Blog Bling

This probably won't make much sense to those who read it through a feed. You'll need to visit the web page at http://www.writers-edge.info to see the Blog Bling I'm talking about. That's my term (remember, you saw it here first) for most of the entries you see in the left column: badges from services, directories, groups and activities in which I participate, and a few selected ads. They come and go as I play with the page and/or links go bad. The latest addition is A Word A Day, from Wordsmith. It's tucked between the Archives and the Honorable Mentions list. Another is the blog ad at the top of the column, a little experiment in seducing more readers to visit. At the very bottom is the on-again, off-again visitors' locations service from Hitmaps--finally, someone in Africa stopped by! Some prefer a more minimalist appearance for their blogs. I can't resist the girl geek mind candy. What the heck? We all have our addictions. Pass me another piece of bling.

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Quote Week Nine

"Words are loaded pistols" Jean-Paul Sartre

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Writing Content

A line of text on a web page takes 25% longer to read than on paper. Reading words on the screen is quickly tiring. Part of this has to do with the fact that what you see on the screen is composed of pixels, little bitty dots, that the eye/brain system must work harder to recognize as letters, words. The nearest analog is dot matrix printing, a pretty much obsolete technology for reading material. One consequence of this fact that screen text is more difficult to read is that viewers tend to skip over long sentences and phrases. A way to induce readers to stick with text online is to reduce the line length to about half the screen's width, or about 10-12 words. Writing for the web is one time when the writer may have a little control over how the writing will appear to most readers.

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Christopher Rice

It seems long ago that I mentioned and reviewed this Rice's first novel, A Density of Souls (also posted at at Allconsuming.) Now he's about to tour for his third novel and opened a website Author Christopher Rice on himself, his books, and mostly about gloomy gayness. He also drags in his famous mother's spat with Amazon.com reviewers of her latest novel. A nice touch is the oppotunity to read portions (synopses and prologues) of his books, unfortunately in a website frame which requires much scrolling. More on the plus side, Rice offers personal information, his speaking schedule, background information on the books, photos, and lots of links -- all practices I advocate in writer's websites and discuss in my new eBook, Basic Effective Websites for Writers, just released today.

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Virtual Books

In Tuesday's Buzz, Balls & Hype M.J. Rose asked Kevin Smokler for his vision of the future:

Every author will have a website, most will have a blog. Publishers will read blogs as a matter of course and know they are crucial to book publicity. Authors will know that hiding out, pretending technology doesn't exist and being afraid of contact with your readers is foolish and self-destructive.

Smokler is, of course, inventor and general factotum of The Virtual Book Tour in which authors visit blogs to boost sales of their books. Now, if we could get Smokler together with Atwood for virtual signings during the virtual tours, all we'd need is virtual books.

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Handling Rejections

If you've ever had even a passing inclination to write a book, hop over to The Zero Boss: Das Book - The First Wave of Rejections. Especially read the supportive comments that follow. I must hand a gold medal to the author, for he has consistently shared the book-writing process with his readers (which includes getting it published). Of course, he solipstically shares just about everything else in his life with his readers, a blatant case of T.M.I. (too much information!)

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Author Quotes

In my never-ending research to bring you useful writers' resources, I stumbled upon onfocus.com : authors. Granted, it's a limited list, but at least you can run down it, select someone you're interested in, and see what they said. Try the random function. Like a virtual fortune cookie for the bookish. Onfocus is part of a personal blog by Paul Bausch, a web developer in Corvallis, Oregon.

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Dean Koontz

Novelist Dean Koontz could probably benefit from Margaret Atwood's Unotchit invention. InsideBayArea.com reported recently about Koontz:

He has written 70 books in half as many years, with sales nearing 300 million in 38 languages -- all with little publicity for his books or himself. ("I'm probably the only best-selling author who's never done a book tour.") He gets 20,000 fan letters a year, reads every one and employs two full-time assistants to help answer them. He doesn't use e-mail and has no Internet access on his computer because it might distract him from his work, which he does all day every day, almost nonstop.

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Amazon Book Reviews

Dartmouth Professor Mikhail Gronas thinks the amateur reviews buried in the bowels of Amazon.com are valuable nuggets of literary gold, ready for research to mine. "Amazon.com book reviews are not based on literary theory," he says. "They are written by everyday readers, not scholars, who bring a new perspective to the topic of taste. Since online reviews are voluntary, they offer honest opinions that aren't prompted by specific questions," he says. I thought all reviews are voluntary! Amazon book reviewers can assign up to five stars as signs of favorability. Gronas thinks this is a valid quantification of "taste". I wonder, because I lurked on the Amazon reviewers' message board for a while and read quite a few complaints about the top ranked reviewer always giving a good review to the incredible number of books claimed to have been read. (The person is nameless here because, after agreeing to an interview, responses were not forthcoming.) The first principle I learned about reviewing was that if you have nothing good to say, don't say anything. No review is worse for book sales than a bad one. The point is, I dont think Gronas will learn as much from an analysis of Amazon book reviews as he would from a comparison with books not reviewed.

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Quote Week Eight

"Self-discipline is when your conscience tells you to do something and you don't talk back." W. K. Hope

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Subtitles

The New York Times Sunday Book Review carries an essay, "The Subtitle That Changed America". It's written by Ben Yagoda, who directs the journalism program at the University of Delaware. He's nostalgic for times past when books needed only "strong titles". He blames an excess of books published and decreased advertising budgets for elaborate subtitles to capture the fickle reading public's attention. The current fad, Yagoda notes, is to include a "how", "why", "list", or "opening preposition" such as Inside, Beneath, and Beyond. Three-part lists have been popular in recent years. I think another purpose might be to catch the attention of Internet search engines. Every time a book is buzzed in a blog, the more keywords mentioned in the title/subtitle, the more snags are available to catch digital attention.

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Writing Hacks

Mind Hacks is subtitled Tips & Tools for Using Your Brain. I've been reading it with a writer's eye, searching for secrets we can use in our work. I alluded to one of these when I wrote about keeping subject and verb close, the Stop memory-Buffer Overrun While Reading hack #51 which begins on page 165. The subhead for this section reads, The length of a sentence isn't what makes it hard to understand--it's how long you have to wait for a phrase to be completed. The book has a decidedly technical bent both in using the language of computing and in referring readers to websites that demonstrate "hacks" (another computer term). Best of all, it's research-based, and the authors include citations right in the text for each section, although they call them "End Notes". Many of the citations and references are digital, and that makes following up an idea even easier. The authors don't require attribution for using their material, but I think they're entitled to every buzz we can give them: Mind Hacks by Tom Stafford and Matt Webb. Copyright 2005 O'Reilly Media, Inc., ISBN 0-596-00779-5.

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Faces of the Fallen

Interesting use of visual imagery.

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Revisions

A couple of famous writers weigh in on revising before you've finished: John Steinbeck supposedly advised, "Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing down on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on." Yet another writer's block? Pearl S. Buck is quoted as saying, "If you start to revise before you've reached the end, you're likely to begin dawdling with the revisions and putting off the difficult task of writing." Each writer's process is individual. I find writing easy and revising (I call it "editing") more difficult. I could dawdle 'til doomsday revising a phrase. Editing is endless, until there's a point at which it shifts from improving a piece to destroying it. So, part of the process of becoming a writer is learning when to stop.

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Unotchit!

Has Margaret Atwood lost her mind? Her website about a rumored, blogged, hyped, buzzed invention to allow writers to hold semi-virtual book signings is replete with technical jargon such as "gizmo" and "doodad". A page of supposed "answers" duplicates her article of last Saturday on a British newspaper's site. Vague descriptions and confusing references read like a kindergartener's cut-and-paste production. I wouldn't be so hard on an author except that the prolific Atwood was known for her exquisite writing. I adore The Handmaid's Tale. I'm not the only writer knocking this U-No-Touch-It, which Atwood claims is Blackberry-speak resulting from potential trademark infringements if she called it something more reasonable. Neil Gaiman weighed in early, hitting on my most poignant issue with Atwood's idea. Readers don't attend book signings to get books signed. They go for the same reason they stand outside buildings when they know someone rich and famous is going to walk by. We want to say, "I saw her, really I did, in the flesh", not in the machine.

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Blog Publishing

While I prowl forums and chat rooms and message boards, trying to stir up discussion among writers about using a blog to publish longer works, like stories and books, Michael Willis quietly goes about his writerly work, performing the experiment I only write about. His longest effort that I've seen is here. This links to the last installment because that entry contains links to all the other parts. What do you think? Would you read pieces that long (or longer) on the web? Could you wait for them to come out, bit by bit (double entendre intended)?

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Valentines Day

This is one of my two favorite secular holidays, so here is my Valentines Day Greeting

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B4B #8 Entry

The Blogging for Books theme for February is a time when you took a risk in your life on someone or something - a new romance, a new career, a new home, etc. Were you successful beyond your wildest dreams - or did you crash and burn? This is my entry:

Risk a Life

A shower of papers rains out of one of the folders and flutters to the floor. I stuff the folders into a moving box and bend to gather the litter. One finger slides open a folded packet of legalese, tangible evidence of a broken marriage, a quarter-century life that ended more than a decade in the past.

"In the matter of ... ", I read. Immediately I'm back in the courtroom, full of gawking strangers, as the judge intones, "This marriage is dissolved!" I startle at the ear-splitting crack of the gavel, eyes smarting with sudden tears.

The choices I made, repeatedly, haunt my senior years. I crumple the decree, ball it up with both hands and aim for the grocery bag I use for a trash can. And stop. Wait.

"Shit!"

I can't toss it. Social Security. One more year and I'll need it to prove the marriage lasted long enough to qualify me for a half-benefit based on his account. I'd love to let go of this painful reminder of those many decisions:

An impulsive kiss, a tentative engagement, wearing my grandmother's ring for a year and a half. If I were engaged, like most women graduating from Northwestern in 1965, I'd get an invitation to the Tri-Delt's Pansy Brunch. It was almost like I was "normal". My virginity was a secret holiday gift to him six months before I reluctantly married him so he could support us on military pay. He'd insisted. Neither would our parents have cottoned to my Bohemian idea of "just living together". It was hard enough to be the Lutheran that took my mother-in-law's son away from her Catholic church, although we'd already decided to become Unitarians. And my mother--you'd think marrying a Catholic was worse than unwed motherhood!

"No wife of mine is ever going to work!" he declared when I wanted to fill the boring, lonely hours with a job. I spent a lot of time at the library and wrote poems. He wanted to be a father. I wanted to please him. We had a child. After nearly six years, he grew to hate the service. I faked suicide. He got out.

After four more years of coping with his dead-end job, I gave up and got a do-it-yourself divorce. He didn't care if I moved away with his child, but I couldn't find work and care for the kid alone. I crawled right back and finally persuaded him to remarry three years later. I couldn't stand the feeling that we were "living in sin".

When he decided to move a thousand miles away, I sold his house, packed everything up and followed. We'd actually lived in the same town for five whole years. I finally had some friends, a place in "society", but still I thought the best father for a child was its natural one. Of course a child needs a father! We moved again and again. He roughed me up a few times, and I finally threatened to call the sheriff, but I didn't leave. The kid was still in school. One of the cats was pregnant. I had no where to go.

Another job evaporated, and he left to work elsewhere while I sold another home and got the kid out of high school. His new position was supposed to shift to the west coast, so I went ahead and found a house. He never came and after 18 months, tired of being a married women with no husband, I packed up the cats and moved them across the country again. We lived together one more year in yet another God-forsaken armpit of the nation (because of his work). By then he wanted me to get a job, but unemployment was already high in the rural outback. He lost that job and told me he didn't want to be married any longer, that I could always work at MacDonald's.

I smooth out the divorce papers and blot off a tear with a tissue before the ink runs. I sigh, wondering if I regret what I did, or what I didn't. I did exactly what I'd been told to do by my almighty Mother, society, the church. Marriage is a holy institution. Marriage is forever.

"It's just a piece of paper!" he declared, slamming the door behind himself as he walked out of my life.

I choke back the sobs and tell myself the same. It's just a piece of paper that I cram back into the file folder marked "Important". It was just my life.

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Quote Week Seven

"Motivation will almost always beat mere talent." Norman R. Augustine

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Charlotte Simmons

Tom Wolfe's latest novel is not doing well as reported by several book news sources, including Nielsen's BookScan. (Remember this book won Wolfe the British award for the worst writing about sex?) It is available at half the published cover price in brick bookstores and even less in virtualities. See I Am Charlotte Simmons. Even with such discounting, Farrar, Straus & Giroux denied the book's sales are less than expected, explaining that this is a marketing technique to keep it on best-seller lists. Uh huh.

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ezines

Subter.com Under the Radar is a classy production, especially for a debut. I wouldn't mention it unless it were visually attractive, featured decent writing, and contained content worth reading (IMHO). The founder, publisher, editor, contributer, P. Bradley Robb, who also blogs at Soporverity, harnessed the power of social networking via the Internet in a remarkably intense initiative. I don't know if this comes from his experiences as a recent military veteran or perhaps as a veteran of publishing scams like he experienced with ST Literary Agency. He said: The fact that ST Lit took advantage of me when I was abroad defending their right to do so hurt more than the money that I lost to them. I mention the company only because it showed up one day in the column of Google ads. When I took Brad's advice and Googled the name, the results were an eye-opener!

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Separated at Birth

Writers turn journalism to Jello by separating the subject of a sentence from its verb. The preceding sentence models better structure. The subject "writers" is followed by its verb "turn". (Jello is capitalized because it is a registered trademark, but I'm not going to attempt to get THAT little gizzie into this text!) New writers, with a little help from a pencil or pen, can find problem sentences, like this one, by marking the subject and verb and seeing how many words intervene. Keeping the constructs close doesn't condemn you to the dreaded "Dick and Jane" syndrome. It actually helps readers by clearing the brain's short-term memory cache, so it can fill up with the next jumble of words until they become a clear, understandable phrase, elaborating your sentence. Varying the sentences' lengths avoids monotony. See?

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First Amendment

If you can't read the print in this cartoon, you can find it at the First Amendment website. Click on the image for more information (an act of exercising our First Amendment Right!)

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Orphan Copyrights

The US copyright office is considering changing the laws, due to concern that orphan works, (whose owners are difficult or even impossible to locate) might needlessly discourage subsequent creators and users from incorporating such works in new creative efforts or making such works available to the public. You have until March 25 at 5 p.m. EST to email comments to the Library of Congress. Read all about it at the official website. It also contains a brief, clear summary of current copyright coverage and the need (or not) to register works.

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Blog for Books #8

Blogging for Books theme for February is a time when you took a risk in your life on someone or something - a new romance, a new career, a new home, etc. Were you successful beyond your wildest dreams - or did you crash and burn? (Official Rules) You will have until 6am Pacific time on Monday, February 13th, to write a blog post of 2,000 words or less on that theme. (If you don't have a blog, I'll host your entry if you send it to me in the body of a TEXT ONLY email.) Guest author Faulkner Fox will choose three winners who will receive an autographed copy of Fox's book Dispatches from a Not-So-Perfect Life and a copy of the novel Case Histories by Kate Atkinson. Two prizes this month, no entry fee!

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Multiple Submissions

"I can do that?" the incredulous new writer asked when I suggested she submit the same query to more than one editor at a time. "Isn't it against the rules?" What rules? Editors who accept email queries are so inundated with electronic communications that a writer who receives any response is lucky. Writer's Digest, always a classy act, recently turned down an idea I'd sent last summer. The pleasant refusal came from a different editor from the one to whom I'd sent the query. In fact, the work was already published elsewhere, but there's nothing to stop me from rewriting that piece and giving it a different slant for a new publication. Multiple submissions of completed manuscripts are a different matter. Some publications forbid them, so always check the most current guidelines (usually online). Some welcome them with notice, and some make no mention. I try to err on the side of caution, usually including a note on where else the work is currently submitted. Another writer suggests playing off rivalries, but this could easily backfire on the writer.

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Quote Week Six

"Rudeness is the weak man's imitation of strength." Eric Hoffer

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Writing Ripoffs

Writing is rife with ripoffs, like all human activities: agents who charge "reading fees", publishers who don't publish or distribute, self-publishing total packages that aren't. Arm yourself with the information available in the Warnings section of WritersWeekly.com, Alerts at the National Writers Union site, and Beware at the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America website. These resources are updated fairly regularly, and the managers check out material before listing it, unlike what you might find in online forums, often targets for reverse scams and back-biting campaigns from both side of the publishing fence.

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Best Sellers

An interesting tidbit gleaned from yesterday's book club talk by Sallie Bingham confirmed a point I've tried to make about best seller lists. The figures only represent books sold by publishers to stores. Many of those books never reach customers. Instead, stores return the books to the publisher for credit. Actually, what Bingham said was that the data reflect the numbers of books printed. The veteran author of a dozen books, and poetry and plays, discussed Transgressions, her collection of exquisite short stories. Joelle Losfeld (an imprint of Gallimard) recently bought the French translation rights to the book. Bingham revealed that France, Rodin's home in Paris to be precise, is the setting for her next novel, which will continue her exploration of women's lives.

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Paid Reviews

"Can I get paid for writing book reviews?" is a question I see frequently in online forums. Of course you can! Plenty of newspapers, magazines, and even some websites pay for critiques. Often the reviews are written by staff, but many book editors maintain a "stable" of freelance reviewers. BookWire takes a slightly different slant on paid reviews--publishers can pay the company to have books reviewed. The NY Times apparently questioned whether such reviews are legitimate or only advertising. The website's director rebutted that they are credible because they are "professional", honest, and unbiased. They're also ads.

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Proofread

Did you ever wonder what proofreader's marks on your manuscript meant? Or maybe you need to edit some copy and indicate minor mistakes to correct. See Designers Toolbox: Proofing Marks for a quick, basic graphical list of these strange-looking scratchings. The image is printable. Explore the whole website for beaucoup useful information for writers. It is delightfully designed with a minimum of clutter, restful to the eyes.

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Branding

Years ago, I was grateful for MacDonald's restaurants. I drove across the US several times, living on Big Mac/Small Fries/Iced Tea. The consistent decent quality and prices, as well as easy access to and from interstate exits, won my loyalty. Now fast food is banned from my diet and I wouldn't eat at the nearby Mickey D's anyway because the quality has plunged. Branding runs rampant among book selling too. The 22 year-old independent Thackeray's Books in Toledo (OH) will close soon, reportedly because Borders is opening a superstore at the request of a Westfield Shoppingtown mall. No doubt it will contain a big chain coffee shop. The owner of a tiny used books store told me he is closing, citing online services and high rents as driving him out of business. Soon book buying will be as impersonal and devoid of character as dental hygiene. I can't help but wonder what Robert Pirsig and the MOQ community would have to say about these situations.

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