why editors are always saying "don't give all your backstory at once right at the beginning before anyone cares about your characters!" If Leo had just explained the whole deal with what had happened with his wife right away, it wouldn't have been marginally as interesting, because we wouldn't have had any emotional investment in the story or its outcome. The slow reveal, just in little hinting bits throughout the movie, is what makes it work.
If you can bottle Joseph Gordon-Levitt and somehow make that bottle be your book...you win.

Can you make my book a best-seller?

2010-07-12T20:14:00.003-04:00

As much as I hate to say it, sometimes nothing but weird, dumb luck can make your book a best-seller. It can be a wonderfully written book in a sizzling hot genre written by an A-list celebrity, and it can still fizzle out before it's even picked up by an agent. Alternatively, it can be a middling book written by a working-class single mom in a genre that was considered passé two hundred years ago, and it can sell more books than the Bible.

So no, I can't make your book a best-seller, and any editor who says he can is a quack. I can make your book better. I can improve its chances in the shark-ridden seas of agent-finding by making sure you don't turn off agents by doing things like using your thesaurus to find 5000 synonyms for "said" in your dialogue. But editing, the way I see it, has very little to do with the actual sales of a novel. Once reviewers and consumers have your book in their hands, good editing will ensure that your book isn't tossed into the reject pile right off the bat. But to get it there, you need your cover, your radio appearances, your local bookstore support, and everything else that goes into a good marketing effort.

I just tend to get a lot of inquiries asking whether I can magically get some book, sight unseen, into the NYT lists. The authors who ask me this question invariably disappear off the face of the earth after I respond that no, no editor can do that. I worry that these people are being suckered into paying huge amounts of money to unscrupulous "editors" who claim they possess the golden fleece of sales or something.

Honestly, if I knew the secret to best-sellerdom, I'd be churning out Harlequins like there was no tomorrow. But that would be sad. What a book really needs is magic - the magic that you as the author bring to it and no editor can ever duplicate from scratch. So go work your magic, and let a good editor help you polish the results so they're ready to present to the world.

Open for business

2010-07-07T11:34:00.003-04:00

I've finished up my editing backlog, and the newspaper is taking its yearly month-long summer hiatus. Which means...if you were waiting for the perfect moment to have your novel edited, that perfect moment has arrived!

Don't wait for the fall rush to get your homonyms sorted out and your perspective shifts un-shifted. Call now, and I'll throw in the em-dashes for free ;)

Knowing how to use tracked changes: important

2010-07-05T19:52:00.009-04:00

I think I learned to use the "track changes" function in Microsoft Word back in university. Maybe on a collaborative paper? I was terrified, yet intrigued, having always bolded or underlined or color-fontified my changes in documents before that point, and then painstakingly searched through documents line by line to find all the changes.

For those who don't know, "track changes" is a function by which one person can make changes in another person's document, and that person can see what changes have been made and either approve or reject them. They can also automatically move from change to change, eliminating the need to strain their eyesight trying to see where commas have been inserted.

This is something you need to have access to and be comfortable with if you're serious about writing.

I'll repeat that. This is something you need to have access to and be comfortable with if you're serious about writing.

I can't tell you how often I've had people tell me they have this, or that they know how to use it, and then I find out that they've made dozens if not hundreds of extra hours of work for themselves by not actually using it properly. Don't do this to yourself! It's not harmless extra work either - it's piles of horrible, agonizing busy-work that will distract you from the real meat of your editing and cause your book to be not as good.

The good news is, it's really easy to learn! There are a total of about 4 buttons you need to know, and they are labeled things like "next" and "yes."

Youtube is an awesome resource for learning to use track changes, because you can search for your specific version of Word (including the Word for Mac, older versions of Word, and even Pages for the Mac) and get a video that shows you specifically what to do.

I'm writing this article as a permanent reference for clients - so if you've hired me to edit for you and you're saying "I don't know what she means by track changes, but I'm sure I'll figure it out when I see the edit," or "Oh yeah, track changes, I used that once a while back, I'm sure I'll pick it up as I go along," or "I have my own system, and it's always worked for me so I don't want to confuse myself by learning another way," or any other sort of response besides "I am absolutely 100% positive that I know how to both give and receive tracked changes, and I consider this so elementary that I can't even believe she's writing a blog post about it," then you MUST go look at Youtube videos or speak to your resident computer geek and learn.

To paraphrase that Geiko ad, "5 minutes could save you 100 hours or more of totally unnecessary, painful, horrible, torturous editing work."

IPPY awards

2010-05-17T10:20:00.004-04:00

I'm delighted to report that The American Book of the Dead, a novel that I had the pleasure of editing last year, has won the "Visionary Fiction" category of the 2010 Independent Publisher Book Awards. Congratulations to author Henry Baum on his golden touch :)

A giggle from Craigslist

2010-05-10T12:59:00.003-04:00

Saw this on Craigslist today and thought it was pretty cute.

*********

Auther: needs Publisher

I am looking for an honest publisher able to take-on a timly, controversial and important project.
Must be prepaired to make enemies within the spheres of Establishment & disreguard them.
((for more info plz enquire inside.
Thanx !

Compensation: This is for Book Publishers themselves looking for new material

**********

Clearly this guy isn't going to be bringing down any "Establishments" any time soon, but how good of a character would this be in a story? "Writer of groundbreaking manifestos, too irate to proofread, seeks publisher willing to make enemies...and then disregard them!"

I wonder what percentage of authors hit up Craigslist for character and plot ideas?

What we can learn about writing from...hockey playoffs!

2010-05-04T07:00:00.001-04:00

I'm not going to lie - from now until at least next week, and hopefully well into May, pretty much all I'm going to be concentrating on is hockey playoffs. And work, of course. But really, hockey!

Montreal is making such an improbable run right now that I wouldn't put it past them to win the Stanley Cup (that's the Superbowl of hockey, you Americans) just because it would be so darn shocking.

Which brings us to this week's lesson in...perspective! Yay!

Very brief primer in hockey - The NHL is broken up into two halves: East and West. Each half has sixteen teams who play during the year. Based on how much they win during the year, the top eight teams make the playoffs. In the first round of the playoffs, the #1 team plays the #8 team, the #2 team plays the #7 team, etc.

The result of this is that the #1 team - which has probably had an amazing year and is feeling really good about itself - plays the #8 team, which has probably had a very middling year and squeaked in by the seat of its pants. Thus was the situation of Montreal (#8) vs Washington (#1 and for God's sake they have Ovechkin).

You have to win 4 games (out of a possible 7) to win the round and go on to the next one. Nobody expected Montreal to win even one game - they were meant to be a mere speed bump on Washington's path to inevitable glory and immortality.

But Montreal won. HAH! It was insane. We partied in the streets.

Now - here's what to think about - there are (at least) four perspectives you can look at this kind of classic underdog scenario from.

1 - You like the #1 team, and they win
2 - You like the #1 team, and they lose
3 - You like the #8 team, and they win
4 - You like the #8 team, and they lose

If you were writing a story like this, you'd have to examine all four of these and decide which one you want to go with. Which has the most drama/catharsis/rapture/agony? Is a win more exciting if you like the strong team or the underdog? What are the different effects of a loss from each perspective?

#3 - the underdog win - is your classic Disney scenario. And yes, it's awesome when you actually live through it. But in fiction, that's really what people expect, and it can get very old if it's not well done. Is there a way to make a compelling story out of the strong team winning, or the weak one losing? You bet there is! You just have to figure out how.

Final point. Even if you've decided already whether your main character is strong or weak, and whether they win or lose, it's really crucial to writing a rounded story that you look at all these other perspectives. So your underdog character wins. How would she have felt if she lost? Is she determined not to lose, terrified of losing, or resigned to probably having to lose? If your strong character loses, how badly did he want to win? Was he sabotaged by his own arrogance, or was he tired of the pressure of winning all the time?

Hmm....

Indy books vs Indy bookstores

2010-04-23T07:30:00.003-04:00

In my other life as a journalist, I had the good fortune recently to attend a lecture by the owner of a very successful independent bookstore. He was speaking to a group of authors and small local publishers, and the dynamic was extremely interesting for a number of reasons.

The majority of the participants were on the older side, and there was a lot of resistance to technology. Amazon, Kindles, iPhones - all were the enemy (though there was an undercurrent of idolatry, if I'm not mistaken). The smell of ink came highly recommended. Most of the questions were of the "how do you think technology X will affect writers" variety. Which seemed odd to me, since they were speaking to a bookstore owner, who clearly can't do anything about the influx of technology.
There was a sense of shifting blame for the failure of one's books. It wasn't that the book was bad, or boring, or extremely limited in audience. It wasn't that people have limited incomes and can't just buy every book by a local author that vaguely overlaps with their interests. It's that bookstores won't buy local books, or it's impossible to get printed in the current market, or nobody will take a chance on their topic. Now, certainly there are great books being ignored out there. But it seems like leaning on these explanations may result in a lot of bitterness down the road. FYI.

Most interesting, though, was a question about self-publishing. An author was saying he'd self-published but now couldn't get even local indy bookstores to stock his book. This is a common complaint, and a totally valid frustration for an author that's edited carefully, gotten a great cover, and totally deserves the shelf space. But the bookstore owner still said no - it was very unlikely that he'd carry a self-published book.

The reason for this? Well, one of the only things that really good indy bookstores have that big chain and internet stores don't have is...quality control. The staff are reading the books, picking up titles that got great reviews or that they really liked. People come into the stores trusting them, knowing that whatever they choose to buy will be well done and worth reading.

So even though it seems at first glance like indy books and indy bookstores are a great match, from another point of view it's indy books that stand the greatest chance of running indy bookstores out of business. Ohnoes!

What we can learn about writing from...Polanski's The Ghost Writer

2010-04-20T05:00:00.002-04:00

I liked this movie really a lot. I'm afraid of sounding like the NYT reviewer and going all hopelessly giddy over what on the surface is just an inane political thriller just because it's so nice to see something that's made by somebody who knows what they're doing and doesn't cut around so much that it makes you nauseous.

So, what can we take from this film?

1. People actually can mature as artists and get better and more subtle with age.

2. No matter how unremarkable your subject matter, presentation and style can make it fascinating. (The inverse of the Burton situation, come to think of it!)

3. Reinforce the emotional state you're trying to invoke in your audience. If it's suspense, make everything a little unsettling. If it's joy, get sunny little elements going. A lot of tiny, subtle things have a bigger impact than a big obvious thing. If you don't know what emotional state you're trying to evoke with a scene...consider that your audience may not either, and that often leaves them in various states of confusion, disconnection, or most likely, boredom.

4. Know what you're doing. Everything in your story has significance, and if you're just throwing words in there to fill space, that will translate into a story with less impact. Unless, you know, you get the monkeys-throwing-poo-at-the-wall effect and accidentally create something that resonates with the masses *coughTwilightGrishamDavincicodeCOUGH*

It's the second sentence, stupid

2010-04-16T07:30:00.002-04:00

At some point in the evening on my birthday a couple weeks ago, I was curled up on a real live divan in the chicest apartment I am aware of in all of Montreal, talking to some of my favorite people about writing. Because that's how I roll.

I'd had a brainstorm on the metro for a possible first line of a novel. I'd been quite pleased with it, but then I realized it was, of course, totally cliché. To the point where it had several points of intersection with the first line of Twilight. So I'd fiddled with it to remove the similarities, but now I wasn't so sure I liked it.

At this point in my gripping narrative, the owner of the apartment (who is certainly a better writer than I'll ever be) said "Really, though, it's the second sentence that makes it." Or something to that effect.

And I think she was totally right. It's almost always the second sentence that really hooks me. The first sentence will get me interested, and if it's good or intriguing it's like standing on the edge of a cliff. I feel excited, hopeful...full of anticipation to see if the author can follow up. And then I read the second sentence, and if it's blah I feel kind of let down. But if it's good, I smile and sigh happily and settle in. It doesn't have to be brilliant, but the two sentences have to really work together.

A sampling from the most recent books I've been reading -

"The temperature hit ninety degrees the day she arrived. New York was steaming--an angry concrete animal caught unawares in an unseasonable hot spell."

--The Valley of the Dolls, Jacqueline Susann

"I first met Perkus Tooth in an office. Not an office where he worked, though I was confused about this at the time."

--Chronic City, Jonathan Letham

"My company was charming. Opposite me by the massive Renaissance fireplace sat Venus; she was not a casual woman of the half-world, who under this pseudonym wages war against the opposite sex, like Mademoiselle Cleopatra, but the real, true goddess of love."

--Venus in Furs, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

"Elspeth died while Robert was standing in front of a vending machine watching tea shoot into a small plastic cup. Later he would remember walking down the hospital corridor with the cup of horrible tea in his hand, alone under the fluorescent lights, retracing his steps to the room where Elspeth lay surrounded by machines."

--Her Fearful Symmetry, Audrey Niffenegger

"'So you're all set for money, then?' the boy named Crow asks in his typical sluggish voice. The kind of voice like when you've just woken up and your mouth still feels heavy and dull."

--Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami

With the possible exception of Her Fearful Symmetry, all of these sucked me in on the second sentence, not the first. And even in HFS, it's the second sentence that seals the deal. The first sentence of each of these was interesting enough to keep me reading. It's a teaser. But so many people try to cram their hook into the first sentence like it's a hard-and-fast rule. But there you have it - 5 out of 6 of the last books that hooked me had the hook in the second sentence. The exception?

"At that very moment, in the very sort of Park Avenue co-op apartment that so obsessed the Mayor...twelve-foot ceilings...two wings, one for the white Anglo-Saxon Protestants who own the place and one for the help...Sherman McCoy was kneeling in his front hall trying to put a leash on a dachshund."

--The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe

So, how about it? Is this important variation getting lost in the shuffle with the common fixation on "hooking with the first sentence"?

What we can learn about writing from...Burton's Alice In Wonderland

2010-04-13T05:00:00.003-04:00

1. No matter how good your influences and source material are, or how great every element of the concept is, your final product can be a no-fun mess.

2. Even if your final product is a no-fun mess, it can be insanely beautiful and there's a lot of value in that.

3. However, added to the value is a fair touch of tragedy - why use that much beauty to present something so unwatchable?

4. Even great artists can't automatically pull off horrible clichés.

What we can learn about writing from...pop music

2010-04-06T05:00:00.002-04:00

Granted, music and writing are different formats. But really, it's all about inducing some sort of thought and/or emotion in the consumer, and there could well be a lot to learn from listening to the right lyrics.

One thing that comes up right away is that emotions and situations, in song, can be conjured up in just a few words. To take some random sample of what my on-random mp3 player is conjuring up...

"How dare you? How old are you now anyway?"
"Went out walking in the woods the other day, when the world was a carpet laid before me. The buds were bursting and the air smelled sweet and strange - it seems about a hundred years ago."
"I have never cried in anybody's arms the way that I have often cried in yours."
"I'm looking at the sky cuz it's getting me high - forget the hearse cuz I'll never die."

(PS- Don't judge me, you know it's on your iPod too!)

Even without context, lyrics (like poetry) can evoke, entice, make us laugh and cry. We get a sense of voice, and emotional state. We can probably guess the genre even without hearing the tune. Our mind opens up to back story, makes connections to our own life, and fills in the blanks.

Can this be replicated in longer-form writing?

Birthday!

2010-03-30T10:28:00.003-04:00

So, there are still remnants of my cold hanging on - a lot of people I know seem to have this problem right now, so maybe we all caught the same Cold of Endless Doom. But I seem to be in the end stages. Fingers crossed.

Yesterday was my birthday! Hurrah! I took the opportunity to turn off all the TVs and computers and other screen-having implements in my life, and it was so relaxing, you guys. You should try it.

Usually it's pretty nice on my birthday and we take some kind of trip, but this year was rainy gloom and we're being "frugal" because poor Chris is going through his poor-student phase, so sadly no birthday vacation this year. That's okay - I really have been spoiled the last few years - Mont Tremblant, Quebec City, the Eastern Townships, Orford national park...all so awesome. But yeah, yesterday was no day for hiking. I will hike when it's nice. Oh! That's actually a literal "rain check," eh?

But fun things did in fact occur. I got awesome new pants! And a new Wii game! And I finally bought that Mick Jagger movie Performance. I don't even know if I want to watch it, but I've been jonesing after it for so long since seeing it at that crazy psychedelic film festival at the Canadian Centre for Architecture like, 5 years ago, that it was just one of those things that I had to have so I could stop thinking about trying to have it.

And! Speaking of the CCA, I got a membership! So I am going to be there all the time from now on. It's so much more than a museum - there are all these study spaces and reading rooms and whatnot, so it's actually more similar to having a club membership to a place that lets you just be in one of the most gorgeous buildings in Montreal all the time. Now all I need is a laptop so I can do all my work there :)

That is all. I actually have some things to say about writing, so I will do that soon.

Blarg

2010-03-17T22:11:00.002-04:00

OMG, you guys. I'm so sick. And you know what it is? A cold. I thought it was allergies, but the doctor (which I went to! It was free! Canada is so neat) said no, it was just "the common cold."

Problem is, this most common of ailments is actually a complete disaster in my line of work. Sure I can figure out if commas belong and eliminate excess adverbs with a stuffy head, but it's times like this that I realize there's so much more to editing than that. Even with a line edit, there's intuition and holding onto endless amounts of detail and knowing what to fact-check and remembering that a character's bike was blue with white stripes at the beginning of the book and white with blue stripes at the end.

Uggggh. I want to be better. Everything hurts!

Links! Sequels!

2010-03-08T10:29:00.007-05:00

I'm as yet unsure about links posts. Personally, I normally don't read them...they don't tell me anything in themselves, and by their very nature they create the threat of Opening More Tabs, which causes me to stress out. Will the article be worth it? What if it's on a page where there's tons of stuff that I need to look at and I end up having to spend hours getting caught up? Better just not to find out.

However, here are two links. And one of them's a comic. I hereby promise that if I do links posts, there will only be two links and one of them will be a comic.

1. Sequels - The Nathan Bransford report. Because almost everybody is writing a series and leaving important things out of the first book because they're "saving it for the sequels" and no matter how much I tell them the only thing that will accomplish is that the first book won't be as good as it could be and nobody will buy it and they need to just view it as a stand-alone and then think about sequels when and if a publisher actually takes the first book...nobody believes me. They keep insisting that it's got to be a series, and they've got to write it all now and there's no need to resolve plot threads and characterizations because it will all happen "in the next book." But it won't happen, because the first book won't get bought, so the sequel won't get written.

2. Comic. About DRM and how it's the worst thing ever.

Hm...

2010-03-04T22:48:00.003-05:00

Are TV crime shows the reason that so many people are writing so many walking-down-hallways-thinking scenes?

Apostrophes redux

2010-02-09T11:19:00.004-05:00

So, Chris and I were watching the Super Bowl on some channel out of Vermont, and they kept sneaking in these ads for Jay Peak. For the non north-easterners, that's a place where one goes skiing. Not me...my tendency to always brake when going more than 5 mph on any mode of transportation has proved prohibitive for effective skiing. But other people ski there.

The new motto for Jay Peak, it seems, is "Raise 'em Jay." A perfectly good motto (not logo, folks! Motto), but there's one problem, which will be apparent to anyone who read this post and has a look at the motto as it appears in the above screen capture.

The Chicago Manual of Style, as usual, says it best: (CMS 7.31) "Since some word processors automatically change an apostrophe at the beginning of a word to an opening single quotation mark, caution is needed; a code in angle brackets can be added, or it may be possible to fool the system either by typing a letter before the apostrophe and then deleting the letter or by some other means."

So Chicago style officially condones doing ridiculous workarounds because Microsoft is evil.

It's always kind of amazing when companies spend as much as they spend on their publicity, and then don't bother to have somebody with some sort of writing skills look at their copy before they slap it on huge media campaigns. Chris insists that graphic designers aren't English majors and can hardly be expected to know the difference between an apostrophe and a single opening quotation mark...

...which brings us around to the eternal point: Yes, you need an editor. A great big company with snazzy TV ads needs a proofreader for its 2.5-word motto, which means it's highly likely (and no source of shame) that you could use one for your 100,000-word book.

The Avatar school of really basic writing success

2010-02-02T18:57:00.005-05:00

So, I went to see Avatar the other week. Did you? I bet you did! Did we like it? I thought it was pretty shiny...it kept my attention for three hours, which is a pretty handy trick. Made me a little motion-sick for a bit in the beginning though.

The storyline and plotting were extremely simple, which made me think this would be a great illustration of a couple of basic writing points that get made all the time and authors never seem to quite buy into. To whit:

1. "You don't have to overdo the back story. Readers can fill in a lot from just a few hints, and they don't need to know everything."

Authors love writing back story. They love their characters, know them inside and out, and want to tell you every little thing that the main character's best friend's great-aunt went through when she immigrated to America and endured great hardships.

There is, of course, a time and a place for back story. But what Avatar proves is that given the opportunity, audiences will happily truck along with the barest information. Did they tell us how that guy lost his legs, or what he and his brother did as kids, or where any of the minor characters were from, or what was going on back on earth, or how technology had gotten to awesome or the history of the avatar program or...anything? They did not.

They couldn't get around explaining why everyone's on this planet, so they show us that rock in that one tiny scene and tell us it's really, really expensive and it exists on this planet. Not who discovered it, not what it does or why people pay so much for it, just the bare essentials - it's a thing, and it's expensive.

Based on this absolutely scant amount of background, pretty much everybody on Earth was able to watch, understand, and enjoy this movie. And those points they skip over aren't boring, irrelevant ones. Any one of them could be a whole story on its own. Audiences would probably love to know all that stuff, if they had five hundred hours to spend watching the extended version.

Again, this isn't to say that you should oversimplify your work and cut out all the back story. It's just to point out how smart your audience is, and how much they can guess without being explicitly told anything.

2 - "Introduce important stuff early, in context, and be subtle about it."

I think there's a lot of fear, especially with less experienced authors, that readers will miss any point they aren't beaten over the head with. The danger is, of course, that if it's totally obvious that something is going to be relevant later in the book, readers won't get any surprise or pleasure out of the reprisal.

To be fair, Avatar is pretty obvious. It's clear that the big dragon thing will be relevant later, as will the thing where the people get unplugged and their avatars fall down, and the thing where the tree has the power to bring people back to life as their avatars.

But still, everything is introduced plausibly, in context, and as part of a scene and a plotline, which is where I see a lot of struggling occur among authors. If it's really important, make a scene about it. And be creative! Don't just force a scene where some random character happens to be talking about some topic that will be relevant later. Make it really fit, an integral part of the story. Unless, you know, you're writing a satire.

Goodness, I've rambled. I hope some of that is helpful!

Bonus Tiger Woods post

2010-01-25T14:44:00.005-05:00

Because grammar stuff is funny even when I'm supposed to be taking a break, here's an important syntax lesson, brought to you by the Superficial's blog post about Today's interview with the Daily Beast's Gerald Posner regarding anonymous sources speaking about the Tiger Woods Crash. Because if you're not six degrees separated from your celebrity gossip, life isn't really worth living.

So. Tiger and Elin have a fight. Tiger takes some sleeping pills and conks out, because apparently this is a valid way for husbands to end fights now. What happens then? You might well ask!

"While asleep, Elin looked through Woods' cellphone, both sources tell Posner."

Barring the possibility that sleep-snooping is a Nordic model superpower, this sentence fails. I see a surprising number of sentences that make this error in my line of work, and it never fails to confound me. So here's the thing: In a sentence of the form "While [QUALITY], [NAME(SUBJECT)][ACTION]", the subject of the action is also the one with the quality. To give the quality to somebody else, you gotta do "While Tiger was asleep/While Tiger slept, Elin looked..."

I know it's a couple extra words, but one of the times you're allowed to add more words is when the additional words change the sentence from one that doesn't mean what you're trying to say into one that does.

Too much to read!

2010-01-19T13:14:00.003-05:00

I truly love to read. I was one of those kids who loved hiding in corners with books even before I could actually read the words. My parents bought me this little "nook" - a tiny rocking chair with a cat painted on it, with a matching little rug. So I could pretend to be an old lady sitting by the fire with a book, I guess? Anyway, it was great.

Lately, though, I've realized that reading has really insinuated itself into every corner of my life. And like any good addict, I've developed all these tricks and schemes to make myself think I'm not just reading all the time. I wake up and have tea and read something light and happy. Then I get to work, reading and editing. During breaks, I catch up on the million billion blogs on my blogroll. When I've got some spare time, I read review copies for the Self-Publishing Review. And then in the evening, I curl up with a good book.

So, right now I am reading, in approximate order of frequency,

Nancy Drew - The Thirteenth Pearl (for the light morning read)
Her Fearful Symmetry (for evening escapism)
Slaughterhouse Five and Bonfire of the Vanities(out loud with Chris and the rat, who loves to be read to. Ach, grammar. The rat is listening. Chris is reading.)
Nurtureshock (for two separate extremely informal book clubs with Anna-the-future-doctor and Nicky-the-current-mother-of-toddlers)
Persuasion (for when I'm in that Jane Austin mood while eating lunch)
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles (for the second time, but I seem to have stalled at about 90%...I'll get back to it, I swear!)
The Chicago Manual of Style (because I'm always reading the Chicago Manual of Style)
And, of course, this month's developmental editing book, which is so much fun to have developing ideas for!

Because everyone's doing e-book stats this week - Of those nine books, three are hard-copy and six are on the Kindle. None of the Kindle books involved me paying money to Amazon. Though they've made sample chapters available over not-wireless, so I can actually get them now, which makes me happy. But not happy enough to buy anything from them. Keep trying, Amazon.

Anyway, leave me alone now. I have reading to do.

Filtering

2010-01-16T15:14:00.005-05:00

Ignore the fact that I've completely missed Tuesday. Saturday is like Tuesday in many ways.

Something that comes up in nearly every self-published book I edit and review is the overuse of filtering perceptions through a character. So, you want to say that the sky is blue, and instead of saying "The sky was blue that day," you say "Jim noticed that the sky was blue that day."

Check this out when you've got any kind of sensory information coming in - do you need to say that John saw the deer cross the street, or Andy smelled the salty sea air? Sometimes this is nice, but very, very often it's just adding both extra words and an extra layer of separation for the reader between themselves and the observations in question. Compare...

John descended into the cellar, his body trembling with fear. A gust of moldy air blew past him as he opened the door, and something creaked in the darkness.

with

John noticed that his body was trembling with fear as he descended into the cellar. As he opened the door, he felt a gust of moldy air blow past him, and heard something creak in the darkness.

At best, it just doesn't add anything but extra words. At worst, it's awful - it reminds the reader at every step that this is happening to John and they aren't there. You know how with the best books you always say "I was just sucked into the world the author created, and I could feel everything like it was happening to me" ? Filtering is a great way to make sure your readers don't have that experience.

A quick fix: Do a search for "notice/note." If you're feeling ambitious, also search for variants of the other sensory words - feel, smell, hear, see, taste. But "notice" will catch the most obvious ones.

Hm...

2010-01-09T13:21:00.003-05:00

It appears that I've been procrastinating making a blog post for going on a month now. I had a feeling it had been a while!

Alright, hiatus over. Starting next week, I'm going to go for a once-a-week posting schedule. Every...Tuesday. Does that sound good? I think that sounds good.

See you Tuesday!

ground vs ground

2009-12-13T22:44:00.004-05:00

Because it's nice to be positive sometimes, behold this craigslist post:

ANTIQUE SNUFF BOX - $120 (Westmount)

Lovely little treasure.
Snuff is ground tobacco.

I stared at this for a little bit, thinking about some kind of narcotic truffles, before my brain sorted itself out.

It's really quite the all-purpose word though, eh? "I had grounds to search the parade grounds for coffee grounds that were ground into the ground." Nice.

Microsoft is annoying me

2009-12-08T16:00:00.003-05:00

I'm working on Word 2007. I've been working on Word 2007 for ages, but all of a sudden it seems to be doing weird things. In addition to the weird things I'm accustomed to it doing, like turning my apostrophes into open-quotes and trying to persuade me to turn all my thats into whiches.

Namely, it's auto-capitalizing my i's even when they're part of a word I haven't yet finished typing. I'm just typing away at a normal speed, and my instead reads as Instead before I've actually gotten to the end of the word. I know I can just turn off that auto-correct feature, but it's the weirdness of it suddenly starting this strange behavior that's kind of freaking me out.

Secondly, it just auto-corrected a your to you're. Which was wrong. For no reason. I'd been noticing weird homonym things when I re-read my edits for a project recently, and thought that I was just typing too fast or something and making embarrassing mistakes. But now I have to be paranoid that my own word-processor is trying to get me in trouble. I think it's time to suck it up and turn the auto-correct off entirely...I'll just have to capitalize the first words of sentences all by myself. Sigh. My lazy pinkies will not be happy.

First sentences, part one

2009-11-30T22:29:00.003-05:00

First off, I found a great example on Authonomy of what I was talking about in this post on telling readers that business is proceeding as usual. First sentence of the book - "Joe Schmo found himself, as always in the downtown area of City, State." It's actually a good example of the over/underusing commas thing too. But yeah, thought that was cute. I can write one too - "As the character began her existence at the beginning of the book, she discovered that she had been placed by the author in the town that she was now aware that she lived in." I'm sure Chris can write a better one, but you get the drift.

Secondly, I was paging through my book review notes, and discovered an old favorite that I've never mentioned here. The novel begins with a sentence something like this - "The last thing Vampy McVampire expected when he walked home from school that day was to be attacked by a werewolf." That's hokey enough in itself (and please don't start your book with a sentence about the last thing your character expected), but what's worse, within the next one page, the author proceeds to establish that his character is a vampire, walking home alone late at night, outside of his school, where over the past several days a large number of werewolf attacks on vampires have occurred. Soooooo....probably not the smartest bat in the cave if the last thing he's expecting is an attack which is clearly extremely likely.

As it turned out, the book was pretty iffy all the way through so it didn't really matter if the author lost the reader's trust right away or five pages later. But if you've written a book with integrity and continuity, and then you blow the reader's trust with a first line designed for impact but without care for how it meshes with the rest of the book...that's a bad thing. Once you lose your reader and they're not sure if they can believe you, it's nigh impossible to win them back. And it's no fun to read a book when you're not sure the author took care to ensure he actually means what he says.

Commas

2009-11-30T11:14:00.002-05:00

Happy post-Thanksgiving to the Americans...and to me, because I have great Canadian in-laws who use me as an excuse to sneak in a second Thanksgiving :)

Today's post is more of an FYI than a how-to article, because commas are a much bigger topic than I'm prepared to handle right now.

In short, though - you may be using too many commas. Or not enough. For most practical purposes, you don't have to actually stress over every comma, you just have to avoid excess. If you're adding commas because you seem to remember your English teacher telling you to use commas in a certain context, you're probably using way too many. If you're cutting them when you think you need them because you read something about comma overuse and are trying not to use any, you're probably using way too few.

If commas really stress you out, it's worth picking up a style guide and reading up on them rather than blindly trying to strike out and add/smite at every opportunity.

Kindle in Canada update

2009-11-19T10:59:00.006-05:00

So! Exactly eight months after I had to go through all that rigamarole to get my hands on a Kindle 2, Amazon has finally rolled it out in Canada! I'm not even a little sorry I didn't wait - the amount of reading, working, and playing I've done on Bookie McClicks since its arrival has been well worth the extra shipping charges.

Now - how about that wireless? I know maybe it's a little soon, but I can say for certain that I can't get wireless connectivity from where I am currently sitting. I'd check the rest of the apartment, but the guinea pig is asleep in my lap and I don't want to wake her up and make her cross.

But let's say for the sake of argument that I still can't get a connection. Why? I want to start getting sample chapters without having to drive to New York!

EDIT: The coverage map on Amazon shows Montreal as being well covered by 3G connectivity. The "information for international customers" details on Amazon, however, uses the phrasing "Customers in Canada will enjoy..." which would seem to imply that they'll hook us up in their own sweet time. Being treated like they're doing me a favor by letting me buy stuff from them is by far my favorite part of the Amazon experience. And by favorite I mean somebody needs to flog Jeff Bezos. Now.

UPDATE: So Amazon's response to my inquiry is basically "hah, sorry - you're shit outta luck. Your model won't get wireless in Canada." So, basically, everybody who bought the Kindle 2 prior to now got a worse model for a higher price, which means they've made the resale value of all these US wireless models $0 because...who would buy them when you can get a better thing for the same price? No trade-in is mentioned. So all these businesspeople who bought Kindles to use internationally must be as irritated as I am. Stay tuned...

Writing your own back cover copy

2009-11-17T21:11:00.005-05:00

The fact that authors have to write their own blurbs and cover copy when they self publish is a very awkward thing. For the authors, I imagine it's akin to torture. Poor authors - you've written the book, you've gotten it all fixed up, you've said what you wanted to say in 70,000 words, and now you have to say it all again in 50.

The results usually aren't too bad...back-cover copy is pretty formulaic, and you can't go too far wrong just typing in the copy from a published book in your genre, and replacing the key words.

The key thing is that you're trying to sell your book, right? So you say things that you think will make people want to buy it. That's good thinking, but sometimes I wonder if the authors have actually read their own books, the cover-copy is so far off the mark. Comparisons are made to books without the faintest resemblance either in plot or voice to the book in question. Allusions to authors, styles, and literature movements that the author hasn't been exposed to since 11th grade Lit class 30 years ago are demurely smuggled in. Characters are identified as the main character who aren't the main character. Really.

I understand the need to talk up your book, but really* - don't compare yourself to Crime and Punishment if the only similarity is that a crime occurs in your book and the perpetrator suffers because of it. It's like comparing your book to the Bible because it has God in it. And don't say your book draws from the surrealist movement just because you threw in a couple of vaguely weird bits that nobody would have noticed if you hadn't made a character say "Wow, this is so weird, I feel like my watch ought to start melting soon."

Moral: Back cover copy should both sell and remotely resemble the book you have written. It's bloody hard, but I promise it can be done.

*titles and genres have been changed to protect the innocent

Overwhelming numbers of thoughts

2009-11-11T17:01:00.003-05:00

Something I really get pleasure out of weeding out of manuscripts are these expressions like "thoughts flooded/pounded/stampeded through my mind." There are times and places for these expressions, but on the whole I find they get used way more often in writing than they do in life. In a bad way.

And also in a different way - when a real person really says "my mind was flooded with thoughts," (if that ever actually happens) there's often an implication that this person is overwhelmed - there's so much going on that he can't think clearly. In writing, though, this implication usually isn't there - it's more just a literal "I was standing there having lots of thoughts" kind of situation.

Primarily, though, the expression seems like a lazy attempt to evoke an emotional response in the reader. Like describing heartbeats speeding up and hands shaking and whatnot. It usually doesn't add anything, and it sounds silly. So go ahead - find a better way to say it :)

Thanking one's editor

2009-11-03T11:45:00.003-05:00

I think it's an occupational hazard of being an editor - my job is creating more work for writers who were really hoping they were done with their manuscripts.

Some authors really enjoy editing, and many actually gush at me over how happy they are that they won't be sending their work into the world with huge gaping plot holes and ellipses where there ought to be dashes.

But many others seem to fall into a catatonic "holy shit look at all this work I have to do" mode when they see their corrections, and the anxiety causes them to forget to thank their editor. Especially on the various writer's websites I participate in, I see this happens a lot.

In one group the other day, a woman posted a query letter that was basically a disaster. I gave her some great feedback, several paragraphs of information and some links to groups she should be checking out. Her response? "How about this: [New query letter pasted in]." So...her response was "no thank you, but can you do it again?" Um, yeah. No.

Anyway, it's fine. I see where the authors are coming from - they're getting hit with all this stuff and it's hard to feel grateful - like if you meet a plumber on the street and he's super nice and comes over for coffee and spends half an hour checking out your plumbing for free, and then tells you you've got a bunch of problems and are going to have to get $5000 of repairs or your house is going to melt. By all rights you should be thanking him for donating his spare time and saving you from not realizing there was a problem until your house collapses, but in the moment all you're thinking is "oh no, what am I going to do?"

I love metaphors. Thank your editor. Thank you.

As usual

2009-11-02T10:01:00.003-05:00

Starting a new project today - yippee! And it's a good one, too.

This week's helpful writing tip concerns this propensity writers seem to have for noting that things are happening the same way they always do.

So, like, "Just as she did every morning, Penny the Guinea Pig squeaked for her breakfast."

or, "I served Penny her favorite yummy grass in her usual dish."

or, "I knew as I woke up that Penny would be running circles in her cage yet again."

This is more common near the beginning of books, as authors try to establish routine before they mix things up. But honestly, it's not necessary.

"But Erin," you gasp breathlessly. "Your examples are all so clunky!"

Well, yes. And that's the thing with these kinds of sentences. They're pretty much always clunky. Like, when is it necessary to state that something's routine? I find it's used most often with really obviously routine things. Like, if a character is walking the dog, and the dog gets muddy feet, and the character thinks about what her mom will say when they go in the house. This is exactly the kind of situation that the "as usual" pops up in, presumably because the author feels like there's this question "where does the character get the idea that the mother will say this?" So they clarify - it's because this is what the mother always says. To which the reader says "Well, duh."

Unless something really weird is going on, readers will assume that what a character's doing at the beginning of a book is par for the course. Telling them that Cindy is making her usual cold cereal breakfast with her usual latte wearing her usual ratty sleeping sweats is insulting, and unnecessary. If any of those things weren't usual, we wouldn't even care. I promise.

Really super cliché list for story openers

2009-10-25T16:49:00.005-04:00

Nathan Bransford, California literary agent and king of the publishing bloggers, just ran a contest. In this contest, something like a million billion authors sent in first paragraphs of books, and Nathan picked the best one. I'm not so much interested in the best one per se, but about halfway down the results post, he breaks down the most common features of his very large sample group. This list is very interesting, and also very representative of what I've been seeing in my review books. People just really, really want to start their books these ways. So if you've started your book with one of these things, just be aware that others have had the same idea. Lots of others.

(I'm not sure what the protocol is for yoinking this kind of thing...but Nathan I heart you please don't sue me I'll take it down if it was wrong.)

The following is somewhat abbreviated from the original post.

-setting/rising suns and characters bathed in red colors, as well as moons and characters bathed in twilight.
- Girls looking in mirrors/brushing their hair/looking in mirrors while brushing their hair
- Corpses and blood
- Second person.
- A person who is dying but feels all detached from the experience. Sort of like: "I am dying, but I feel nothing but a bemused disinterest about it. Isn't it curious that I'm dying? I suppose I should be scared right now. This is peculiar indeed."
- Waking up
- Gripping the steering wheel tightly
- Contemplating the depth of an important moment, especially: "If only this one thing hadn't happened, then everything would have been different." "It was just like any other day, only then this one thing happened." "This was the precise moment when everything changed."
- The pull the chair out from under the reader several times paragraph, like this: "Statement. Well, it wasn't that per se, it was somewhat like this. Or should I say rather more like this. Still, it was indeed kind of like that original statement. Only kind of not really."
- Common phrases: "consumed with fear," "last thing I/he/she wanted/expected, "washed over me/him/her, "top of my/his/her lungs," "farthest thing from my/his/her mind," "(blank) - literally," "they/my mom/my grandmother say(s) that (aphorism)."

On the subject of dual-screen ebooks

2009-10-21T11:05:00.003-04:00

There are seriously a lot of new ebook options coming out for Christmas. They've got wireless, they've got lending library capabilities, they've got touch screens and cute leather covers and color screens. You can even get a bendy one!

Personally, I want my eventual Perfect E-Reader to have all of these things. Except maybe the bendy bit...that's silly. But one thing that a lot of developers seem to be toying with is this dual-screen idea. Because it's more like a real book, y'know? With two facing pages?

So one of these has finally come out. The Entourage Edge. It is really very cute, and holy wow does it have a fun website. I mean, it's not the Mini Cooper website, but it's good times.

The cool thing about the Entourage reader is that it's got one side that's color/touch, and then the other side is the e-paper screen. So they solve the problem the Sony Reader's been struggling with of how to combine these types of screens without losing the best aspects of both.

But I am dubious-verging-on-absolutely-displeased about e-readers shaped like books. The two-page thing is actually my least favorite thing about books, and the thing I've been happiest to change since I've gotten my Kindle. I've always found the page on the right is perfect. It lays flat, you can curl the other page around to form a handle, it's just great. But the left page is curly and hard to hold and you're limited in how you can sit to hold it open and read. I realize this sounds really pathetic..."woe is me, holding open a book is so hard!"...but really, it bothers me. It's always bothered me. And it makes my arms hurt.

So count me in the one-screen camp. I don't need it to look like a book as long as I can read off of it!

Tongues, cheeks, clichés

2009-10-20T22:25:00.007-04:00

You know what I really hate? Damn, I hate it so much I don't even want to type it, because that means I'll have to see it for the rest of the time that this window is open. But I'm strong.

It's this expression "tongue planted firmly in cheek." This is, I can only assume, meant to be a cute original way to avoid using fellow cliché "tongue in cheek." Okay, but guess what. It's not cute, and it's not original. It's ugly, it's stupid, it's so overused that it has pretty much overrun the original phrase, and it HURTS MY SOUL! It's like "why use three perfectly good words with a designated meaning when we could use five idiotic cutesy-poo words to say the same thing but make Erin cry?"

I hate you, blog and magazine writers who say this. Hate.

Traditional- and Self-Publishing Aren't Mutually Exclusive

2009-10-10T16:09:00.003-04:00

The internets tell me that there seem to be two violently opposed camps in the publishing world - those who say that traditional publishing is where the money is and self-publishers are deluded idiots, and those who say that traditional publishing is dying a horrible death as we speak and self-publishing is the shining future.

As usual, I firmly oppose extremes, and get all anxious-like just thinking about them.

First of all, in what other art form are commercial and indy work mutually exclusive? Does anyone say that bands that record their own cds and play shows out of their lofts shouldn't make the effort? Where would painting or fashion or film be if there weren't people out there experimenting in their own studios? In all of those fields, a lot of the indy stuff is crap by people who don't know what they're doing. But a lot of it is wonderful, much better than comparable pieces put out by Chanel or Hollywood or whoever. Some people hate the "sold-out" big names and only go with the indy stuff, and some people don't want to go to the effort to find the indy stuff so they just go see blockbusters and look at commissioned art in magazines. And that, my friends, is what makes the world interesting.

Really the only sensible position, and the one I think most people actually take, is to like what you like and not give a damn who put it out.

That's my first reason. There are more. Can you think of them?

It's easier to write when you know what you're writing about

2009-10-08T17:32:00.002-04:00

If you feel like you're getting really bogged down in a section of something you're writing, it might be wise to consider whether what you're trying to write is clear to you.

Poorly written sections often correspond with sections where the storyline doesn't quite work, or the section doesn't really tie in well with the plot, or the author seems to just be riffing on some idea that doesn't deserve so much space.

The flip side of that is totally-unrelated sections that are way, way better written than the rest of the book, because they're about something the author is passionate about. (Oh man, if I was English-teacher-style forcing that sentence not to end in a preposition, it would have been really bad!) Like, where the book's historical fiction, and it's kind of plodding, but all of a sudden there's this large, eloquent narrative interlude about the comparative merits of knitting over crocheting. You know? Where you can just tell that this is what the author is really into.

Oversimplified Moral: Love what you're writing, and make sure it makes sense.

Peek vs. Peak

2009-10-02T22:28:00.002-04:00

This from the Montreal Gazette review of Coco avant Chanel (I know you had nothing to do with this Hayley!)... one can only blush to think of the implications.

The funniest bit about it is...well, there're two funny bits. One is that this quote is used, confused homonym and all, in large type, on the ad for this movie that appears in the paper. The second is that this quote is used, despite the fact that this is a two-star review, and the reviewer did actually mean "this is the only reason you could possibly want to see this movie."

Twilight

2009-09-28T19:35:00.002-04:00

Okay. You know what? I liked it.

I'd already tried once and aborted before the end of the first chapter. But I will not be defeated so easily. So this time when I started, I said to Chris "Okay. Make me sit here and read the first three chapters. If I can get through those, I'll be hooked, and I'll read the whole thing in one sitting, and it will be awesome." And that's pretty much exactly what happened, except that it took two days instead of one because an evening at the arcade beckoned.

And despite [insert all the things that are horribly wrong here...trust me, I noticed them. I'm an editor], I had a totally great time reading this. I would not know what to say to a male human who liked it, since virtually everything good about it fell into the "adolescent female fantasy" category. And that bit was done flawlessly. I ooohed and aaahed and squeaked and squealed and very near burst into tears a couple times... so essentially, "I laughed, I cried, it was better than Cats!"

Honestly, I think if it were better written, Twilight wouldn't be as good. Right now it's totally over the top and ridiculously serious, and this combination of characteristics is exactly equivalent to the mindset of its intended audience. Which is awesome, and clearly effective at causing massive amounts of money to be flung in the direction of the author.

So...that's it. I'm not going to front that I'm too good for this...I have my literary cred, I can soak the damage to my reputation of liking a few over-adjectified bestsellers. Plus I just read Dorkismo: The Macho of the Dork, and it told me I can like anything I want. Hah.

Characters have to do Things, part 1

2009-09-22T18:20:00.005-04:00

Okay, we have a problem.

I'm reading my review book, minding my own business, when suddenly it occurs to me - has the main character been truly active at all yet? I'm halfway through a 400-page book, and seriously this boy has been sick, captured, or both pretty much nonstop. He's a strapping young lad, handsome, hot with magic, good with the ladies...you'd think with that kind of setup he'd at least be on his feet occasionally. And he is from time to time, but really his non-sick/non-captured moments are the exceptions, falling between long bouts of swooning and puking and being in trances and comas.

Even when he is healthy, he's largely passive - he's learning things, or being told stories, or being introduced to new cultures. All of which is great, and on the whole I'm really enjoying the book, but it's just so frustrating when you want your main character to be, I don't know, smiting things, and instead he's always passed out in the back of the car.

This is part of a larger problem I've noticed among authors who are writing out of love for their characters rather than out of the hopes of entertaining their audience. It's great if you love your characters, but this isn't fan fiction (I hope) - this isn't like "oh, we all know how great Legolas is, and wouldn't it be great to read a story where he's always in distress and Aragorn has to sweep him up on his horse and protect him and carry him to safety and nurse him back to health and..." ahem. I'll stop there.

But yeah - that would be awesome, but your novel is not Legolas Aragorn Slash-Fic. It is a novel. We, the readers, need to meet your character and learn what's so great about him...and we can't do that if your character is always passed out. I'm sorry.

******EDIT******

This issue really seems to have been floating around in the cosmos this week - there are a couple other great blog posts on the same topic here and here.

2009-09-20T10:38:00.002-04:00

The Times has an article today where a longtime publishing professional muses about the atmosphere in publishing houses from the '60s to the present. With the upshot being, of course, that everything is currently much more efficient, much more competitive, and much less fun and romantic.

It's kind of sad, but it helps answer that question I always get about why I'd rather freelance than work in a publishing house. This is why - I'd have loved to work in a '60s publishing house. Now, it's too much like working in any other office.

Da Vinci Code

2009-09-16T15:30:00.003-04:00

Speaking of books that came out yesterday, apparently there's some more Dan Brown in the world now. Why the world needs more of his writing...well...the world knows more about these things than I do.

Conveniently, I just read the Da Vinci Code last week. Totally by chance, in fact. I am clearly in tune with the universe. I'm going to give it some extra points off the top because I'd already seen the movie so I can't say what it must have been like to read it when the element of surprise still existed. Maybe it was better?

And...I don't get it. Why is this so popular? It's not tremendously interesting or exciting, it's got lots of history and no sex, and the writing is very, very middling. I mean, it's not that bad. I'm not going to dump on it--it's competent, it puts words in orders that communicate things. Which, as an editor, I can promise you is harder for most people than it sounds.

It is total crap with adjectives, definitely. How do you "wake up slowly"? How do you take a "long sip"? What does it look like when somebody is walking with "a haunting certainty to her gait"?

It also leans heavily on one of my favorite pet peeves - informing the audience that something is interesting by having a character directly tell them so by word or action. To whit:

"With an unexpected jolt, Langdon stopped short."

'And not just any person,' Teabing blurted, clambering excitedly to his feet.

And my personal favorite, all of the following are from one conversation. One.

"Sophie felt a little chill...Sophie was surprised....Sophie glanced at the art book before her, eager to move on....Uncertain, Sophie closed her eyes...Sophie glanced up, looking surprised...Sophie shook her head...Sophie looked overwhelmed...Sophie felt as if the entire night had turned into some kind of twilight zone where nothing was as she expected...Sophie was sure she had missed something...Sophie turned to Langdon to help...Sophie was mesmerized...Sophie was amazed...Again, Sophie was speechless...Sophie was starting to feel overwhelmed...Sophie was surprised...The words seemed to echo across the ballroom and back before they fully registered in Sophie's mind...Sophie stood transfixed...Sophie felt the hairs stand up on her arms..."

Soooo, yeah. Mostly readable, kind of fun, a good way to feel highbrow and still read trashy writing. I guess. I'm sure there must be better ways.

Syncronicity

2009-09-15T17:26:00.004-04:00

Just thought it was funny that this book Shoplifting from American Apparel came out today. Because I live half a block from an American Apparel (don't we all, eh?), and yesterday as I got off the bus on that corner, a couple really heavily tattooed hipster boys were leaving the store, and we both turned the same way so I ended up walking behind them. I was just noticing that one of them had kind of a big butt for such a skinny guy when he stuck his hand down his pants and pulled like three T-shirts out of his ass. It took me at least half a minute to register that he had stolen them - my first thought was honestly "Huh. That guy carries around extra t-shirts in his pants. Do people do that now? To make their butts look bigger?" Logic:1, Erin's Logic:0.

Books about authors, Part 2

2009-09-11T18:38:00.006-04:00

I mentioned this back in the Girl with The Dragon Tattoo post, and promised to follow up on it, so here goes.

I've been seeing a lot of both high-flying and unpublished authors presenting the following sub-plotline:

Character A is an author. He's writing a book. Maybe struggling with it, worrying if anyone will read it, having some writer's block. Definitely passionate about the subject though. Lalalaplotstuffplotstuff. Suddenly, something happens in the plot! And Mr. A's book is suddenly an internationally relevant topic of overwhelming public interest! People are storming the bookstores! Chasing him down for interviews! Women are flinging themselves at him in the street! OMG!

Alternately, Character A is already an internationally reknowned author, and gets piles of respect and opened doors everywhere he goes, thus facilitating his quest. (P.S.- I'm talking about you, Da Vinci Code. You don't fool me.)

You don't have to be a psychologist to see what's going on here. This is the author's greatest (sub)conscious dream playing out. The fantasy that he's playing out for himself every day as he writes, and every night before bed. And really, that's great! I'm glad we're thinking positive thoughts here. But I do find it amusing that these positive-visioning exercises are making it into so many books. Maybe I'm the only one who reads these and says "Ah. Authorial wet dream. Sigh." Or maybe I'm not. In any case, I'm putting it on my cliché list.

Freakin' freakin'

2009-09-10T12:59:00.003-04:00

I have to know. Do any teenagers actually say "freakin'"? I see this word invariably when adults are trying to write teenage parts in their books, but I never said this myself or knew anyone who did. Maybe occasionally in jest, when imitating a parent or something, but never seriously. Which causes me to wonder - where did adult writers get the idea that the inclusion of this word will cause a character to resonate with teen readers?

Survey : Meta-literature

2009-09-08T17:45:00.003-04:00

What are your thoughts on fiction about authors and writing? Books where a major character is a writer trying to make art and having a hard time of it?

I tend to be skeptical...I mean, I love it conceptually, but in practice I'm almost always disappointed. You're encouraged to write what you know, of course, and what a lot of what many first-time authors know is, well, an author sitting at the computer failing to write a book. Most of the time I find this feels cheap, and even when I really like the author's style, I wish they were writing about something else.

I've seen films and read books that are like this, and have liked them very much. Swimming Pool, for instance, and my favorite book of all time, Hopscotch. Both use the struggling-author thing as a springboard for greater achievements, though, not just as an examination of the author's own psyche. Do we care that much about a random unknown author's psyche that we want to read a whole book about it? Not often, eh.

I guess my feelings on this are best summed up by that rhyme..."When it is good, it is very very good, but when it is bad it is horrid."

Your thoughts?

The Girl who Played with Fire

2009-09-01T09:30:00.004-04:00

This one doesn't even get a cover picture. Will I read the third book in the series? Yes, I will, if only because the second book in almost every trilogy is a boring disaster. I don't even know what was going on with this book. The NYT seemed to like it alright, but I'm going to have to diverge with them once again in matters of art...this was a horrible, plodding mess. A huge percentage of it is dedicated to Lisbeth buying a condo, furnishing it at Ikea, and going grocery shopping. Hurrah, right? When she was tattooing "I am a sadistic pig" onto the stomach of a man who really deserved it in the last book, I was totally saying to myself "Self? Don't you really want to know whether she'd go with the Aspelund or the Malm for her guest room?"

Actually, the best part about this book was that a couple characters had names that I only know from Ikea furniture.

When I finally realized what the main plot was, I couldn't believe it. I'd really hoped all that was just a subplot, and kept waiting for something more interesting to kick in, but about 90 percent of the way through I finally gave up and accepted that the bad guys were that two-dimensional. Gah.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

2009-08-27T12:37:00.010-04:00

This book was really quite good. I agree almost exactly with the NYT review of it, which is a bit scary because that never happens...maybe writing my own reviews (I've got a new one up, by the way) has made me more attentive. It has its flaws, but one can only assume that the editorial process was somewhat stunted by it being a) a translation, and b) released after the death of its author.

However. This is a best-seller. The waiting list for the sequel at the library is prohibitive. People love it, they buy it, they fling money in its direction. And it's not trash, either. So I'd like to use it as a bit of an example of that thing I always say about how all the writing "rules" should come with the caveat "unless it works, and/or you do it really, really well."

This best-seller is guilty of breaking all of the following rules that authors in writing groups spend countless hours warning each other about:

Not starting the story right away. The main plot doesn't present itself until 15% of the way into the book, and even then there is a fairly large plot detour before it gets fully underway.
Not finishing the story quickly after the climax.
Taking place in a foreign country, where people have foreign names and worry about foreign issues. Can an American audience identify with characters named Holger and Dirch? Do they care about social problems and corruption in Sweden?
Being too long. This book is pretty long. I'm not sure how long, but definitely pretty long. Publishers don't like long books right now because of the cost of paper, you know.
Having a major part of the intrigue be related to coded Bible verses.
Having long passages of not immediately relevant history and back-story.
Using multiple perspectives. It's all third person, but several different characters' points of view are utilized.
Being about a writer, and then presenting a situation where the writer becomes famous and adored. I've actually got a whole post somewhere in the back of my mind about how funny it is that writers always become the most obviously passionate about their subject when they're able to work in their latent impossible dreams of total success, but for now, suffice to say that this is horribly cliché.

All this, and I still sped through it and immediately started on the sequel, as did many others from the looks of it. This is not an excuse to break the rules, and I'm not saying it couldn't have been much improved by hammering out these issues, but the story and writing were good enough to carry it through despite any objectionable elements. Food for thought.

***

PS - Amusingly, awesome group blog The Book Book just had a post on this as well. It's somewhat more useful than mine for things like, er, plot. Read it here!

Tales of Chinatown (1922)

2009-08-23T15:44:00.004-04:00

Some things I love: short stories of the mysterious persuasion, literature from before political correctness was invented, fiction that takes place in really dirty parts of London when telephones and cars were unusual possessions.

Tales of Chinatown comes from midway through the career of the prolific Sax Rohmer, who specialized in writing about the "Yellow Peril" of the Chinese neighborhoods in London, and who died most ironically of the Asian Flu in 1959.

Many of the stories read like an unambitious contemporary knockoff of Sherlock Holmes, though with a somewhat more active role for the Watson character, Knox. Others, though, are just completely weird little supernatural vignettes that are much more Poe than Doyle. A theme of cultural identity runs through all the stories, with mixed-race characters struggling to keep the better part of their souls afloat in the face of much darker undercurrents that threaten to pull them into the dangerous criminal underworld.

Like I say, nothing that you could get away with nowadays without being run out of town with flaming pitchforks, and maybe rightly so. But still, a very interesting and revealing foray into a dark little corner of history.

Choke (2001)

2009-08-21T12:40:00.005-04:00

I somehow made it all the way through Choke without realizing it's by Fight Club guy. I have possessed this knowledge in the past, but for some reason it just didn't click, despite the really obvious similarities. The plus side of this was that I was actually able to judge this book on its own. The minus side is that when you judge this book on its own, it's pretty unpleasant. Well-written, certainly, but really very icky.

Pacing's great, voice is great, style is great. Twist isn't nearly as good as Fight Club but I feel like I probably missed some details while I was skimming through the icky bits. It feels derivative certainly - the gross-out anatomy stuff, the support groups, the weird sex, the weirder jobs, the insane people. But hey, if you do something well, why not revisit it? All the great authors do. But I don't know. Anyone read both?

I feel like I like this one more in retrospect than I did at the time...It's not you, Choke, it's me. You did great.

Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1976)

2009-08-18T17:03:00.005-04:00

I think the heat is probably making me cranky, so perhaps I was less patient with this book than I should have been. But I'm wary of just writing my dislike off to the fact that I am So Sweaty, because I clearly remember reading Jitterbug Perfume, and it was the same thing. In the case of JP, I giggled myself into a frenzy for about the first two thirds of the book, then suddenly realized I was tremendously bored, put it down, and never finished. I never do that, I'm a consummate book-finisher, so this stuck in my mind.

I did finish Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, but it was with a fair bit of grumbling and swearing. For about the first half it was pretty good, there were giggles to be had and intriguing images to be lost in. But then, splat. Two hundred pages of alternating mediocre erotica and mediocre philosophy, all wrapped in overdone self-conscious word games. And the history of whooping cranes in America. By the time the story kicked back in near the end, I was totally disenamored of both the characters and the plot, and found no satisfaction in a resolution that I probably would have quite enjoyed if it had happened a hundred and fifty pages sooner.

Next up, this "Chuck Palahniuk" character. He better watch out though, because until the thunderstorms start I am not on speaking terms with writing that doesn't make me forget I'm in the guldurned sauna here.

American Gods (2001)

2009-08-17T15:44:00.007-04:00

It's approximately four hundred degrees and humid in Montreal right now. And of course, nothing in Montreal is air-conditioned, because it's winter all year. The only real reason I even own fans is to dry my laundry faster. But this week is that random week that happens every year where it's too hot to do anything but sit with your feet in a tub full of cold water until your toes all prune.

Fortunately I don't have to work this week, since my office is the hottest room in the apartment. Just being in it right now to write this post is a feat of extreme heroism.

I'd actually already planned to use this week to do some serious reading. There's just so much I haven't read, and so much of it sounds so good. I'd assumed I'd read all the classics since my parents were such lit snobs and I plowed through their walls of bookshelves several times as a young'n. But it turns out that there's a lot of brilliant stuff out there that doesn't fall into the categories of "Renaissance humanism," "Feminist self-empowerment treatise," and "German existentialism," if you can believe it. And a lot of it is a hell of a lot more fun to read.

So yesterday I read American Gods by Neil Gaiman. I'd never read anything of his before (duck and cover to avoid the withering stares of the fan base), but damn. I think I'm in love with the Americana branch of magical realism. I'm going to just go ahead and call that my favorite pleasure-reading genre until further notice.

AG in large part takes place in Wisconsin, with local landmarks, expressions like "yoopie" (person from the upper peninsula (UP) of Michigan that sits on top of northern Wisconsin) and bathroom doors labeled "pointers" and "setters" all giving it that delicious midwestern feel. It's also, of course, bizarre and supremely clever and just dirty enough, but I'm sure there are others out there who can much more eloquently detail its value as an important piece of modern literature.

It also (and I've definitely broken a sweat so this is my last point) breaks a lot of The Rules. It uses the "like we're living in a novel" bit not once but several times. It veers into long descriptive passages about towns and roads and landmarks to set the scene. It doesn't delve very deeply into the personalities of any of its elaborate cast of characters. Okay, most of them are gods, but there are a couple humans in there, and hardly any of them have more than one or two distinguishing traits. And its central conflict is a battle between Good and Evil. Cliche? I think so.

And do any of these things detract from the book? Not a whit. This is what I'm always talking about - the rules are there to inform you of things that a lot of writers do badly. But they can be done well, and if they are, your book can be a cult hit and bestseller even if it includes a full chapter describing the House on the Rock. Thank you, Neil Gaiman, for raising the bar.

Site changes and editing update

2009-08-12T12:29:00.003-04:00

I am very pleased to announce that I now have a proper website for my editorial work at kallisti.ca. This is doubly delightful because, as a new Canadian permanent resident, I'm allowed to have a .ca domain, which I think is very neat.

The site was designed and built by Christopher Kahn, to whom I am eternally grateful. I think he did a marvelous job--I wanted the site to be simple and helpful, and I think that's just what it is. What you don't get to see is the amazing project database he also made for me, which is like magic. It leaves me free to assault misused hyphens and dangling modifiers instead of trying to strong-arm my math skills into properly organizing deposit invoices. Brilliant.

Just in time for the site launch, I got a lovely shout-out on the Self-Publishing Review for my work on Henry Baum's upcoming novel The American Book of the Dead, which I had the pleasure to edit last month. It's been really gratifying to hear some kind words from my authors even after they've spent weeks reorganizing subplots and rewriting their least-favorite scenes because of me! I've heard some horror stories of authors feeling very abused and browbeaten by freelance editors, and I really hope that I can make the experience a little more pleasant for the authors I work with.

Just finished off a YA project, and I'm taking the rest of the week off to finish up all the paperwork I need to do for my residency, all the chores I've fallen behind on...you know. Everything. I'm really looking forward to my next project--it's a delightful novel by an Authonomy author that's already in great shape, and I can tell we're really going to be able to make it shine. That'll probably be my last project for this month, and then I'm accepting submissions for the fall.

Kindle sample chapter reviews

2009-08-04T00:30:00.004-04:00

I was lucky enough to take a little vacation in the States last weekend, and of course I brought the Kindle along to witness the glory that is the Full Kindle Wi-Fi experience. And, well...wow. I mean, I adore my Kindle, Wi-Fi or no, and I already have more to read on it than I'm going to be able to manage in half a year at least, but all of that is just base logic...the truth of it is, I fell in love. You can order books. All the books. From. Your. Bed. Or from the car mid-roadtrip. And then, because I get motion sick and can't read in the car, you can have it read your new acquisitions to you. I took out a sample subscription to the New York Times, because we were in New York, and it downloaded to my Kindle each morning as I had my tea in the hotel cafeteria.

Oh! And we saw an ad for it in the subway. That was neat.

Okay, so I won't front - the wi-fi is an insanely amazing thing. But I also don't have an iPhone, so maybe it's just because this was my first exposure to handheld 3G anywhere-internet. Though to be fair, the connection was a bit lousy - I had to log into facebook again every time I did anything, so log in, type a wall post, log in, post the wall post...sigh. So the iPhone would probably win that battle. But still. You can Beam Books Out Of The Sky. It's like heaven.

Oh, so I downloaded some sample chapters. And by "some" I of course mean "every one I could get at before my battery ran out." Now that my pet rat has gotten old and his greatest joy in life is to be read out loud to, I've been reading him a whole variety of NYT bestsellers, and he seems to be quite enjoying it. To date:

Swimsuit: I was relieved that this ended when it did. This man does many things I never would have allowed as an editor, plus I'm not really big on the whole "gruesome murder" bit. Benji enjoyed it.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society: Is that right? This one was a big hit all around, and even the Manfolk, who pretended to be playing video games and not listening, let out a couple of good chuckles over it. I would definitely accept this one as a gift, if I have any admirers.

Twilight: Ah. I see.

Finger-Lickin' Fifteen: Um...maybe I just wasn't in the mood? I'm rather pleased that there's this huge series of popular books with a Latina heroine, so we'll give this a thumbs up, but...meh.

How the Beatles Destroyed Rock and Roll: Now, this one actually takes advantage of the sample chapter setup. Unlike stupid James Patterson, whose fancy "publisher" apparently didn't have enough time to look and see that 60% of his sample was the table of contents, this here book gives a big fat juicy sample, unhindered by massive quantities of front matter. I'm only a few pages in (Benji was dissatisfied by the lack of dialogue), but the narrator seems like a sweetheart and he's saying all those smart things about Blues music that always make me go all weak in the knees.

Stay tuned for a guest post from that boy who downloaded all the sci-fi sample chapters.

"Look to" vs. "Look at"

2009-08-03T13:31:00.003-04:00

Cage match!

This is fairly mysterious to me, since it seems so clear, but I recognize that prepositions can be horrible beasts.

So. When you have your eyes, and you have somebody standing in front of you, and your eyes are registering that person, you are looking at them. You are not looking to them.

I suspect this might be an issue in Southern USA speech? This is a bare-bones hypothesis based on the fact that the two authors who I've seen use this regularly are both from the South, so it's probably wrong, but it's the best I've got so far. If this does turn out to be a regional dialect thing, then more power to it.

However. If you do say this, you should realize that it's going to sound very odd to a lot of readers. Looking to has a very specific meaning which is going to short-circuit with what you're trying to say and cause them anxiety. When you look to somebody, you're seeking their support and guidance, not just registering them visually:

Benji Rat looked at me, wondering if I had a treat.
Benji Rat couldn't reach his treat dish, so he looked to me for a boost.

Do you say "looked to" in the first context? If so, tell me everything.

Tussled vs. Tousled

2009-07-31T12:44:00.004-04:00

So, I just thought I'd replicate this photo of Zac Efron, courtesy of the Onion News Network...

Ahem. Actually, I have an excuse for this behavior. And that excuse is called "the difference between tussled and tousled." That difference being that right now this headline says the Onion editors intend to launch a full-blown assault upon the scruff in question, rather than simply rumple it while cooing softly, as they presumably intended. You have been warned.

National Book Awards 60th Anniversary

2009-07-20T14:20:00.003-04:00

I don't seem to be much of an other-website promoter, but this is just too damn cool. To me, anyway. Though to be fair, the term "tremendous book nerd" has been bandied around in relation to me in the past.

For anyone else who thinks a nicely-laid-out retrospective of classic books from the past sixty years is omgzawesome, the National Book Foundation has given us just that. There have been 77 National Book Awards fiction winners in that period, ranging from things I've heard of (The World According to Garp, All the Pretty Horses) to things like, well, The Wapshot Chronicle. Giggle.

At any rate, a great way to learn about what some very booky people have considered the most important book of the year since 1950. And whether these selections have stood the test of time, at least from today's perspective. I'd be willing to bet these things go in cycles, and the ones they're making fun of this time around will be the stars of the show for the hundreth-anniversary edition.

They've only got about the first dozen entries up right now, so there's plenty of time to catch up. Have fun!

Word is messing with your quotation marks

2009-07-17T17:15:00.005-04:00

This is a post about quotation marks and apostrophes, but you don't need to learn any rules. Because this is not a post about punctuation, it is a post about Microsoft Word. I don't really understand Word, but it seems to be working against us all. Hide your children!

Ahem. " and ' problems that are not your fault fall into the following categories:

The "randomly applied curly quote" category. Notice that when you type " or ', it at first looks like a little straight line. Most of the time, if you've turned on this option, Word will turn the little straight lines into little curly lines. But sometimes, it does not. I don't know what y'all are doing - are you pasting portions of your MS into the Word document from Gmail or Notepad or something? Is that what does it? Whatever it is, it results in "/' going back and forth. This is very distracting and bad, and positively dreadful when it makes it into a printed book. One of my recent self-published review books seriously went back and forth every few pages, and at many points the opening and closing quotation marks in the SAME LINE would be in different styles. Bad.
The "apostrophe or opening-quotation mark?" category. When a word or number starts with an apostrophe ("I went to this place back in '94!" or "Y'all don't know whatcha talkin' 'bout") the apostrophe is supposed to curl away from the attached word. Word does not know this, and will almost always curl it towards the word as if it were a single open-quote. This can actually confuse the reader, especially if you've been nesting single and double quotation marks a lot, so as trivial as it seems, this is important to catch.
The "I forgot what kind of quotes I'm using" category. I guess I can't *really* blame Word for this, though in a perfect world, Word would send paper-clip-man to you to say "Er, hey! I noticed you were doing European-style quotation formatting (- Why no, he said, I didn't steal your foie gras) and now now you're back to American-style ("Nuh-uh," he said, "I ain't never seen any pheasant as big as that there one before."). So...should we not do that?" I recently read a self-published book that was nearly flawless in its editing, but it actually went back and forth between these all through the book. It was really bizarre.

If your book is going to be professionally published, all this will get picked up in proofreading. One hopes. But if you're self-publishing, for goodness sake watch out for these while you're editing.

Bolt upright

2009-07-05T14:05:00.002-04:00

Dictionary lesson time! Yay!

There exists an expression: "bolt upright." This is nearly always part of the longer phrase "to sit bolt upright," and it means to sit very, absolutely straight. As in, "The young Lady Grey was rather prone to uncouth slouching, so her tutor, the eminently proper Miss Agatha, would slap her back with a walking-stick if she failed to sit bolt upright in her chair."

Despite the presence of the word bolt, this expression has nothing to do with sitting up quickly. Bolt in this case is actually an adverb, modifying upright. So one does not, upon waking up from a bad dream, "bolt upright." This would be akin to saying "I woke up from my nightmare and absolutely straighted."

I mention it mostly because this is a bit pesky to correct in editing - it's not just a matter of replacing the offending word, it requires at least minor rephrasing and sometimes derails the whole sentence. So better that we all just use it correctly.

I hope everyone had an excellent July 4th - I of course missed it up here in Canada, but I can assure you that I was accidentally setting fire to my lawn in spirit.

Time Lines

2009-07-04T18:08:00.003-04:00

I'm wondering whether many authors get a time line down on paper for their work. Give it some thought - it can help you clarify things to yourself and avoid ambiguities that'll confuse your readers.

If even you, the author, aren't sure what year something happened to your character, or what time of day it is when a scene takes place, how is your reader supposed to know?

New Book Reviews

2009-06-26T16:24:00.004-04:00

By me!

Jaunt, or, "Why you should seriously get a professional edit and never use exclamation points again!?1!!"
Drowned Sorrow, or, "Trashy supernatural horror is supposed to have plot holes. Thumbs up!"

Also, a great example of what I was talking about in this post came up yesterday...author goes on ranting diatribe against negative review, comes out looking like a heinous, arrogant monster. Good job, Alice Hoffman.

Kindle 2 in Canada: the definitive update

2009-06-20T21:47:00.005-04:00

Since I seem to be getting a lot of my search-hits from people looking for information about getting a Kindle Reader in Canada, I thought it would be good to summarize what the deal is with that. So here you go! Hope it helps, e-book seekers.

1. Kindle is not officially available in Canada. They won't ship it here, and the wireless doesn't work here. You can't get wireless delivery of books, newspapers, blogs, or any of that.

2. However. If you can get a Kindle (by having somebody in the US order it for you and mail it or bring it to you, or getting it delivered to your hotel when you're on vacation, or whatever), there are a lot of things you can still do with it.

If you have access to a credit card from a US bank that's registered to a US address, you can register your Kindle. You can order books from Amazon.com and transfer them, via USB, from your computer to your Kindle. You can also use the free conversion via your registered Kindle email address for documents under 5 MB. You still can't get newspapers or blogs though, I'm pretty sure, since these are only delivered wirelessly. I'm not positive about that last bit though, I haven't tried it.
Even if you don't have the US credit card and can't register your Kindle, there are a lot of things you can do with it. There are programs available on the internet that let you convert documents all by yourself. You can download free and not-free books as .mobi files from an increasingly large range of websites, including the Gutenberg Project, and Smashwords. You can also, via a particularly wonderful internet-available program (which I shall not name because I hear Amazon comes after blogs that make this kind of information available...tyrants) download newspapers, journals, blogs, and other goodies to your computer in Kindle-compatible formats.

In conclusion, I'd say if you want a Kindle in Canada, and can somehow get one, it's worth it even without all the bells and whistles that come with the American service. Honestly, I've only used Amazon a couple of times to put content on my Kindle, and I've been using it extensively for months.

Free online content, plus the newspaper/blog feed program that downloads the Chicago Tribune, Le Monde, the Utne Reader, and my Google Reader feed for me every morning and transfers them to my Kindle in seconds, has kept my Kindle full of readable goodness without having to pay another cent.

Exclamation!!!

2009-06-19T17:57:00.004-04:00

Writers, please - search your MS for exclamation marks. Just search, see how many there are. 10? Great. 100? Not so great. 1,000? Get out your hatchet.

Exclamation marks add emphasis to a statement, but a good exciting statement can convey a lot of emphasis without having to resort to punctuation.

A couple reasons for avoiding exclamation marks:

Unlike Spanish, you only get the '!' at the end of the sentence. Therefore, if the reader hasn't realized by then that it's an exclamation, they'll be surprised and have to go back and re-read. So maybe you've got some tweaking to do.
'!' loses effectiveness the more often it's used. If you've got them scattered in, even every few pages, the reader's exclamation-o-meter has time to settle back down to zero, and then the next '!' will be just as effective.

In a self-published novel I'm reviewing right now, the author really goes off the deep end with his punctuation. Any editor would have made him ratchet this down tremendously, but there seems to have been no editor involved, alas. It seems, though, that somewhere in his subconscious, the author realized that his exclamations were losing exclaimyness due to overuse. The solution? Multiply the number of !s and start throwing in some ?s, of course!

This is wrong. If you have any !!s or ?!!s in your work, destroy them immediately. This sort of thing has no place in formal writing.

It gets so bad near the climax of the book that there are paragraphs where every sentence ends in some combination of !s and ?s. It gets as bad as "?!!!" before he starts busting out the all-caps emphasis as well. Crimeny. At this point, the reader is laughing at your characters, not getting involved in their emotional state.

Go Pens Go!

2009-06-12T23:09:00.006-04:00

We break from our regularly scheduled programming to congratulate the 2009 Stanley Cup champions - the Pittsburgh Penguins! Especially Canada's darling Sidney Crosby, the totally dominant Quebecois goalie Marc-Andre Fleury, and Montreal native Max Talbot, who scored both Pen goals 4TW! Awesome, guys, you deserve it.

How popular are e-books?

2009-06-12T10:52:00.003-04:00

Well, I just got a spam email whose subject line offered me free e-books.

Iceberg ebook application

2009-06-09T18:32:00.003-04:00

This is cute. Instead of something as crass as the "progress bar" the Kindle shows to let you see how far through the book you are, this thing for your...(iphone? Is that an iphone?)... actually shows you a picture of a book with your spot marked. Awww.

Also, how obvious is the Photoshop job? Or does chapter one of Twilight really extend to page 146?

Something neat: Echidnas

2009-06-08T19:41:00.002-04:00

Yup. Pretty damn cool.

These guys deserve the "miscellaneous" tag in a much deeper metaphysical sense than usual.

Responding to negative reviews

2009-06-07T20:24:00.009-04:00

I read somewhere that, as an author, you're never supposed to respond to bad reviews of your work. No matter how tempting it is. And I think this is very good advice! Granted, the review landscape is changing. It isn't just ivory-tower NYC intellectuals writing for elite newspapers and journals anymore. This whole Web 2.0 business lets everyone and his alligator write reviews of everything they set eyes on.

But all this might not change the fundamental fact that you aren't going to gain anything by responding to your negative reviews. It's easier than it used to be, and it's certainly tempting to get a comment in there right below the review in question that rebuts all the points the reviewer has made. But still...

This hasn't happened to me yet, though I'm afraid that at some point in my reviewing history I'm going to get snarked at. I'll tell some author that their work is unreadable, and they'll fire back that I'm a disgraceful illiterate child who wouldn't know great art if it was inserted into my nostril. And I'll probably cry...I'm much too sensitive for the internet.

I'm such a rambler! What I'm trying to get at is that this one reviewer on the site I write for said this one book was badly edited and did weird things with character voices and really just needed another good go-through before it was printed. And the author of this book fired back with a just-this-side-of-civil missive that really only made her look, if not worse, then really quite unlikeable. I'm not likely to read historical drama on the subject of slavery and redemption by an author who sounds like my cranky 9th grade English teacher on a bad day.

The points the author makes are, I imagine, the classic responses of somebody whose work has been belittled in public. She says she's heard from readers who really liked it, that she's sold many copies, that she had tons of people read it before it went to print to check for errors, that she intentionally did that thing with the dialogue (and even has a professional source who told her it was okay!), and, zinger of zingers, that there was a typo in the review. Meow!

The thing is, none of these arguments mitigate the situation. A reader can sympathize if you've had tons of people check for errors, but that doesn't make it less annoying when they bump into them in the text. You can explain what techniques you've used all you want, but if the reader doesn't get it and just thinks it's weird, none of that matters. Even if an Important Personage gave you the thumbs-up.

This isn't to say that a reviewer may not be totally off-base, miss the point of your work, and not enjoy something that piles of readers will eat up. Goodness knows that's happened more than once in the history of book reviews! But you as an author will come off as more gracious, and more triumphant, if you haven't started catfights with all the reviewers who put you down on your way to the top. The proper time for such behavior is when you're accepting your major literary award and you throw in a snide comment about all the people who put you down and didn't recognize your genius.

Book Reviews

2009-06-04T22:11:00.003-04:00

I admit it - writing is hard for me. I think it might be just that that I'm out of practice, but it's really an uphill battle. I admire authors immensely for being able to produce pages and pages of words, when I totally struggle to string together...like...two. Words.

Anyway, I've been writing book reviews for the website Self Publishing Review, which I've been quite enjoying. It's really fascinating to read the books that people have self-published! It must be terrifying to send your book off to be reviewed, especially without the buffer level of knowing that a publishing house accepted/edited/designed it. That way at least you can blame the publisher for any mistakes, and know that even if the reviewer didn't like it, at least the acquisitions editor did!

With the kind permission of Henry Baum, the mastermind behind the Self Publishing Review, I'm going to be going into a little more depth on the editing angle of the books I've been sent for review. I've made a few remarks on editing in the SPR reviews, but I'd like to talk more specifically about what another edit could have done for each book. It'll be a paragraph-structure adventure! But not right now, because I'm sleepy.

For the time being, you may revel in the glory that is my SPR reviews:
Daywalker, by Rebecca Rock (Vampires)
The Legend of Jimmy Gollihue, by George LaCas (Literary fiction)
Fairy Senses, by Frances Ruiz (YA Fantasy)

"It felt like we were living in a novel..."

2009-05-18T14:31:00.003-04:00

I've been noticing that a lot of the authors I work with, and a lot of the self-published books I read, like to sneak this line in. Something weird is happening, or somebody shows up at a suspiciously convenient time, and all of a sudden the deus ex machina kneejerk-reaction sets in, and a character says "It feels like we're in an old B-movie! But we aren't! This is real life!"

I'm not going to say that this is always bad, or that it can never be used effectively. Because I don't say things like that.

There are a couple reasons, though, why I think that this technique is usually a bad bet.

1. It's overused. So overused, in fact, that even if you've used it well, the reader is going to wince and hate it and not appreciate that you are the one person in the last dozen books they've read who actually really got some technique and nuance going with it.

2. It's cheap. It says "ignore the fact that what I just wrote is highly unlikely." It's not a terribly persuasive argument, but it does glue a patch over the rough bit by saying that the author (via the character) recognizes the logical or scientific leap that has just been taken and assures you that it's okay.

3. It betrays the author's discomfort with what he's written. If you've written the situation, the setup, and the book well enough, the reader is going to go along with you because you have carefully suspended his disbelief in the pertinant areas. If you haven't, like if you're 200 pages into what appears to be action taking place on earth in the present day, and all of a sudden pigs start to fly, then maybe you should rethink. Drop some hints. Y'know.

4. It does the opposite of what it's supposed to. It's like putting makeup over a zit, but you only have your wintertime concealer and you just spent two weeks tanning in Hawaii. It pulls the reader out of the action and says "Hey! You see what I did there? Wasn't it weird? Weren't you kind of uncomfortable with that?" And then the reader says "Yeah, it's like you're in a novel - a bad novel." Even if they were prepared to accept whatever you've just done, they now have been slapped in the face with it and their feelings are hurt. It is non-preferable to hurt your reader's feelings.

The plural of typo is typos

2009-05-13T15:24:00.002-04:00

I promise this won't turn into a grammar blog, but I'm going to sneak this one in.

The plural of typo is typos. It is not typo's. Repeat: TYPOS. This is a fairly straightforward example of adding an -s to the end of a singular noun to make it into a plural noun. Like radios. Zoos. Halos.

Anyway, I don't really care that much when people make plurals with -'s. Most of the time, honestly, I think it's a mistake, and if you showed them the word and said "What's the plural of this? How is it spelled?" they would know. But with typo, this mistake is just embarrassing. Because it's a typo on the word "typo." And you see it in the funniest places.

"Our agency will then hire a professional editor to check your work for mistakes and typo's."
"I hate self-published books because they're always full of typo's, and they're badly formatted, too."
"Please be sure that you have checked for typo's before you submit your work to us, or it may be rejected."

See how that just totally destroys your credibility? Yeah.

Don't you bring me no bad news

2009-04-25T13:07:00.005-04:00

I've noticed that in the world of book reviews, there seems to be a policy of only reviewing books that are "worthy of review." That is, if the book is amateurish, or unremarkable, or just plain bad, there's nothing said about it. Silence.

Now, I can see how reviews, even bad ones, will serve as publicity for a book. I can see where reviewers might think they won't even waste people's time reading about something that they absolutely should not read.

But honestly, I don't buy it. In what other field, art or otherwise, does something bad not even merit a mention? Bad films get reviewed. Bad art shows get reviewed. Hell, bad microwaves get reviewed! But a mediocre book, even if it was good enough to get picked up by a publisher...nothing.

And I personally would like to know about these things! Even if it's just a one-liner: "Spelling atrocious. Cover amateurish. Story full of holes. Couldn't finish--like reading nails on a blackboard." That would do. Especially given the explosion of books available through POD and self-publishing...books really are a commodity rather than an art form a lot of times, and I sort of think they should be treated as such on the review circuit.

I really distrust websites that only run good reviews. I assume that somebody is paying them or giving them freebies, and I assume that their good reviews aren't trustworthy. Just like I wouldn't trust a math teacher who gives all his students A's, I don't trust a book review website that only rates books "excellent!", "classic!", or, at worst, "very good!" (book reviews dot com, I'm looking at you!).

If readers should have the freedom to decide what they enjoy reading (even if it's Twilight), they should also have access to the information necessary to make an informed decision.

That is all.

Bad writing

2009-04-24T16:50:00.002-04:00

I've been thinking about whether an author's intentions when writing a book contribute to my actual perception of the quality of the book. And I think they do.

Not in any deep way, but if I feel like an author's writing with the creation of commercial goods in mind, their book had better be pretty damn good if I'm going to feel like it was worth reading. It should be either really fun to read, or really well written, or both, but if it's mediocre it's just like any other piece of merchandise - if the paint is bad quality and pieces look like they're going to fall off, what's the point?

On the other hand, if I feel like the writer is writing primarily for personal satisfaction--they enjoy it, or they want to explore some ideas, or they want to see if they can do it--I can be a lot more lenient. They're not trying to foist anything on me, they're just offering their handiwork for sale. So if it's fantastic, it makes it all the more special, but if it has some rough edges that just adds to the charm.

Kindle 2 customer support in Canada

2009-04-17T10:29:00.003-04:00

Well, obviously we're talking fiction here.

Amazon's Kindle reader is not available in Canada, for "copyright reasons." Though one has to wonder, what are these copyright issues that are so insurmountable that the Sony Reader is now available pretty much everywhere?

Anyway, Amazon won't ship the Kindle to Canada. You can buy books for it as long as you have a credit card associated with a US address (I've tested this - it's true!), but they won't ship the Kindle to Canada, US credit card or no. Which is makes it time-consuming, wasteful, and expensive to get the Kindle up here. Mine was shipped to my mom in California and then to me in Montreal...so shipping charges and insurance had to be paid twice, the risk of it getting hurt in transit doubles, and all that. And I still have the damn thing, in Canada. I'm American, I live in the US part of the year, I'm totally allowed to have my Kindle (which I love...there's so much to love), but Amazon insists on making me feel like I'm undergoing some sort of criminal subterfuge because I happen to be in Canada on my birthday.

So, I was thinking I'd give them a chance to redeem themselves. I called up customer support and said essentially "Look - it cost me $80 on top of the $360 the Kindle already costs to get it shipped up here. Now I don't have that money to buy Kindle books. Could I have some credit toward Kindle books to make up for it?" The terrifyingly perky customer service lady flat turned me down. Damn.

Obviously they don't have to give me anything, it was my own choice to do things this way. But I thought it would be nice, and good customer relations, and anyway - it doesn't cost them anything! That's the beauty of e-books! They could just say "Sure! In fact, have $100 in e-book credit! We're really sorry for the inconvenience." I'd love them, and it wouldn't cost them anything. Or, it'd cost them a teeny bit in royalties. Totally worth the fact that they'd have a satisfied customer. Alas. They've cornered the market, they know they won't lose my business (though I will certainly work harder to not buy my ebooks through Amazon, for what it's worth), so why do any favors?

Things they should have taught me at school

2009-04-16T12:15:00.002-04:00

Having just done my taxes (sort of - my boyfriend did them and I mailed them without payment [but on time!] because I couldn't find my checkbook and couldn't figure out another way to pay), I got to thinking about all the things that really should be taught in school. I mean, history's great, science is great, but why is it that all of the things that *everybody* is going to need to know either don't get taught or, if they are taught, they're taught in write-off classes like home-ec and photography? I guess parents are expected to teach their kids all the crucial bits, but...well...they don't. And it's all such simple stuff - a single semester-long class per year could have saved so many of us so much grief.

So, here are some of the things I wish somebody had taught me in school!

1. Taxes. What they are, when you need to start paying them, what the most common forms are and how to fill them out. What are deductions, how to save your paperwork...all that stuff.

2. Employment. What job interviews are like, different sorts of resumes and cover letters, how to dress for an interview or a job, where to look for jobs, how to get along with co-workers, basic information about different options and the kinds of work most people end up doing...

3. Municipal matters. How to use public transit in your city, what kinds of services are available, where your elected officials are and what they do, how the legal system is set up, where to go when you need things, how the phone and electric and water systems work, what crime and safety issues are, where the really nice parks are at...

4. Technology. My computer class was taught by a teacher who knew about half what any of the students knew about computers, but insisted on starting us all at the very beginning anyway. We wanted to learn to program, she wanted to teach us which finger to use to type "7". And she spent the equivalent of an entire class trying to make us say "key" instead of "type."

Okay, that's what I'm thinking of off the top of my head. Should anyone else care to participate I shall be more than happy to update.

Electronics overload

2009-04-07T16:54:00.006-04:00

I'm not usually one for technolust, but the pictures in this article definitely set my heart a-flutter. All...those...capacitors... (longing sigh).

It reminds me of all the happy hours I used to spend disassembling VCRs I found in the street.

Wired.com : Where Gadgets Go to Die

Things my Kindle 2 can do

2009-04-05T13:28:00.001-04:00

I just figured out how to get my Google Reader to upload onto my Kindle! I've got this "Calibre" program that does conversions really easily, and it also has all kinds of newspapers and journals and things that you can set to download automatically.

If I was in the US, of course, I could pay for these papers (maybe some of them are free? I don't know) and have them directly beamed into the Kindle every morning so I wouldn't even have to hook it up to my computer. I'm sure I would love that. However, having this Calibre thing fetch whatever journals I want in the morning (the button is actually labeled "fetch" - this makes me happy) is a good substitute. Really, if I plug the Kindle into the computer at night, Calibre will just send the news onto it automatically anyway (it sends over whatever it's got downloaded as soon as it detects a device), which is more or less the same thing.

This is amazing. I get like 100 blog posts via Google Reader every day, and I really do need to at least have a look at them all to keep on top of all the things I suddenly seem to be keeping on top of. So this is at least an hour of reading that I'm no longer going to have to do in front of a computer screen. I can curl up on the couch with the cute little rats, have some tea, and enjoy myself. Amazing.

Espresso Book Machine coming to Montreal!

2009-04-04T11:31:00.005-04:00

For those who haven't heard of this - it prints books for you. In under 5 minutes! Out of this snazzy case it's reminiscent more of a couple of printers, some knives, and a hot-glue gun duct-taped to a folding table, but what the whole package amounts to is something that's going to save really a lot of trees. And make it so you can print off a quick book on your way to lounging in the sun in those big fields in front of t I'm kind of in love.

And the McGill library is getting one this spring! There aren't too many out in the world yet, so this makes me very happy. I can't wait to go print a book on it! I wonder what book I'll choose.

Read more about it:
OnDemandBooks website
Self-Publishing Review article

Kindle 2 has arrived on my couch!

2009-03-30T13:39:00.002-04:00

March 30th, 1:00pm - Kindle is here! It was a ridiculous matter to get it - my mom had to buy it, have it sent to her in California, and then mail it to me herself. Because Amazon refused to ship it to Canada. But now, a mere half-day after my birthday, it is arrived.

1:05pm - It is so cute! Soooo cute. The packaging is cute too. It opens like a book!

1:25pm - I think I'm figuring it out. The instructions (in an ebook that opens when you turn it on) are really easy and quick to read, and most of the buttons make a lot of sense. I'm still not quite familiar with the note and clipping functions, but give me time.

1:27pm - Also, when it goes into sleep mode, it shows portraits of famous authors. I think the greyscale has 16 levels, so the pictures look really nice. Same or better than the quality in a lot of books, really.

1:35 - I have uploaded a book onto it! No whispernet, obviously, because I'm in Canada, but it also accepts .txt files, so I just converted a book that a friend sent me in Word, drag-and-dropped, and voila! There are no tabs because of the formatting, but despite that it looks nice and promises to be easily readable. And it remembers what page I get to... I'm a disaster with bookmarks so that's a nice touch.

More to come...

iUniverse cover quality

2009-03-24T10:02:00.010-04:00

As I've been researching POD options, I kept thinking that all the price levels and comparative service packages are a distraction. So the company offers cover design at a reasonable price - but are the covers professional and effective? So they offer editing - are their editors skilled and qualified and motivated to do a good job? That kind of thing. In other words, I want to actually see the books to see if they look good, and read them to see if they're full of mistakes.

My first face-to-face encounter has been with a small perfect-bound paperback iUniverse book. Whose cover curls. And not just a little bit - the damn thing stands open like you've put a mid-sized rodent in there as a bookmark. Front and back, from the day it was brand new to its present well-read state. This lead to all sorts of shenanigans as I was reading and reviewing it, because it was just so damn annoying I had to set something on top of it whenever I set it down. My friends would joke about it and poke it when they came over.

The offending cover, compared to a book that's behaving itself rather better

There were other problems, like the gutters were too narrow and the editing was so poor in places (both in the "this story is confusing and has obvious gaps and errors" sense and the "wow, there's another typo" sense) that I can only hope that the author didn't use iUniverse's in-house editing services. But those things are only really evident once you've bought the book and are sitting down to read it, so in a sense they're less immediately important than the cover, which I think has both turned me off of recommending this service to authors and given a number of my friends a poor impression of POD books.

The very nice customer service fellow I talked with at iUniverse tells me that although this does happen, the company hasn't recieved any official complaints about the matter. Well, now I guess they've got one.

Has anyone gone the POD route and seen this problem?

BookaBook - sad but true

2009-03-22T21:40:00.010-04:00

Next on my list of author/reader networking websites is the Dutch site Bookabook.com. This site, which seems to have only a handful of users at the moment, screams "scam"...though it could also, to be fair, just be a well-intentioned but thoroughly impractical and poorly thought out business plan.

The idea is that you put your book up in the site, and at the same time 1,000 shares in the book are offered for sale at 15 Euros apiece. Once all thousand shares are sold, Bookabook publishes the book.

Right off the bat, this is absurd - They're making 15,000 Euros ($20,000 US) off the shares before they've even published the book. When you can publish a book through iUniverse for around $1,000, or through CreateSpace or similar companies for...well... $0. Though to be fair, they'll never make any money off of it because they allow users to get their money back any time before all the shares are sold.

Before publishing your book, though, Bookabook will edit it. They will not do a nasty developmental edit and mess with your artistic vision, but they will do a copy edit and check for typo's (sic). Yes, they had a typo on the word "typo." A quick scan of the rest of the site established that the quality of their text was uniformly atrocious. But I digress.

Once the shares are sold and the book is published, you start raking in the profits. Bookabook takes 60%, of course, and the author gets 20%. The other 20% is split among the 1,000 shareholders.

The math hurt my head so I shopped it out to the computer science student on my other couch. He laughed at me and explained some basic principles of algebra that I failed to absorb at any level. The result, however, is that with a postulated $15 cover price, the company would have to sell 75,000 Euros worth (6,800 copies) of a book before shareholders would make back their initial investment.

And that, my faithful reading public, is today's lesson in why the stock market crashed.

Authonomy dramaz report

2009-03-21T21:23:00.002-04:00

Hellfire broke loose this evening on Harper-Collins's Authonomy author-networking website, when it was determined that the "glitch" that was keeping the site slow or crashing all day was none other than a tech-savvy author who posted a youtube video asking his wide network of friends to join the site and vote for his book.

The video itself, by an Irish writer, vlogger, and Starcraft afficionado, is strikingly harmless. He sounds like a nice enough fellow, and it's actually super funny to hear somebody walk you through the Authonomy process in that friendly tech-support style. But as it happens, this fellow has a lot of friends, and they're gamer friends with plenty of time to spend fiddling around on the computer, and they've come out in droves to visit the site and comment on his book.

Together with totally crashing the site all day, the concept of doing this, and being sucessful at it (the book in question has shot up the rankings and is already #1 on the weekly chart), has raised some ethical questions. Which are all being expounded, in greater or lesser degrees of coherence, politeness, and rabid fury, by pretty much everyone who's on the site right now. The author started out trying to defend himself, but faced with the onslaught of hate he's pretty well been reduced to calling everyone "jealous" and pretty much looking like a big ol' douche. But to be fair, everyone is so furious at him he'd have to be a saint to make himself look good at the moment.

The book itself... well, the first couple paragraphs were so bad I didn't keep reading, but a few people who did say it improves a lot after the first couple pages.

Anyway, he's a gamer, and he's gamed the system. Certainly, this kind of behaviour will totally sink the site and the community behind it if more than a couple people do it. But on the other hand, it's legit - he has a Starcraft-centered fanbase and he can ask all those people to vote for him, just like everyone is always asking all their Facebook friends to vote for them in whatever contest they're involved in. It's taking the contest into a whole other league, and I can really appreciate why the people who've found a really nice community in Authonomy would object furiously to this first advent of spam-warfare.

What will happen? Will the interloper be chastized? Banned? Shot?

Stay tuned.

Eastern Townships Advice Required

2009-03-19T22:05:00.001-04:00

It's time for my annual birthday-in-the-mountains excursion, and this year the theme is: Eastern Townships! My strapping young lad and I are going to venture into this Orford national park, and stay overnight somewhere on the 28th. We'll have a car, and we speak fine French and much better English.

So, my questions are:
A- anything we shouldn't miss? Wineries, awesome places to hike, deeply adorable little towns, roads between places that are very pretty this time of year (the melty time, I know, it is my blessing and curse to be born on probably the most liminal day of the year) fabulously cozy little cafes, restaurants, places to ride horses or see many wonderful birds... these sorts of things.

B- where to stay. If there's somewhere cheap and fun that would be awesome, but we're willing to go up to around $100 for the night. The places my research has yielded are the following: Auberge McGowen (Georgeville?), Manoir de la rue Merry (Magog), Auberge du Centre d'Arts Orford, Gite Maison Hote (Magog), A L'Ombre d'Orford (Orford). Do you know these places? I'm open to other suggestions too. I like things that have a lot of character, feel solid... doesn't matter if the rooms or bathrooms are big, as long as they feel nice, you know?

Um.

2009-03-18T15:06:00.004-04:00

Now, I just read a book where the author felt it necessary to give an exhaustive physical description of every character in her book, no matter how minor. This was particularly funny when juxtaposed with the way in which major components of the plot (time elapsed between chapters, whether people were aliens or not, etc.) were left to be inferred, if not just omitted altogether.

My opinion of what constitutes an "exhaustive physical description," however, has just been shot out of the water by a friend who directed me to this unholy monstrosity (original post here)

Click to read.
Warning: The pain. Oh god, the pain.

Discover your beautiful what?

2009-03-09T17:37:00.003-04:00

Normally I don't really care about these things - it happens, it's usually a typo, I do it myself fairly regularly and I've never been confused about this whole "your/you're" business.

But this is an ad going out to like a billion people, for a major chain. So there's (they're's?) no excuse.

At peace

2009-03-08T22:30:00.003-04:00

I read best when I'm eating. I can concentrate completely, I'm content, I'm not looking for anything or in a hurry to be anywhere else.

This is actually one of the reasons I want an ebook reader - some books are just so damn hard to prop open when you're disassembling an artichoke.

Your daily nonsense from the New York Times

2009-03-04T14:17:00.006-05:00

The New York Times was especially prolific on the nonsense front today.

First, in an article about organic food:

"Although the rules governing organic food require health inspections and pest-management plans, organic certification technically has nothing to do with food safety."

Hm. In what way do health inspections technically have nothing to do with food safety?
*****
Secondly, and somewhat more delightfully, we have an article about the science of free throws in basketball. I'd often wondered about this, and it seems like the stats on what percentage of free throws are successful have stayed static for decades. So they're setting the stage, talking about how weird this is, and of course you're going to want a professional opinion on the matter, so they come up with the following:

"'It’s unbelievable,' Larry Wright, an adjunct professor of statistics at Columbia, said as he studied the year-by-year averages. 'There’s almost no difference. Fifty years. This is mind-boggling.'"

There you have it. This man's mind has been boggled by a straight line.
*****
And finally, in the "just saying what happened is boring" class of nonsense, the intro to an article about Google's digitized book settlement:

"Last month an e-mail message washed up at the offices of The Cook Islands News in the South Pacific."

Beautiful.

"pip"

2009-03-02T14:43:00.003-05:00

I have a friend from China who reads all sorts of funny books and emails me when she doesn't know what something means. It's amazing the things she finds - she's actually really a good reader, so usually what she'll send me that doesn't make sense to her will be a very poorly worded passage, or a typo or something. But sometimes she's just found a funny expression or a really obscure word.

Today, she sent me a word I have never seen before. I thought it was a made-up word, or maybe that her book was British. Because I know they say "pip pip old chap" and things in British movies. But last I heard they don't say it referring to newly hatched turtles. It turns out that it is a real word, and it means "to break through the shell of the egg pipped> transitive verb : to break open (the shell of an egg) in hatching "

It is truly wonderful that there is a word specifically for being a baby bird and trying to be born. Or turtle. Or duck-billed platypus. I am happy.

"Desktop Miracles" publishing?

2009-03-01T14:19:00.004-05:00

It's the funniest thing, I can't find any sort of outside review of this place, anywhere on the internet. I know it's a real place, I've even worked with them a bit when my former employer published a book through them. I wasn't impressed with their editor, but the finished product is a lovely book.

It just seems really strange to me, this complete silence about a company in an industry I wouldn't probably go that kind of route with a book again, but it was an interesting experience, and I really would like to know what other people think about the company.

Not, like, the general "it's a vanity press even though it says it's not omg they'll charge so much and you'll never sell." I'm comfortable with that bit :)

Authonomy shoots self in self's foot

2009-02-27T17:48:00.004-05:00

So, this site Authonomy. I've only been a member for a couple weeks, but it's a pretty cool thing. It's a site for authors to share their work and critique each other, and there's a lot of good stuff available.

Its gimmick is that it's run by HarperCollins (or is it just Harper now?), and there's this ranking system for all the books. And every month, the top five books in the rankings are read and critiqued by real live HC editors.

What seems to have developed is a very reciprocal system - a perfectly transparent "You read my book and I'll read yours" exchange that everyone involved is expected to participate in. I feel like a bit of an anomaly, actually, because I'm reading a few books and I don't expect anything in return. I mean, the idea is certainly floating around in my head that a lot of these people are probably going to self-publish and need a good editor who they're not going to have to mortgage their house to pay for... but I'm really viewing my participation in the site as more a recreational activity and low-key networking attempt than as an actual, aggressive advertising adventure (see what I did there? With the alliteration?).

Anyway. The result of this reciprocal, social-network-based system is that you have to put a LOT of time into the site to make your book climb the charts. Granted, it helps if your book is good. These people are authors, after all, many of them experienced and published, and though your book can go a long way on self-promoting forum activities, quality does play a role. So that's good. But really, if your book is in the top 5, you are putting hours and hours into reading and reviewing other peoples' books, chatting with them, thanking every single person for their support if you get it, and so on. All with the hope of attracting the attention of an agent, and possibly getting the sweet reward of a fair read by an HC editor.

So today (or yesterday in England, where most of this is happening), the magnanimous editors have handed down their views of the lucky top five. All of the reviews ended with "Unfortunately...at this time...not marketable...difficult period in publishing...sorry, no." But that's okay. The problem was that, while four of the reviews were in-depth commentary with a lot of honest, helpful advice (though they do seem quite prone to telling fantasy books to be more realistic and realism books to be more fantastic), one of the feedback posts was, well, a synopsis. Paragraph after paragraph just happily describing the plot of the novel. And then two lines at the bottom saying the "sorry, no" thing.

This must have been so disappointing for the author, after putting all that time in to win the prize, writing a book that people liked, and then just getting nothing. A lot of the more cynical forum-participators are saying that he's got to just move on, maybe they really just didn't have anything to say, and there's no guarantee anywhere that they're actually going to provide helpful feedback.

All of this may be true, but if HarperCollins wants to keep this site afloat, they're not going to do it if people feel like there's a chance that they're going to get such pathetic feedback. They may not have written something that will get published, but at least they want their book to be better because of it, and there's no point in HC even being involved in the site if they're going to make such a weak effort.

That is all.

Celebration!

2009-02-27T13:51:00.002-05:00

I would like to commemorate a momentous event: the first instance ever where I have correctly estimated the number of something. That is correct. Usually, this is my greatest failing. Put me in a room full of people and I couldn't tell you if there are a hundred people in it or a thousand. But today I said a book review was 750 words, and it was. It was 700, but seriously. I feel like I've entered a new era of my existence.