The Reader's Catalog

Someone added my name and address to mailing lists dealing in books. I was a little irked until this week's deluge of junk mail delivered The Reader's Catalog. The classic selections appear to be trade paperbacks, probably custom print runs. I mention this resource because not only is it available online, but the books the business carries are ones I could recommend to beginning writers as beneficial reading matter. Of all the books and accoutrements listed, I'd really like to receive the Children's Travel Journal and Kit. It looks like so much fun!

Writing News Releases

"Day of the Dead Sugar Skulls" is my favorite news headline. Every year a local publication uses it to announce a Dias de Los Muertos celebration. Every year I puzzle over it the first time it runs. By now the people in the organization having the event must be reconciled to having little to no control over what parts of their news release are used, and how the information is presented. They probably write it as a regular news article, and that's the best way to go about it. (more)

Make Characters Real

Use basic needs--food, water, sleep, shelter--to REALize your characters. This coordinates closely with a previous suggestion to remember to use the five basic senses in your writing. It applies to what your characters experience as well. Other common human characteristics include desires for sex and companionship; pleasure-seeking/pain avoidance; and intellectual pattern-seeking and a need to understand. The basic needs apply to all life forms we know about, historic and current. There's no reason to think they won't continue into the future.

If you're writing speculative fiction, horror, sci-fi, or fantasy, you might give a character an opposite desire or lack of a need to differentiate your work. Asking readers for a total "suspension of disbelief", however, could backfire. A universe with which they cannot identify at all strains readers' abilities to remain in the fictional experience. Even in the Known Space worlds of Larry Niven characters don't violate all the familiar: The Kzin mate; the protagonists of The Neutron Star search for similarities, learn, and grow; inhabitants of The Ringworld build homes.

Reality and Fantasy

Think about the blurring lines that separate reality from fantasy; news from entertainment; and the media, messages, and messages' recipients. Leaving aside arguments concerning the nature of reality, consider what's going on in broadcast media. An upcoming TV crime show CSI (fantasy) deals with a victim from a reality show. So-called "reality shows" are obviously contrived in plots, settings, and probably in participants, who aren't ordinary people when production crews finish coaching them.

What about the latest interactive edutainment that converts a TV into a toy? Children play with the set via a DVD and a hand-held device with content and a wireless connection to the DVD player. Heaven knows what's going on in the kids' minds when they have the ability to control what they see and hear. It's hard enough to teach children the difference between reality and fantasy even when it's clear to an adult!

The third incident that spurred on this thought-train was a review of Margaret Drabble's The Red Queen in the October 24, 2004, San Diego Union-Tribune by University of San Diego English instructor Bart Thurber. He remarked that the novel contains many references, and Her sources are real, he said. He also alluded to Nabokov and Umberto Eco as planting fantasy references in their books. It made me think of Brown's Da Vinci Code, Amish in the City, and back to Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, all confusions of fantasy and fact, presented as reality.

Dangling Participials

According to Strunk and White , if you dangle your participial phrase at the beginning of a sentence, it had better refer to the grammatical subject of the sentence. An example is needed to illustrate:

Shedding fur and dander all about, Sharon chased the cats through the house.

What the author means is that the cats shed while Sharon (the subject of the sentence) chased them. To make it clear, the sentence needs rewriting something like this:

Shedding fur and dander, the cats raced ahead of Sharon.

The same rule applies even if the participial phrase begins with an adjective, preposition, or a conjunction (very popular these days). Beginning a sentence with "As" may seem mild and unassuming; however, it can lead to the ludicrous, as Strunk and White noted: "As a mother of five, with another on the way, my ironing board is always up."

Good Writing

In the ongoing effort to help writers (especially online) get started and improve, here are some websites with useful articles:

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/writebetter/
http://www.writerswrite.com/journal/dec99/keegan21.htm
http://www.writerswrite.com/journal/aug98/keegan11.htm

Perhaps extending the guidelines to email would be good practice. A recent message to Writer's Edge referred to "good writting". I visited the would-be author's website and also found "writting" in the copy. Such simple spelling mistakes encourage screaming and shouting here, as does writing the name of the language as "english" (always capitalize proper names).

Starting to Write Poetry

In the 2000 edition of The Writer's Handbook, Susan Kelly interviewed then U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky. She asked if he wrote poems as a child and he said, "I would always be ... making up little chants in my mind" without recording them on paper. I thought back to the earliest poems I can remember creating. There's actually an extant paper copy of a short epic I wrote at age ten! Prior to that personal Romeo and Juliet saga, I recall carrying about a tiny red plastic note pad case in which I wrote, with a tiny yellow pencil, "Four things, poor things." It was a two-line requiem to the dead animals I had counted along the highway on a trip to the farmer's market around the courthouse in Hamilton, Ohio. The rhyming scheme of Mother Goose had taken fierce hold! Pinsky crafts his works in my style, too: "you're trying to pour your heart out," he said. His Favorite Poem Project continues to record thousands of varied Americans delivering their favorite poetry.

Bad Writing

I thought I'd found another good online reference for beginning writers until I spotted, early on, a wrong verb. The word choice changed the entire tone of the article to something the writer did not intend. When I contacted him about it, part of his reply was "It's JUST a blog". The writing concerns communication. It is published on the Internet in the author's website, where he touts himself as a "writer" in three online publications and the editor of another. In his vitriolic rebuttal he said, "I'm not a writer", as if that excused him from any responsibility. Some online writers seem to want to have their cake and eat it too, as the saying goes. They want copyright protection and to be seen as experts whose sites merit inbound links, but without accountability for the example their writing presents. The saddest part of this adolescent attitude is that they perpetuate one another's mistakes and cultivate the culture of "I saw it on the web, so it must be right".

Gmail Anyone?

Writers.Edge@gmail.com has some invitations to give away. Send an email to that address with your first and last name. Gmail will automatically send you an "invite" for a 1G free account. They've made some nice upgrades to the program which, like Google's social networking website Orkut, remains in beta test mode.

Predictions Database

Here's a fun research tool. Imagining the Internet is a project of Elon University and the Pew Internet and American Life Project. They've collected predictions about the Internet made from 1990 - 1995 by a thousand people in positions to know what they were talking about. The remarks are catalogued in a database with search capabilities including: Predictor's Name; Topic; Subtopic; Date of Prediction; Date of Publication; Publication Title; Medium of Prediction; Author of Publication; Article or Chapter Title; Page or URL. There's also a searchable database with brief biographies of the predictors. If you write about communication and/or the 'net, this one's a keeper. They're doing it again, and you can participate. This time the predictions are anonymous, still interesting but less useful.

National Novel Writing Month

It's time to register for the sixth annual 30-day-wonder contest. The idea is to write a 50,000-word novel during November. Technically, that's really a novella, or a long short story, but that's not the point. The nonprofit organization is affiliated with do-good activities like schools and libraries and laptops and books. It's free to enter and everyone who writes at least 50K words is a winner! Blogger.com, in its inimitable way, has taken this a step further to announce a Blog Your Novel program that will take place here. Enjoy!

Memoir Writing

When a potential student contacted me about memoir writing, I thought of freelancer Lonnie Burstein Hewitt. She's written an inexpensive trade paperback guide for biography/memoir writers, The Little Red Writing Book. It was a kick for me to meet her, because she's also the author of a book I first bought and used in 1986, A Guide to Walking San Diego. We discussed the practicality of the newest self-publishing technique, Print/Publish on Demand (POD), but reached no firm conclusions on the phenomenon. She's done it once, and I've been researching POD for about a year. The reviews are mixed and still coming in.

Writing Longer

How did you like the last post? I warned that longer and longer entries are a problem for bloggers, especially bloggers who are writers. If you like the longer, linked pieces (or not) let me know. That way, the paragraph received as a feed is a teaser; and it really must be a grabber, like the lead sentence in most writing. It's good practice for a career in writing copy for online advertising, I'm told. On a more creative note, the Blogging For Books October contest winner is Lilly of The World According to Me. It must have worn her out, poor girl, because she hasn't blogged since then.

Writers' Journals

Writing instructors often advocate (and teach classes about) keeping a journal. This is not the same as keeping a diary or a personal blog, in my opinion. Pouring out your daily rants and raves may be psychologically therapeutic, but it will seldom make you a better writer or provide fuel for your professional writing engine.
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How to Sell Books

Ever wonder what goes on in the mind of the owner of an independent book store when restocking the shelves? Author M.J. Rose found out by allowing Nicki Leone, manager of Bristol Books in Wilmington, NC to guest blog on book promotions with Things in my Inbox. I learned from Leone that there are "approximately 500 books published EVERY DAY in this country". She bewailed the junk sent by book promoters. Here's her wish list:

• press kit with usable copy like a generic author interview, on a CD
• an audio selection that she can hear during her commute (media unspecified)
• a shelf talker card with a photo of the book and "Recommended Reading"
• contact info for the author's website
• what events or programs the author wants
• which ones the author will participate in

Leone suggests that the publisher/promoter allow store owners to order the junk as part of their marketing plan: "Allow one freebie gizmo for each book ordered, But if I could have asked for, say, 10 bags of pasta, and done a "Spaghetti Western" promotion around the title, given away a bag with the purchase of a book, maybe had a contest for the best sauce? Well that has potential." You get the idea? Read the whole entry for context.

Good Links for Writers

Developing the resources page is going slowly, because I research all recommended links for quality. On Richard Lederer's website I found a wonderful collection of references for Etymology, Grammar & Usage, Columns/Online Magazines, Linguistics, Newsgroups, Puns, Reference including Dictionaries & Thesauri and Other, Word Games, Word & Letter Play, and Word Watching & Vocabulary Development. He's given us permission to link directly. Graciously.

Three Simple Rules

"All these rules just go right out the window when I start," a beginner complained, concerned about being unable to remember guidelines for good writing. Let's make it simple: use senses, specific nouns, and strong verbs. Most forms of life see, hear, smell, taste, and feel. Add details about these senses frequently. Sharon has Siamese. Isn't that more colorful than "a friend has cats"? Even better, Sharon breeds Siamese. She also strokes, tickles, and brushes them. Use strong verbs in the active voice. "Sharon scratches her favorite Siamese under his chin; his tourquoise eyes slide shut, and a gentle rumble vibrates against her fingers." You could use this sentence in fiction and nonfiction. Or, passively, this sentence could be used.

Blogshares

I discovered this badge for Blogshares. A quick visit elicited major confusion. In short, it's a fantasy stock market in which blogs and their links are commodities and valuations, crossed with a Vegas casino. If it weren't for the latter, I probably would be writing about the website. Imagine my shock to find Writer's Edge already in play--and I hadn't even registered it! Curiosity piqued, I snooped through every page I could enter with an utter lack of comprehension, except to find a couple of guys who were trading my stock, err, blogshares. I tracked back to find their blogs, and whoops! One was already linked to Writer's Edge. That's one way to make the value of your stock grow -- promote the product.

There was some good reason for me to wait to join Blogshares until the blog had its own URL, but memory fails me. So, yesterday I joined and what did I find first--another blogging contest! Blogshares is almost as complicated as the real life version, including derivitives. Considering it took ten years of study before I dabbled in a municipal bond mutual fund as my first dollar-denominated investment, it's no surprise that I haven't started trading blogs yet. However, I did find the website's quick fix, equivalent to a one-armed bandit: a sequence of questions appear in a poll, and a participant wins five "chips" for each response. Click, click -- kaching! I have no idea what good the chips are, but the website is certainly fun!

Googleprint

Google is beta testing a new book service. When you look for a "book" in the regular search window, books in the googleprint system are presented at the top of the page with an icon of colorful book spines. Click a listing to move into the special area where you're offered glimpses (like Amazon's "Inside the Book") of covers, copyrights, a few pages, tables of contents, and links to pages for the books at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Book Sense, and in Froogle. Booksense.com looked useful because it requires you to search by zip code. Unfortunately it returned the name of a bookstore which specializes in mysteries when I was looking at books on herbs. Googleprint wants publishers to send books and has a comprehensive program and procedures established to receive and scan them at no charge. The whole book is scanned so it's all searchable. Also, Google puts contextual advertising on the results pages resulting in income to the publisher. It is unclear if Google accepts print/publish-on-deman (POD) productions. It does ask for the ASIN (Amazon Standard Identification Number) of any book sent.

August Bodies

Thanks to writing friend Dona Meilach (72 of her 85 books are listed at Amazon!) I had the opportunity to talk with several other famous and about-to-be-famous writers. The august group included Richard Lederer, David Brin, Natasha Josefowitz, Wayne Dosick, and Ona Russell. Watch for entries on these people and others I interviewed (and thanks for permission to boldly split infinitives, Richard!)

Growing Pains

We've moved into our own home at http://www.writers-edge.info. Me, myself, and I never expected this growing success; that's why we didn't plan ahead. Actually, the blog began as a home brew experiment with some store bought goods (like Google's Blogger and AdSense, Amazon's Associates, and PayPal). The bulk of the website that developed around the blog remains back at Hancock Websites, but the blog itself becomes the index or home page at writers-edge.info. Yes, that's really a hyphen in the middle of the name; we chose the .info suffix because it best describes the site. The other pages will be duplicated and old copies and blog archives will stay where they are ad nauseum. Visitors to the old address will find a notice of the move. Yes, it's complicated and challenging, and that's what we like.

Legend in Her Own Mind

If you love words, you must read this story about a $40,000 mural with misspelled names of Einstein, Shakespeare, Vincent Van Gogh, Michelangelo and seven other historical figures. Now the city of Livermore, California, is paying the artist an additional $6,000, plus expenses, to fix her mistakes. Miami-based Maria Alquilar said, "The people that are into humanities, and are into Blake's concept of enlightenment, they are not looking at the words. In their mind the words register correctly."

B4B - October Last Call

You have until 6 a.m. (PST) Monday to enter the October Blogging for Books about a time you were pushed to the brink of insanity. Guest blogging at Writer's Edge is once again available by comment right here or by sending your entry as plain text in the body of an email to writersedgeATattDOTnet (take out the AT and the DOT and substitute appropriate symbols).

Sandy Adams B4B

Then the ZeroBoss asked his readers to write something.

I stumbled on to the ZeroBoss's site as Blogging for Book 3# happened and quickly became addicted to not just the ZeroBoss's blog but also all of the people who comment on his entries. This crazy person who takes care of the kids, the house, and yet still seems to have a sense of humor fascinated me. Then Blogging for Books 4# came along.

Now I write all the time, sure, in secret. Rarely allowing anyone to read or critique my stuff. "I don't want to do this" I hear myself say. Suddenly I've given the ZeroBoss the thundering voice of God "HAHAHA" laughs "why she doesn’t even know what a comma is used for" I start to mess around comma, or period, comma noperiodnono comma.....urg, well, something like that.

Nothing like feeling like you can't do something to make me angry enough to try. I start to think of all the great crazy stories I have. There's the one about the crazy ex......but really that's his crazy story I just got pulled in. Then there is how my mother drives me crazy, but shoot doesn't everyone's mother drive them crazy? In my head I write about a million transcripts from my life. I'm driving down the street yelling at the people in front of me because they just screwed up and now I can't remember where in my story I was. Then I start getting mad at the ZeroBoss, how dare he presume to ask random people to write in, doesn't he know what he is doing to me? This really pisses me off and I decide I’'m not going to write anything.

Not so easy. I get this inkling in my brain that if I don't write in, it's going really hurt. How many times have I not done something..... .about a zillion. Oh I do the big things like deciding to live overseas or moving halfway across the country with no job and no money. It's the little things that I have problems with, like going to the doctors, or heck someday's I'm scared of the grocery store. When it comes to my art, I usually destroy it rather then take a chance that someone might see it. Burning it, erasing, drowning, I've done it all to my best stuff, the stuff of my soul. AND it hurts, every single time. It hurts like someone stripped the skin off my arms. I'm sick of being sick, I'm tired of the pain, and I'm pretty sure that the ZeroBoss does not have the voice of God. So here it goes.....good luck to myself.

Book Reviews -- Pi vs. Geisha

Two books I've been reading make for interesting comparisons and constrasts. Memoirs of a Geisha is definitely a 'life of' type of book, Life of Pi both is and is not a memoir. Actually, neither are really memoirs; they are novels, fiction, untrue. I stress this, because there seems to be some confusion among writers and readers about what forms are fiction and what forms of writing are considered nonfiction. I'm ambivalent about "creative nonfiction" at the moment.

The first 100 pages of Life of Pi were the best part for me. The author laid out the path of Pi to full participation with multiple religions in a pleasing, rather linear fashion. The bulk of the book, dealing with Pi's ordeal in a lifeboat, was depressing and tedious. I found the appended transcript and report as much gimmickry as the entire premise that this was a tale told to the author by the main character and in exactly 100 chapters. My impression that the writing quality deteriorated with the story (and Pi) may to be a function of growing discontent with the story itself. Switching back and forth with time and settings was disruptive rather than intriguing.

Memoirs of a Geisha received gushy positive reviews, especially because it was a first novel. I found it slow and boring at the beginning and wondered what all the fuss was about. Eventually the story engaged my interest, especially the description of life in Japan during and after WW II. By the surprising end, which came all too fast, I wanted more. The author also used the "as told to" device and in this case it didn't intrude, probably because he limited it to the book's beginning. I found remarkable his ability to write from a woman's point of view with delicacy and insight. He captured the mindset of an oppressed person in an oppressive society very well.

Epigraphs

For part of a novel, I was writing those little quotation thingies you find at the beginnings of book chapters. I'd been trying, on the fly, to discover the correct name for weeks. Finally I could stand it no longer and went to Ask.com (formerly Ask Jeeves). In a roundabout fumbling with "term, quotation, book, beginning, and chapter" I fell into a fantastic page of terms.

There it was: "Epigraph 1. An inscription, especially on a building, statue, or the like. 2. An apposite quotation at the beginning of a book, chapter, etc." Of course then I had to visit the dictionary to ensure I had a handle on "apposite": adj. Strikingly appropriate and relevant. See Synonyms at relevant. And then they wrote: ... Apposite implies a striking appropriateness and pertinence: used apposite verbal images in the paper. Whew! What a lot of digging just to make up quotes. Writing fiction is hard work.

A Way With Words

Nonfiction writer Martha Barnette is the new co-host with Richard Lederer for A Way With Words, a weekly US public radio program on the English language. If it doesn't air in your area, listen to a live or delayed stream (broadband and Windows Media Player required) here (click on A Way With Words about halfway down). Barnette's website has some interesting links for word lovers and writers alike.

Odds & Ends

You have until 6 a.m. (PST) next Monday to enter the October Blogging for Books about a time you were pushed to the brink of insanity. Guest blogging at Writer's Edge is once again available by comment here or by email. I'm feeling very much in service mode, having just finished Memoir of a Geisha. [delicate feminine shudder shakes her shoulders]

Last night I indulged my German ancestry in a luscious dinner of pork steaks cooked over sauerkraut, served with hot sweet and sour potato salad. O.K., so I used canned potato salad for the first time in my life. I admit to being so desperate. I'd visited a nearby Octoberfest Sunday, only to find it a common arts and crap show instead. It was majorly disappointing! No Octoberfests again until I see Munich. Ach!

Teaching Writing

Some writers were discussing teaching writing. We agreed that writing teachers should be published authors, whether or not they also have teaching credentials. "Of course, writing can't be taught. It's just something you're born with," someone said. Hmm. I'm not so sure. Certainly one can learn to write news, stretch that into magazine articles, extend it to a nonfiction book. Tools and guidelines abound. On the other hand, writing good poetry and fiction does seem to require some certain intangibles. I'm starting to suspect these mysterious qualities relate to memory and verbal skills (as measured by I.Q. tests) and a sensitivity to stimuli that sometimes accompanies other less desirable conditions like alcoholism, agoraphobia, and anxiety disorders. The illusive "creativity" may be more a matter of innate traits that can be coaxed and nurtured and guided. It's less an either/or situation than a more or less one. It seems to me that to exercise and try to develop a minimal creative writing talent would result in a mechanistic style, rather like formula writing: plug in a character from list A with an adjective from the B list, a verb from list C, and a D list adverb. Repeat until the story's done.

Blog Contest

Nominations are open until October 15 for this quarter's best blog and best blog entry at The Diarist Awards. This is a peer review process, however. Only bloggers can nominate other blogs for awards. The categories should be perused before you fill out a nomination form. You can't solicit others to vote for your blog, either, but if you email me, I'll consider a nomination. Send me the permalink to an entry you'd like nominated, or to your blog for a site nomination. Be sure to note the information is for The Diarist Awards. Good Luck!

MLB

Instead of an X-Files rerun, the ninth inning of the Dodgers/Giants baseball game fuzzed into view on my TV yesterday afternoon. Serendipity. Watching Steve Finley's grand slam and the incredible come-from-behind victory that clinched the NL West pennant for the Dodgers ignited my baseball fever. After many years of banked fires, I felt adrenalin stabs of excitement, pulse race, breath quicken and yes, yes, yes!

It was better than sex. It made me want to read again Shoeless Joe by W.P. Kinsella, and watch the video of Field of Dreams.

I'm in love again. His initials are MLB.

Linguistic Project

What will archeologists and linguists use in future millennia to unlock the secret scribblings we make when English has vanished from the earth? The Rosetta Project is a global collaboration of language specialists and native speakers working to build a publicly accessible archive of all documented human languages. Why worry? The project explains that "Fifty to ninety percent of the world's languages are predicted to disappear in the next century, many with little or no significant documentation. Much of the work that has been done, especially on smaller languages, remains hidden away in personal research files or poorly preserved in under-funded archives."

The project has several tools you can use already. Its All Language Archive produced this result for basic English. I had no idea English, in its many flavors, is the language of so many countries. Another surprise was the common text used in the Comparative Word List Generator: translations of Genesis Chapters 1-3 as Biblical texts are the most widely and carefully translated writings on the planet, they say. The project plans to make material available in three media: online, in a huge reference book, and on micro-etched (analog) discs.