Blogging For Books

I wanted to mention this intriguing contest again. Read the rules and regulations here. The Zero Boss and I exchanged a few mutually satisfying estrokes, after which I could finally comprehend the competition, mostly because he gave me a peek at the announcement for September. In modern parlance that would be a "prepeek" (another rant in the making).

The project should interest writers, bloggers, and readers. If you have a book to get rid of (one you've written, I mean), then you, too, could be an author/judge/prize donator. If you want to try to win a book, I'll donate space for your guest blog entry (if you haven't a blog of your own). If you like reading others' views on a particular topic, September's theme will certainly provoke thoughtful responses, and maybe some good writing. Stay tuned for comments. In the meantime, mark your calendar to check The Zero Boss for his announcement.

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Cheatsheets

Writing these entries fulfills several functions: they are the electronic writer's equivalent of sharpening pencils (avoiding hard work), and they sharpen the writer's skills at packing the most punch into pithy prose. What I'm avoiding right now is deeper development of a novel. I haven't been writing it long enough to have all the characters and interactions firmly in mind. Each conversation and shift in action requires consulting various cheatsheets. I began with a spreadsheet of data about each character. That quickly became unwieldy, so I reverted to text documents with tables about characters, locations, relationships, even a schedule of events. That was still unhandy. When the muse stirs, I don't want to shift gears, open another set of documents, and stare into the screen searching for the exact information I need. I printed the pages. Now I'm making notes on them. Later in the week, I plan to clear a bulletin board on which to post the sheets nearby. Some day I'll get back to the book.

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Meanwhile at The Library

While cruising around the book world online, I discovered Reed Business Information's Library Journal. It is closely related to Publisher's Weekly, but more oriented toward librarians. It does list the PW best sellers, and it has "Books Most Borrowed in U.S. Libraries", fiction and nonfiction. During the week of August 15, for example, the most borrowed books in the LJ database included the Ta Da Vinci Code, Ten Big Ones, and Reckless Abandon; as well as My Life, The South Beach Diet, and Eats, Shoots & Leaves.

I was pleasantly surprised to see that these include best sellers found on commercial lists compiled from major book sellers. While I was napping, apparently libraries started buying currently popular material once more. I suspect there's an entire generation that feels libraries are hopelessly outdated. They browse in the big boxes without even checking the library. (In my mind it will always be The Library, or "libs" in notes to self.)

Finding libraries now current both in research resources (online) and popular reads generates mixed feelings for me. I had never thought of them in terms of mandatorily stocking the ephemera and effluvia that washes across our collective attention. On the other side, I was appalled when I heard people in their 30s declaring they never visited libraries because they weren't "current". Of course I want libraries to fulfill both functions, now that I can't afford new books, even paperbacks. It's the curse of the omnivorous reader/researcher.

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Book Search

Writers who are also book lovers need many different tools to search online. This group of recommendations comes from Project Gutenberg. They are for finding paper books:

Advanced Book Exchange
Alibris
Trussel BookSearch
Library of Congress Catalog

Project Gutenberg is the oldest (since the 1970s!) source of free US public domain material. It claims over 12,000 "ebooks" and also offers CD and DVD images, audio ebooks, and digitized sheet music. I subscribed to the RSS feed to see the current offerings and quickly accessed a plain text version of a hilarious tract on metaphors first published by the the Society for Pure English in the 1920s. It was amusing to read along with Lynne Truss' recent swipe at English writers.

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The Inner Book, Cooked

A few days ago in One Hit Wonders I alluded to the notion that everyone has a book inside just waiting to be written. I think I've discovered what kind of book it is: a cookbook! Have you ever marveled at the never-ending parade of books on cooking and recipes? I didn't realize how many there are until the big box book stores appeared. The Barnes&Noble search engine returned 29,672 titles about cooking and 11,747 on recipes, probably with some overlap. At least 400 hardcover cookbooks were published during this year alone!

I can't imagine feeling I need/want a cookbook and pawing through selections until I find one that suits. Mine accumulate in a more organic fashion -- sometimes as research for an article, or because I was interested in a particular culture (Amish, Shaker) or area where I lived (New England, Middle Atlantic, Florida, Midwest, Southwest) or visited (France, Australia, Honduras, Mexico, Caribbean), or a particular or peculiar culinary interest (organic, whole foods, vegetarian, herbs, convection oven, microwave).

See a pattern here? The best cookbooks grow out of an interest. How many general cookbooks do you need? I've used the same one since 1965 (but I'm on my fourth paperback copy). There is a cookbook lurking inside me after all. Not only do the younger generations not know how to write well, they have no idea how to cook, either. So, I could produce a well-written cookbook as a model of how to write. No? How about a well-written book on how to cook, really cook, home-cooked, made-from-scratch cooking?

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The Da Vinci Code

A friend built up suspense about Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code for weeks before lending it to me. She raved about it. I should have been prepared for disappointment because she'd raved about another book on hidden prophetic codes in biblical Hebrew texts. One glance at the "mathematical algorithm" decoding convinced me of that book's invalidity.

Still, Brown's book lingering on the best sellers lists even after his next publication entered gave me pause. I breathed deeply and plunged in. My first reaction was to investigate the issues Brown presented in his introduction. A quick Internet search revealed one of the purported sources is a well-known hoax. I thought I'd missed something in the reviews I'd read. The book had to be speculative fiction.

Finally my friend convinced me that she believes all the poppycock is real. It's true that he mixes in real names of people, places, and events with a fantastic "what if" about other events and descriptions. That's like believing everything Susan Vreeland wrote in her lilting novel, The Passion of Artemisia, actually happened because there really was a Galileo, and some of that Italian artist's paintings survive to this day.

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Square Circles

The experience of online writing can be a paradox. You write to the world and reap an intimate experience. This intimacy occurs when you receive almost instantaneous responses. If you're writing in solitude, in a lost little corner of life, posting a message feels like casting out notes in bottles to the vagaries of ocean currents.

An example may help: yesterday I noticed an entry (finally!) in a new blog established by Yahoo! Search a week ago. Because it was open for comments, I left one asking for more useful writers' research tools. In the rush to post, I made a mistake in the URL for Writer's Edge blog and found no quick way to correct it. When viewers clicked on my signature, they were sent to an error page (how embarrassing!)

Nonetheless, not long afterward an email arrived from a man who had read my comment. He had to have dug around to find the address writersedge@att.net. Although people build websites hoping for visitors, when one has obviously riffled through your files, it can be unsettling. Fortunately the communicator was pleasant, friendly, and extremely helpful, and we exchanged several messages on the subject of online research tools for writers.

This morning I started a post on some more technical aspects of the Yahoo! Search Blog at another website. I discovered part of my message contained a URL to a page in the website of yesterday's email converser. The irony is that I was writing about part of yet another person's comment on the new blog. This reminds me of the old saying about running around in little square circles and about casting bread upon the waters.

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Tom Robbins in Harper's

In the September Harper's Magazine, veteran author Tom Robbins writes on (and on) about a need that he senses for playfulness in American literature. His protracted beginning with a suicide scene, we can only hope, is poetic license. I found it daunting, the focus on the gloominess and lack of wit in contemporary writing to such an excess, but I soldiered on, consulting my dictionary several times (word for the day: diathesis, a constitutional predisposition toward an abnormality or disease). It's been ages since someone else's writing send me searching for meaning in my Webster's. Now I remember why I subscribed to this magazine when my undergraduate diploma was still damp! It continued the joy of learning that was the best part of attending college.

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Fragrant Reminders

Old Spice deoderant probably isn't the first product, or the last, to play on the notion that fragrances evoke memories better than input to any of our other senses. A whiff of the classic Old Spice after shave lotion, and I'm in my father's embrace, kissing goodbye. He did that for the last time a few weeks after I turned 17. The smell of Old Spice deoderant (classic) reminds me of a husband, in our youthful, erotic years. Aqua Velva blue takes me to my grandparents' kitchen, so long ago, when my grandfather emerged from his after work bath to join us for dinner. Staying with them during summers is my happiest, safest childhood memory. If Gran smelled like anything, it would have been flour; but the scent of their home was apples and bacon and stewed chicken. Occasionally I buy bacon and fry it with a sliced apple, just to relive those moments, to recapture those warm feelings before the knowings of adulthood ripped away childhood dreams. Authors often forget to include references to fragrance in their writing. It's an important part of life, too important to omit.

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Contests and Content

Surfing around with my best friend, Google Search, I happened upon some interesting writing contests and a bonus: I think I've finally seen a definition of Flash Fiction. It seems to be a story of 50 words or less. I found a romance blogger who's holding a competition for such entries this weekend. I don't think I'll enter. The prize is a pair of socks hand knit by Bosnian refugees. Anyway, 50 words is scarcely a minimal conversation. What really put me off was the quality of the other entries. Most could benefit from Eats, Blogs and Leaves.

The Zero Boss offers a more enticing contest with I'm not certain what's involved, although I am assuming the themes will deal with books and/or writing. It is scheduled to continue through March 2005. The judges are published authors, the prizes an autographed copy of that month's author's book. Did I get all the apostrophes in the right places? Don't sic the Apostrophe Posse on me, please!

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One Hit Wonders

When I was a busy, visible news reporter, everyone I met knew a great story. They all wanted gratitude for the tips, and they wanted to see the stories in the next edition of the paper or magazine. Eventually I learned to say, "Wow! I really wish I could follow up on that. Unfortunately the editor tells me what to write about. Why don't you talk to him?"

Conventional wisdom declares that everyone has a book inside. Perhaps that explains all the "one hit wonders" in publishing. One book, and you never hear from them again. One issue, and the magazine folds. One pilot, and the series crashes. Remember "Tom Swifties?" she asks quickly. Those were one line jokes with a clever and cogent adverb tacked on the end.

We're probably all pretty good at crafting one liners, whether they're jokes or concepts for movies or book themes. We toss 'em off like popcorn at parties. One hits the floor, no one notices or cares. It's on to the next. What distinguishes the writer from the rest is taking that one idea and applying his or her seat to the chair seat (who said that -- Mark Twain?).

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Allconsuming Wellies Bears

Oh, yay! The connection with Allconsuming is finally working at it's end. Click on one of the titles of books I'm reading (left column), and you'll find one of the Writer's Edge blog entries listed with a zillion others for that book. Can Technorati be far behind?

As long as you're browsing through the left column, click on Showcase.mu.nu, where you'll find this amusing entry from Chaotic Clarity about walking barefoot in the rain. Showcase is in Hong Kong, Clarity is someplace where they call boots "wellies" (British, short for Wellingtons), and I'm in SoCal (southern California, US). Visiting the left column is like a world tour.

Finally, the link that says "I'm a Insignificant Microbe in the TTLB Ecosystem" keeps me humble. TTLB also spawned Showcase. As Gary Sinise says in the upcoming "CSI New York", everything's related.

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Harper's Folly

The only prize I could claim with my ClubMom points was a magazine subscription, so I took Harper's. I remembered enjoying it in the early 1970s, even having a brief correspondence with the publisher, Lewis Lapham. He educated me about the large post cards which fall out of the magazine whenever it's lifted. "They're called tip-ins," he wrote after I complained that six of them fell out of a recent issue. He indicated that they were probably here to stay. Indeed. Two fell out of the August 2004 issue. That was fitting, because the magazine is about one third the size I remember. Lapham is still publisher.

I noticed a strange disclosure in the fine print of the magazine's Table of Contents. A large section called Readings consists of material from public domain sources, some of it reprinted without permission. I thought that odd. Then I visited the online version. Reprints from old issues of the magazine (it was founded in 1850) are arranged topically, but every page offers a hierarchical path, so the viewer knows exactly where she is. It seemed very logical to me, and all links I tried worked correctly. Some of the material exclusive to the website was the richest in links I've ever seen, like this.

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Blog, Shoots and Leaves

Has Jennifer Garrett, a Boston blogger, been reading Writer's Edge? I hope so. She's built a Blogger Knowledge article from references to the Lynne Truss book about which I've been babbling on (See July 04, 2004, Freedom From Bad Writing!, August 09, 2004, Free Books, Almost, and August 14, 2004, Let Them Have Blogs! as well as listing Truss' book in the sidebar for the last month or so). In fact, this blog practically began with a rant about punctuation, spelling, grammar, and syntax (Writing Right, June 7, 2004).

Eats, Blogs and Leaves applies Truss' dicta to blog writing. I can't think of a higher tribute! I hope Garrett's article becomes required reading for all online writers, no matter what they call their work.

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On the Map

If you notice changes in all the trivia appearing in the column to the left, you've probably seen the new icon/badge/image that links to multimap.com. Click on it to see a map of the Writer's Edge neighborhood. It took too much tweaking to perfectly center the little MM shield (you have to fine-tune the trailing digits of the coordinates).

Still, it's remarkable to be able to designate here the 16 square blocks of Villa Portofino within the Tierrasanta community of the city of San Diego, etc., and have it show up there! It puts this blog on the map, so to speak, in cliches.

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Correct This!

Yesterday's entry surfaced a memory of the "memo incident" which occurred in the early 1980s. My daughter brought home from high school a memo for parents. The school announced a new project to improve students' literacy. They were going to provide weekly pieces of writing for students to correct and parents to look over and approve before sending them back.

The memo was so terribly written that I couldn't restrain myself from proofreading it and sending it (by mail, so it would be delivered) to the principal. I included a note congratulating him on an excellent first assignment. The project must have been cancelled, and my daughter is probably still angry about that embarrassment.

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Let Them Have Blogs!

Lynne Truss offers an explanation of younger generations' inabilities to write right, or at least to punctuate properly. She says in Eats, Shoots and Leaves that "for over a quarter of a century, punctuation and English grammar were simply not taught in the majority of schools". She refers to public schools in Great Britain, but I suspect it also applies to U.S. education. Truss suggests this sad situation resulted from a misguided effort to encourage self-expression.

The trend continues. The eighth largest U.S. public school district proposes creating a digital diary system so that all 138,000 students can have blogs. There's little funding for books, music, and art, but let the students inflict their poor literacy on the world! Think of the filtering that would be necessary to protect the rest of us from nine-year-olds whose every other sentence includes "m______ f______"!

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Technical Difficulties

The technical aspects of blogging are as fascinating (and obscure) as creating websites. I felt I'd never get that RSS feed right. It was so difficult to understand Feedburner that when I finally succeeded, I gave them some feedback and received a kind message from Eric Lunt, validating my experience. Only after fellow WebSanDiego member, Patrick Smith, encouraged me to keep at Feedburner's "Smart Feed" and conversion service that my efforts "took". What was so confusing is that feedburner only converts an atom feed into RSS if someone requests it, or requests a feed with an RSS-only aggregator. If all this looks geek to you, Google it.

The next challenge is Technorati. Currently, if you click on that icon in the left column, you'll reach my Technorati profile that shows empty space next to the Associated and Verified weblogs. I've gone through the process there, but achieved nada. When I check my account, it says the blogs I claimed have been verified. I really can't tell if the services like Allconsuming that check for updates through Technorati are receiving my updates. I think not, because Eric Benson's website (allconsuming.net) does not list my blog entries for books I've mentioned.

Why bother? I enjoy the challenges, I enjoy writing, and most of all, I enjoy being read. I don't want to just fling these posts into the ether and hope for the best. Technorati monitors three million blogs and counting. When someone searches for blogs about writing, I want mine to stand up and be counted with all the rest of them.

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Dylan Thomas

A couple of weeks ago I wrote an entry with a garbled title using the word "sullen". A reader emailed to ask "Why did you call it 'sullen'?" Actually, I was alluding to a poem by Dylan Thomas, "In My Craft or Sullen Art". In 1971 I had cut out a copy of that poem from a women's magazine and kept it with my writing or poetry papers, sometimes posted on a bulletin board.

He expressed what I felt so well:

In my craft or sullen art
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
And the lovers lie abed
With all their griefs in their arms,
I labour by singing light
Not for ambition or bread
Or the strut and trade of charms
On the ivory stages
But for the common wages
Of their most secret heart.
Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
On these spindrift pages
Not for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms
But for the lovers, their arms
Round the griefs of the ages,
Who pay no praise or wages
Nor heed my craft of sullen art.

"these sprindrift pages" indeed

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Cliche

A constant dread I have is that I'll be caught with a cliche down around my ankles. Hackneyed phrases signal an amateur, immature, or a lazy writer. They abound with misspellings in blogs. Preparing blog entries can be a thoughtful, tedious process, or a spur-of-the-moment impulse to strike while the iron is hot. This is when a cliche creeps in.

Catch phrases, currently popular in hamburger advertising on TV, run in herds or come and go as fads, like teenage lingo. Cliches are more enduring. They become embedded in our hearing, in our minds. I think they burrow into our psyches and filter experience and ideas. They're dangerous in that way. You know what you're saying, but what am I hearing if you speak in cliches?

I seem to recall a creative writing teacher at Northwestern expounding that cliches, like Aesop's fables, contain a gem of truth, and that's why they live on. When cliches clash, I start to wonder. How many can you find in this entry?

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Free Books, Almost

After bullying the book club into choosing Lynne Truss' Eats, Shoots & Leaves for our September read, my thrifty Scottish ancestry wouldn't allow me to buy a copy of the recently published book. I thought it was too soon to expect to see copies in used book stores or at the library's monthly sale. I also suspected that I would want to own the guide rather than borrow it, although all the public library's copies had long waiting lists. What to do?

While pondering, I happened to call Fidelity Investments, and the representative ended our transaction by asking me if I'd like to recommend anyone for their services. Hah! Would I sic (sic) junk mail on a friend or family member? "You and the other person will receive a $10 credit for Starbucks," she lured. I told her I don't like Starbucks coffee. "Or you can have a $10 credit with Barnes and Noble," she cooed. I remembered that the company has a website, and a sister book club member had told me it sells used books. I took the chance. The credit (a plastic card with a scratch 'n' sniff PIN) arrived in two days, and I leaped into Barnes & Noble. The "Used" section was easy to spot, the search engine performed to perfection, and an inexpensive copy in good condition was on its way to me in a couple of minutes, guaranteed to arrive within two weeks.

The only aspect that concerns me was the used book dealer's notation that the copy I bought was "remaindered". It had been tossed by a bookstore (or the publisher) only three months after publishing?

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A Density of Souls

Finally finished Christopher Rice's first novel, A Density of Souls. It was a chore, partly because of the awkwardness with which he mishandled words. If a word arrests the reader's attention, it detracts from the sentence and the work as a whole. Rice made some strange verb choices. He seemed enamored with "cock" and "splay". Why his editor allowed a character to have "splayed" her napkin is a greater mystery than the one miscarried by the plot.

On the plus side, he captured the tone of gay relationships. He offered a titillating peek into the world of boyish mutual masterbation and an obligatory coming of gayness story. I was disappointed at the lack of New Orleans setting descriptions. If I read one more explanation of how the high water table prevents ground burials there, I think I'll scream. It was utterly irrelevant to this book. Still, it is a first novel that was published, more than I can say for mine, mouldering in the box that first contained the paper on which it is typed.

I like the variant spelling of "mold" as "mould", especially when used as a verb. It seems a more decadent decay. A personal connotation confuses it with "maudlin" (how I feel about the novel) and "maundering" (what I fear about it).

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Blog this, blog that

Confusion and controversy continue to rage over what's a blog, at least among the people my other day job encounters (web designers and developers). There were diaries, journals, and logs. Now there are logs online, or web logs, used as diaries or journals. The nouns diary and journal have overlapping dictionary definitions, however, a diary is only personal and a journal can be a publication. A log is a record of performance, such as a ship's speed. Add to this the fact that some journalists (in the news writing sense) are publishing blogs, blurring traditional delineations and definitions. Also, as I wrote on July 30 in Professional, Amateur, or Other?, any online writing, however rotten it's written, is considered published.

It's mostly the techies who are objecting to diarists, journalists, and businesses usurping the "blog" name for their publications. Early blogs were frequent, sometimes clandestine, postings of technological insights and news, arcane to non-techies. Geek-speak. I suspect they existed long before the web was invented in 1989, but I don't know what they were called when we had to Kermit them around and reach them by Telnet.

The techies seem to forget, however, that they usurped the term "log" from ship and plane pilots who logged the performance of their crafts long before even the Internet existed.

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For Cat Lovers

I'd just finished a passage in The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold. It described Susie's dog joining her in heaven: "he was so happy to see me, he knocked me down".

I turned the page to begin the next chapter, thinking "That would be nice, to be reunited with all our pets". In that instant my heart was stunned at the possibility of experiencing all my kitties once more. I imagined my beloved Chong launching himself from the floor to my chest and knocking me down; Sam draped across my shoulders and around my neck; Miss Kitty ensconced on my chest, sucking my neck, washing my nostrils and her daughter Sissie's ears while Sissie attempts to nurse on her mother's tiny titties.

I could see Josephine and her three little kittens smelling of milk and sweet dry grass; Tuffy the manx, hopping toward the house, rabbit-wise; Midnight, my first acquisition, following me home from kindergarten, named after the cat on the Buster Brown radio program; Tom, the only red tiger I ever had, reluctantly riding in my bicycle basket; countless, nameless kittens that came and went too quickly.

Once again Chinky Won Lon and Smokey Joe race up and down a staircase; Baby chews the edges of my sweaters while Diablo climbs the Priscilla curtains at Sunnybrook Farm, then poses peacefully with my Buddha statue in the iris garden. He was a refugee from the nearby corn field. Big Blue comes home to be buried with siblings under the iris. Chi Chi proudly offers me her first mouse, and I see her again with her brother, Chong, curled about each other in the egg basket, a living Yin Yang.

It was as if all their souls blew through mine, and I thought, "If I could be sure, I could believe". That reminded me of a long ago friend who repudiated the Jehovah Witness' heaven because it lacked babies. "If there aren't any babies in heaven", she muttered, "I don't want to go".

Is heaven everything we love? Would that be heaven? Actually, I'd settle just for the answers.

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rumspringa

Walking to the house the other day, I stumbled on a stepping stone, lost balance, and probably windmilled about trying to prevent a fall. In the process of tripping over my own feet, I pulled a hip muscle. Well, it's more like a muscle somewhere under the hip at the top of the back of my leg. It hurts to walk fast. I thought, "I'm rump-sprung!" The dictionaries have no definition for this term, hyphenated or not.

It came to mind again when I started to watch the UPN's Amish in the City, where the supposedly Amish were doing their "rumspringa" in L.A. Although I've lived around Amish and read about them all my life, I hadn't heard either the term or the practice. I suspected it was more "made up for TV" junk entertainment. I looked through a few of my books about the Amish and Mennonites and found nothing similar. A superficial surf on the Internet yielded enough potentially credible results like this:

"Rumspringa is a Pennsylvania Dutch term that means "running around." The word also refers to the Amish rite of passage in which many Amish teens aged 16 and older are given the freedom to explore the outside "English" world before deciding whether to get baptized and join the Amish church or to continue living life in modern society. *Sources include 800padutch.com and religioustolerance.org"

There's also a possibly authentic interview with a possibly authentic "authority on the Amish" on the Beliefnet website. I'm hesitant to recommend resources I don't know, especially ones that feature much advertising and "soulmate" matchmaking services.

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