Book Art

In an Outward Bound column of SF Weekly, Karen Zuercher, describes two innovative book shows in the City by the Bay. There Is Nothing Wrong in This Whole Wide World by Chris Cobb rearranged most all the books in the Adobe Book Shop by color. Meanwhile, down the street at the San Francisco Center for the Book, AIGA 50 Books/50 Covers is a juried show of the best designed books and covers published in 2003 put on by the American Institute of Graphic Arts. Books as works of art isn't a new idea. We see many such exhibits, but whole bookstore as a work of art--wow!

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I Need a Hero

I thought I'd found support for my rant on "hero" in the December issue of Harper's. Thomas de Zengotita wrote in "Attack of the Superzeroes" that "The essence of real heroes in the good old days--Newton and Napoleon and Goethe--was that they were essentially unreal. They were not known as people. They were their works and deeds, their myths." He drums up a circular theory that today heroes must perform and become stars, but they can't compete with existing stars who are already performers. "We don't have real heroes anymore because they are too real; representations of them are too rich and detailed. There is no room for us to supply them with mythic life." In the end, he blames technology for the demise of the hero in society because every wannabe can burn a CD, publish a book or a blog, (ouch!) star on reality TV. Ah, but that fame lasts for such a brief instant, as Andy Warhol pointed out.

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Search Writer's Edge

You could hardly miss the addition of a Google search bird at the top of the posts. It perches there for several reasons: blogger.com doesn't offer the facility to sort posts into categories, I can't remember the contents of each post with different titles, and I can't remember titles of posts with a certain content. When I wanted to find all the resources for "writer's block", for example, I was lost. It's for the readers' convenience too of course. This little engine isn't perfect, but it's better than reading all the scratchings to find a particular one. It works better if you enclose a two- or three-word phrase in quotation marks like this: "writer's block". Does it work for you?

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Write Effective Nonfiction

"The National Endowment for the Arts told us a couple of months ago that Americans seriously don't read. There are lots of reasons people don't read, and most of them writers can't fix. But writers can sure control how accessible their writing is," wrote Barbara Davenport in today's "Books" section of The San Diego Union-Tribune. She referred to "readability" or "tone" and stressed this is just as important in nonfiction as in fiction. Collegial understatement, as if you're speaking directly to readers, is more influential, Davenport said, as is a balance of fact, argument, and solutions for a muckraker on social policy.

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Geography Buff Book

A few years ago Brandt Maxwell, a National Weather Service meteorologist, felt "dismayed at the paltry knowledge of geography that most Americans have" and began writing Largest U.S. Cities to Be Named After a Food ... and Other Mind-Boggling Geography Lists from Around the World. His first book appeared this month, published by Santa Monica Press, a small publisher (but not POD). Maxwell said 20% of the first press run of 5,000 copies was already sold to the Discovery Stores. What's more interesting is that he did this without an agent by sending out material to 50 publishers. "I thought I might have a chance with them, often because they'd published a book with some sort of geographical or trivia theme," Maxwell said. Only one other publisher was interested but passed on his book. The publicity tour begins in San Diego next week and continues in Maxwell's home town of Lawrence, KS, in January. Publishers Weekly gave the book a good review, saying the "surprising facts" will appeal to "geography aficionados and trivia buffs" (like 32-year-old Maxwell, who's already visited all the U.S. states and over 50 countries). Read some of it on his website.

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Create Characters

Along the lines of the last entry about finding fixes for writer's block, here's a possibility for developing characters. It's way out there, I'll admit, but take a look at The Status Project. The website suffers a lack of instructions, but keep clicking on links and you'll find lists of descriptors you could use for a character. They can liven up someone you're already writing about or spark ideas for creating a new one. The Status Project is actually art by Kayle Brandon and Heath Bunting, recently displayed at New York city's New Museum of Modern Art, which described the work that "maps some of the interdependencies of official forms of status in an extensive visual diagram. From student cards to passports, Brandon and Bunting document the activities and forms of data that culminate in legal status. The project also includes documentation of the artists exploring their own status as they apply for various forms of identification. This version of the Status Project will further highlight some of the informational borders that define ideas of freedom and access." Here's an "alternative identity" document created for one of the artists:

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Writer's Block Relief

Time again for that favorite topic: Writer's Block. It's also known as Blogger's Block, and one cure is called a prompt or a meme (rhymes with mean) and according to memester supreme, Pariah S. Burke, means: meme n (mem): A unit of cultural information, such as a cultural practice or idea, that is transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another. From the Greek mimema, something imitated, from mimeisthai, to imitate.

Here's a roundup of places you can find something to spark your writing:

one word. so little time.
...in other words...
Jump-start your story
The Muttering Muse
Word beads on Sentence Strings
Writers Digest Writing Prompts
I Am Pariaha

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Self Publishing Romances

It's hard to hear, but British romance novel queen, Barbara Cartland, is taking to self-publishing her next (and last) 160 novels. The manuscripts, dictated before her death at the turn of the century, are available as the Pink Collection. Her estate chose to eliminate the middle man (publisher) in these transactions, the website's director explained to Guardian Unlimited Books News.

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American Idol Writers

Simon & Schuster and Good Morning America are having a memoir contest, inviting people to tell the stories of their lives in a maximum of 600 words. Three finalists will get to "work with professional writers who will turn their stories into manuscripts." Those manuscripts will be voted on by viewers, and the publisher will issue the winning book in late April. Meanwhile in England, the second Lit Idol contest is starting up with notorious Simon Coldwell's brother, Tony, as one of the judges. This one's for crime fiction of up to 10,000 words from the opening chapters of a novel with a two-page synopsis. The finalists will be announced at London Book Fair on March 15 and represented by Curtis Brown, a British publisher. Check at www.thebookplace.co.uk and www.oneword.co.uk for details eventually.

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Google Scholar

Yet another weapon in the writer's research amunition depot: Google Scholar. The latest beta test offering from the Google Empire "enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web." An interesting twist in how Google presents the results of a search: they are ranked by relevance according to the authors, the publications in which they appeared, and how often they've been cited in scholarly literature, as well as by the content. Search results may include citations of material not online, Google says. This sounds like an awful lot of work for a free service. Who decided the authors' and publications' rankings, I wonder, and how? Read all about it.

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Paris Review

I've never known a writer who didn't enjoy reading about other writers. Since the 1950's one of the best sources for this information has been the "Writers-at-Work" series in the matchless Paris Review. Until recently, you had to put your paws on a printed copy to read it. The successors to the Review's founder and former editor, George Plimpton, have brought his dream into reality, and the interviews are coming online. You can download .pdf copies of the 1950's interviews at no cost, and a whole lot more, on the website. Succeeding decades of priceless prose will become available from January to July next year.

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Orkut Media

In a surprising, and I think sideways, move this week Orkut, the online social networking service, opened what they're calling "Orkut Media". On a website with viewing otherwise restricted to members only, the Orkut Media is open to the public. Photos and articles by Orkut members comprise this new site. Orkut is owned by Google, also the parent company of blogger.com, which creates this and a zillion other blogs. Guidelines for submissions are available. Orkut touts the new publication as a place to build the all important "clippings" for new writers. There is no payment. I presume the audience for Orkut Media would be mostly Orkut members and their friends and families. The average Orkut member is single, 18-25 years old, and lives in Brazil. Yes, Brazil! According to the website's latest demographics, more than 60% of the membership reside in the Portuguese-speaking South American country.

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Ona Russell

Earlier this year Ona Russell published her first fiction. As is often the case, the story behind the story is interesting. Recently Russell described how she reconnected with her Jewish roots through the research she performed for O'Brien's Desk: An Historical Mystery. She had ignored and submerged the fact of her ancestry until she discovered a pioneering Jewish woman, Sarah Kaufman, in Russell's husband's family history. Reading about Kaufman's life, Russell said, "spoke to me through time and space" and awakened her to her Jewish heritage. She now plans a series of historical mysteries about the fictional character she created.

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Publishers Marketplace

If you're interested in working in the publishing field, finding an agent or a place for your agent to shop around something you've written, or a place to promote your work yourself, check out Publishers Marketplace. Most of the openings listed on the job board are in New York or California. The agents' listings are especially interesting because they indicate the genre each one handles. If you join and post a website about yourself, you can indicate if you're in the market for an agent (or a new one). Perhaps the best deal is the free daily newsletter, Publisher's Lunch--Published Daily. Except When Not. It must be the last free lunch left in the universe. You can read some of it on the website or receive a richer edition if you join. The website recently added RSS feeds for the jobs board and listings of rights news and offerings (where agents market your work).

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Google Cheats

A couple of weeks ago Google revised its "cheatsheet" to list a few new tricks to search more specifically. You probably already know the Boolean operators of and, or, +, and -. Enclosing a phrase in quotation marks means "find this set of words exactly as I have typed them". Use the tilde (~) right before a word to include a search on its synonyms, and an asterisk (*) between two words means search for those words separated by exactly one word. Other operators such as site:, cache:, related:, info:, link:, and safesearch: work with websites, and you can use them in conjunction with other search terms. In the search engine, Google assumes an "and" between all separate words not in quotation marks and not a URL. The results will differ depending on which term comes first. Google has operators for calculations (less of interest to word people), and a couple for searching with dates. These are daterange: and date:3,6, or 12. Results with these are questionable. A few unadvertised operators allow you to search residential and business phone books (bphonebook: and rphonebook:) and for information about a specific stock (stocks:). See the cheatsheet page for examples of usage.

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Yahoo! News Resource

I've found a section of Yahoo that might help you as a reader and a writer. It's the Yahoo News on Literature and Authors. The page's central contents of News Stories probably changes frequently. Below that is a section of Related Web Sites where I found articles with lists of life-changing books, authors' selections of books that influenced them and their writing, as I mentioned yesterday. Reading one of these, I was reminded of Durrell's Alexandria Quartet and The Black Book. How could I miss mentioning them? A refresher course is handy. Even better, maybe I should reread these classics for a mental makeover! The page also contains links to the Yahoo Directory sections on Literature, Authors, and Literature Awards. That will be useful for my friend who reads only books from lists of award winners.

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Influences on Writers

"What writers influenced you?" Every writer I've met or whose work I've read has probably influenced my writing in one way or another. Some of the more well-known are listed on my biography page, but I don't try to write horror and science fiction, which I read for pleasure. My formative years were spent with Hemingway, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald, Bradbury, Huxley, Emerson, and Russel (Bertrand), to list a few still in my bookcases. Even more English and American poets occupied my mind and heart during adolescence and early adulthood. More recently entire shelves became dedicated to Stephen King and Anne Rice, another is filled with business tomes by Peters and Covey, and the eight-foot top of the office hutch houses material on statistics, databases, and computers. I only keep books that have proven instructive or useful--or wildly entertaining in the case of fiction. The shelves can't keep up with the inflow, a factor I've noticed in the home of every writer I've ever visited.

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Modern Vampires

We were sitting around discussing the vampire genre and how it has (or hasn't) changed through the years after Bram Stoker made Dracula. Actually, vampires appeared in Western literature long before Stoker's 1897 novel, according to Elizabeth Miller's interesting website. If you're so inclined, there's a vampire writing contest. In our discussion, some descriptions of the vampire genre included seduction, intellectualization, progenitor of slasher movies, misunderstood, and bearer of free choice (soul). The latter refers to the Buffy/Angel TV series and films. Occasionally the demons in those productions invade computer systems, but for the most part, the vampires do not yet use contemporary cyberspace and technology. They aren't nearly as wired as the characters on the soap opera Days of Our Lives where everyone carries cell phones and PDA's with sci-fi tracking capabilities. If you know of any high tech vampires, send in the 411.

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Take Risks

Sometimes writing requires risk taking. In the beginning, I turned down an assignment concerning alcoholism because I thought I was too sensitive to be able to handle it. Then I met Donn Pearce, the author of "Cool Hand Luke" which was made into a popular movie. Pearce strongly advised me to never (never!) turn down an opportunity to write. I remembered his advice when I had to go to sea in small boats. I get dizzy on escalators, but risking seasickness allowed me to take dramatic photos of the Coast Guard retrieving an injured sailor from an oil tanker. On another occasion, I accompanied treasure divers and later expanded the newspaper story for a freelance magazine article. Sure enough, late afternoon swells rocked the dive boat just right to nauseate me, but it was well worth the temporary discomfort!

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Rhythms of Life

In addition to using basic life needs to add realism and continuity to your writing, use the rhythms we all experience. Changing seasons are a good example. For instance, even in sunny southern California, the subtle change from summer through fall makes differences in the appearance of the landscape, the weather, people's behavior. I find myself drinking hot tea instead of iced, opening the blinds to let in sunshine to help heat the house, opening windows only when the air temperature outdoors exceeds that of the indoors. Walking somewhere requires a jacket, and with the return to standard time, the daily constitutional moves to earlier in the afternoon. Thoughts of making stews and chili come to mind. If this story were set in the southern hemisphere, the activities would reverse. Spring melts into summer, no matter what month the calendar shows. A Google search on "weather" provides many good references where you can check the weather for any part of the globe and research it for any time of year.

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Lolita in Teheran

If you visit this blog's website, you may have noticed I'm currently reading a book titled "Reading Lolita in Teheran". It's about how repressed women were in Iran ten years ago. I happen to know a young Iranian woman through the Internet. We met on Orkut, the social networking website, and we've been emailing for several months. It was so satisfying to be able to send her questions about her contemporary life, and receive a response in a few hours. I was relieved to read that the rules are somewhat relaxed (probably after Khoumeini died). She often reassures me that the negative aspects of life in Muslim countries are due to political causes, not the religion of Islam. If it weren't for cyberspace, I might have lived out the rest of my life assuming that women in the middle east experience only lives of quiet despair.

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Blogging for Books 11/04

The November Blogging for Books contest starts today. Visit The Zero Boss to discover this month's theme. Check the rules if you're unfamiliar. It's simple: write on the theme, post your writing to a blog (email it to me for posting here if you wish), sit back and wait for the praise to roll in. You might even win a book in the process. At the very least, the exercise will banish any lingering writer's block. Good luck!

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