Copy Rights

Confusion abounds concerning copyright. Often newcomers to the writing field think that a "copyright" somehow, mysteriously, protects their ideas and productions from theft. Sadly, no. It is an intangible authority to control the use and reproduction of material, including items on the Internet. This does not cover facts or ideas. Moreover, copyright law contains a "fair use" clause that allows limited reproduction without an author's permission for certain purposes such as a critique or reporting news as long as the value of the original work is not diminished by the use. A more recent form of rights management is offered by Creative Commons, and Copyscape offers to suss out copies of your web pages on the Internet.

Freelance Rights

The Authors Guild announces an $18 million settlement in a 2000 class action suit filed jointly with The American Society of Journalists and Authors (www.asja.org) and The National Writers Union (www.nwu.org) against major online news databases for unauthorized use of freelance writers' articles. If you once sold an article to a large news service, you might receive from $60 to $1500 more, depending on several factors including: if the article copyright was registered, the original fee paid, the year it was published, and if you permit future use in databases. Visit FreelanceRights to read the release and more details about this landmark case for freelance writers.

Blogs to Books

A note on the PublishersMarketPlace Offerings Board yesterday jolted memories of previous posts on blogs becoming books, bloggers getting book deals because they blog, etc. It seems that Ray Rhamey, who writes about editing at Flogging the Quill has gathered together the wisdom of his blog into a book of the same name which he's now offering as a "how to create compelling fiction through an under-the-covers look at editing plus coaching by a novelist/editor. This book will be an invaluable resource for anyone who yearns to be a better writer". I also checked back recently with A Gag Reflex, mentioned in a comment here, and found the author dickering with a publisher, while blogger Michael Willis continues posting long pieces of fiction in his Bread and Roses. Even farther in the past, my first mention of this phenomenon (which I can't find in Writer's Edge, but posted elsewhere), was "Bitter is the New Black" by the woman who writes at Jennsylvania. She blogged and wrote out her bitterness over a job termination. She is currently awaiting a contract from NAL/Penguin for the book version and says Details magazine is doing an article on "bloggers with book deals". Damn! Another query I should have sent sooner.

Writers' Websites

More authors with technically advanced websites are Sallie Bingham and Damian McNicholl. The sites are blissfully free of frames and animation in design. Bingham offers a Writer's Toolbox and says: Here are some suggestions to help you with your writing, whether you are a beginner or more experienced. Above all, you must develop faith in your own voice and in the story you are going to tell. McNicholl provides parts of his book for viewers to experience in a variety of formats, including his own voice with links to MP3 players needed to hear the files. He also links to other sites for his blog and a essay about the summer he spent shilling his wares. If these last two elements were integrated into his website, I'd call it just about a perfect example of a what a writer's website should be.

Easter Joke

Readers without a Western Christian tradition, and/or sense of humor, might want to skip this post. Is it too late for my only Easter joke? Here goes: what do you get when your pour boiling water down rabbit holes? Hot, cross bunnies !

Quote Week Thirteen

"This paperback is very interesting, but I find it will never replace a hardcover book -- it makes a very poor doorstop." Alfred Hitchcock

Desk Shot

Did you ever even care what a working writer's desk looks like?

Hopefully (Not)

I love Jesse Kornbluth's rant on Ten usage and grammar errors that could (or should) cripple a career at mediabistro.com: Articles: Hopefully (Not). He says: I'm as obsessed with good grammar and proper usage as I am with the books, CD's and movies I choose to recommend (at his website headbutler.com). Now that's what I'm talkin' about! Be as enthusiastic and opinionated as you wish, say it out loud, but say it well. Kornbluth offers his ten peeves of common grammatical and usage errors, like ITS and IT'S, VERY UNIQUE, SINCE and BECAUSE, and EVERYONE and THEY. I have one more to add, one that I just heard a television news reader intone: KILLED DEAD.

Inkygirl

Inkygirl - A weblog for writers who work from home is Debby Ridpath Ohi's creation for telecommuting writers and freelancers based in home offices. More better than the blog part is the adjoining section where she lists current employment openings. You can visit the jobs list directly. Ohi is the Market Watch columnist for Writer's Market website, where she tells us today that Atlantic Monthly will no longer carry fiction (boo!) and that Time, Inc. is going to launch a new magazine on relationships, to be called LOVE.

Query Letters

Not a pen, not a keyboard, but effective querying is a freelancer's most important writing instrument. It doesn't matter how well you write, if you can't sell an agent or an editor, you won't sell your work. Here are some online advice sources if you don't have a handy book to guide you:

Bookdoc
PoeWar
Freelance Writers
Writers Digest
The Writer

Then, to ease the sense of frustration and despair, have some laughs with Query Letters I Love (thanks to John at Lake Neuron).

Writer's Encyclopedia

Writer's Encyclopedia is an online wellspring of quick, useful information about writing terms. More than definitions, less than articles, not searchable but handy. You can scroll down the list of each letter of the alphabet, or view the entries from A-Z. Let's say you're wondering about the differences among a query, a proposal, and a pitch (the latter term is in transition from the film industry into print publishing). Who needs to write a synopsis and who writes a proposal? Look them up with this easy, free service at the writersmarket.com website.

Book Prizes

I'm beginning to see a pattern here. Author = writer of a published novel. Literary = praised by critics, but not necessarily a blockbuster. Blockbuster = positive ROI for publisher (it makes a profit). The more I think (too much) about these prizes, the more questions pop up. Where are the big prizes for nonfiction books? (The National Book Critics Circle has nonfiction categories, but as I recall from being a member, the prizes are non-cash.) Can we call nonfiction writers authors, too? Do books that the critics trash ever win big prizes? Are all blockbusters at least nominated for the big prizes? Should we care? I know a man who reads only books that won a major prize, assuming that those were the best books written. What is a best book? It appears that it would be only fiction, except for the Pulitzer winners. Is it better to read fiction than nonfiction? Is it better to write fiction?

Soul Food

Yesterday a spate of sunshine between weekend storms sent me scurrying out of the office, down into the Mission Gorge to sit on a rock at a bend in the San Diego River. At that point the river is narrow (average 8' across) and deep (maybe 2' at most). It's what we call a "crick" (creek) back home in the Midwest. Was it Annie Dillard who taught me to sit facing upstream to watch the future approaching? I mused how the rippling waters had once trickled over rocky bolders on Vulcan Mountain and drained out of pastures in the placid and beautiful Santa Ynez valley, following the inexorable pull of gravity toward the Pacific Ocean. Small movements caught my peripheral attention. I gazed at a nearby branch snagged on the rock. Gradually the debris and mud-coated bark resolved into two small sinuous lizards, warming themselves. When one's metabolism was up to speed, he began the comic lizard push-ups, inflating his vivid, electric blue throat sack, signally his ardor to the other, smaller female. She ran away, far away, upstream into the weeds. He turned and marched off downstream, leaving me alone with the sparkling, chuckling waters. This was my gift to myself, replenishing the writerly spirit. Was it Thoreau who said, "If thou has a loaf of bread, sell half and buy a hyacinth to feed thy soul"?

Quote Week Twelve

"For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts." Anne LaMott

Kathy Sierra

Kathy Sierra is a writer of best selling technical books. I talked with her recently about some of the principles she advocates that would apply to any nonfiction book. She uses research-based elements from learning psychology and neurobiology to grab and hold attention so that people absorb and retain the book's messages at a deep level. She says, "The book's look, feel and storyline pulls people in and encourages them to keep turning the pages." That's something I'd want in a novel, too! She advocates for a book's language, flow, order, and format to make sense at an ordinary level, and for the content to be correct. Finally, Sierra says, the topics in the book must be the right ones to meet the readers' needs and goals. For her, it's all about the reader. She warns not to skip any of these aspects, and not to worry about having a small advertising budget. "The good folks on the net will take care of that for you, assuming you're keeping up the conversation," Sierra said. She's talking blogs, folks. Send your book to bloggers. Blog about your book. Respond to blog posts and comments about your book.

Capistrano Swallows

Most years on March 19, the little birds known as swallows return to the Mission at San Juan Capistrano in California. Their appearance, recorded since 1776, is used as a comforting symbol of fidelity, that all's right with the world. When I first moved to this area, I visited the location and found an historic plaque stating that one part of the remaining original adobe structure was the oldest wall in the state. There were no "Do Not Touch" signs, and pieces of it weren't for sale, like Hemingway's bricks, so what else could I do but reach out and touch it, documented in a photo, touch history as well as look at it, sniff the fragrance of deteriorating wood and mud, listen to the wind wearing away man's handiwork. I drew the line at licking the wall, especially because the Mission appeared beloved by bats as well as swallows.

Confused Words

This is the short redhead who has composed The Commonly Confused Words Test, a fun and instructive quiz that gauges your knowledge of words such as lose and loose (pet peeves I often see misused on the Internet). Even better, she's posted a key with the correct responses drawn from dictionary.com. I quibble with one of her opening statements: Good communication is not necessarily about using an expansive vocabulary. It is about properly using the words and punctuation you already know. I raced through the 40 test items just marking random responses to see a sample of results and ensure validity. What a delightful surprise to find that the program detected I was guessing, even if my answers confused it!

Orange Prize

The Guardian published a special report recently on the tenth anniversary of the women-only Orange Prize. It's another one just for fiction in English, and long derided as sexist or for writers who can't compete with the big boys. Guardian author Geraldine Bedell wrote: At the root of this is a debate about whether literature is above gender; and whether, if there is such a thing as women's writing, it is subconsciously deemed to be inferior. Some say the Orange grew out of dissatisfaction with the Booker prize with its mostly male lists. Previous winners of the Orange are: 1996 A Spell of Winter by Helen Dunmore; 1997 Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels; 1998 Larry's Party by Carol Shields; 1999 A Crime in the Neighbourhood by Suzanne Berne; 2000 When I Lived in Modern Times by Linda Grant; 2001 The Idea of Perfection by Kate Grenville; 2002 Bel Canto by Ann Patchett; 2003 Property by Valerie Martin; and 2004 Small Island by Andrea Levy. See the longlist released on Monday.

Read Aloud

In a follow-up to the March 5 post on audio books in MP3 format: Audible is opening a London office. The top audio book company has a partnership with the BBC and similar arrangements in France and Germany to obtain content for the different language versions of the service. Audible provides downloadable digital audiobooks, audio magazines, newspapers, and radio programs to listen to on your computer, IPod, handheld device, or to burn to a CD. When I suggest you read your writing aloud, it isn't just for editing purposes! Some see the future of books, especially non-reference material, in multiple electronic formats.

Paper or Electronic?

Yesterday at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, Matt Webb, one of the authors of Mind Hacks, which I wrote about here last month, told me that whenever the book is mentioned on the blog Boing Boing, they see a spike in sales at Amazon. That's "buzz" in action. This morning one of the co-editors of Boing Boing, sci-fi writer Cory Doctorow, offered an even more thought-provoking idea: he said that giving away his novels via ebooks increases sales of the hard copies. Read more about Doctorow and his novel notions on his website, craphound.com. He's an incredibly prolific writer and equally generous with his precious time and himself. End gushing.

Poet Bling

If there were a prize for the best blog bling (and blogs with the most bling) I would nominate those of Sharon Brogan, especially her Watermark, subtitled a poet's notebook. I'm not certain what it has to do with being a poet for I lost myself in amazement scrolling down and down and down to see all the badges and links. Connections I've never heard of appear on her elegant minimalist pages. Ms. Brogan appears to be the proprietress of several blogs and websites, mostly devoted to poetry. So, if verse is your pleasure/ you'll find them a treasure. She also has cute cat items, which I greatly enjoy, even though I'm currently catless in San Diego.

Typo Scare

Typing Error Causes Nuclear Scare, and you still wonder why I rant on about typos?

Emerging Technology

During the next few days, my postings will be somewhat remote while I participate in the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference. I'll be interviewing some of the writers and technologists who are changing the publication world--for better and/or worse. I'll bring you the insights and predictions from their mouths to your eyes and ears, right here and elsewhere on the 'net.

Quote Week Eleven

"By reading good prose constantly your ear will come to know the harmony of language, and you will find that your taste will unerringly tell you what is good and what is bad in style, without your being able to explain even to yourself the precise quality that distinguishes the good from the bad." Stephen Coleridge in The Glory of English Prose

IMPAC Prize

The International IMPAC Dublin literary award is one of the most lucrative of the top literary prizes. It is open to books written in any language, provided there is an English translation available. If the winning book is a translation, the translator receives 25% of the prize, making this a unique award. The Guardian featured this prize recently, and also ran a feature on the ten books on this year's shortlist with links to reviews and interviews for all but the three translations. The prize amounts to 100,000 euros for novels first published in English in 2003. The shortlist includes both men and women authors.

Urban Lit

Chick lit: no. Urban lit: si. Soft porn for the ladies: si, si! I thought of this the other day when I saw an ad for writers with African American experience to produce urban lit novels for someone else. Well, to be brutally honest, what I thought was, "There's no way I could fake that one!" See this New York Post piece on Teri Woods and her thriving publishing empire based on the mean streets. The "soft porn" is a reference to the new Harlequin imprint, Spice, much racier than the romances this publisher has been so famous for. (A preposition is still a bad word to end a sentence with, but sometimes it just fits.)

Scent Story

Where can I submit stories for the latest smell-o-vision consumer product, the scentstories discs? The name does say stories. Are they in CD or DVD format? I ask because the name appears in lowercase letters, a sure sign of a computer item, right? In fact, scentstories is promoted with a website and a "buy two get a free" CD offer! A popular singer appears in a print ad with a quote about playing music. You have to dig deep to find an image of the actual scent disc player. This air freshener joins a list of products that sparked writing ideas: microwave oven disinfectants, computer disc infectants, programs to prevent the dreaded cursor runon. And I was only worried about runon sentences!

People's Choice

The new Man Booker International prize for fiction allows anyone to vote. Your vote doesn't count, but you are allowed to nominate and enter a public comments about authors. The prize of £60,000 can be won only once by an author. Many other aspects of this new prize are creating buzz (see the recent Guardian article). One interesting note is that although the winning author can be of any nationality, the book must be available in English. It's my understanding that this leaves out most of the world's annual output of literature. Comment triste. Maybe the French have hold of something important in their agony over GooglePrint. Another buzzable is the fact that the three-person panel of judges includes a woman, Iranian Dr. Azar Nafisi, who wrote about her expulsion in 1981 from teaching at the University of Tehran for refusing to wear the mandatory Islamic veil in Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books.

French Letters

The French take their words so seriously, but French is a Romance language, and, after all, the language of romance. Consider the brouhaha caused by the first French translation of letters by the medieval lovers Heloise and Abelard. Scandal! Fakery! People take sides and hurl accusations like brioches in an upscale food fight. Oh, the horror of Google giving the future an Anglo-Saxon slant on history--it's causing the head of the French library apoplexy. I love the French. They take words seriously.

B4B #9

Today begins a new Blogging for Books competition to win a copy of Gwendolen Gross' Field Guide: A Novel . The challenge is to write about any incident in your life in the style of your favorite author, fiction, nonfiction, or even blogger (what a challenge!) The writing must be posted in a blog, and if you don't have one of your own, you can send it here by typing it into the body of an email formatted for text only. Any other method causes weird-looking symbols to appear wherever a dash, apostrophe, or quotation marks are used, due to highly technical reasons. [Insert winking smilie.] Deadline is 6 a.m. PST, March 14. If you're going to emulate another writer, make it someone who writes/wrote well and use this opportunity to hone your own skills. Good writing!

Quote Week Ten

"I have forced myself to begin writing when I've been utterly exhausted, when I've felt my soul as thin as a playing card, when nothing has seemed worth enduring for another five minutes ... and somehow the activity of writing changes everything." Joyce Carol Oates

Audio iBooks

The latest revolution in books may be MP3 versions for iPods, according to theIndependent News. The Brits may be behind from a U.S. point of view, but indicators are they're catching on and catching up: the much-maligned audio book has shaken off its image as "books for the blind" and is at the centre of the latest revolution in publishing: the MP3 audio book format. Although publishers like Orion Audio Books don't even have contract clauses for digital formats, Waterstone is going to "test kiosks in its stores where customers can download books direct."

Writing Numbers

Writing With Numbers - American Press Institute is an enormously helpful web page with links to many sites. I especially like Robert Niles' on Statistics Writers Should Know. Niles also edits the University of California's Online Journalism Review, a place to find answers to your questions about writing content online. If you thought this post would tell you when to write 7 or seven, that's an issue about style, as in a fixed system of presentation such as these guides. My predilection runs toward the AP, MLA, and Chicago style books, unless I'm writing something that requires a specific format, such as the AMA for medicine or the APA for psychology (and many of the social sciences).

Colorful Characters

Ari Fleischer, former White House Press Secretary, used the term this morning in a Today Show interview, referring to non-mainstream reporters, the ones he would call on at the end of press briefings, if time allowed. It reminded me of the moment I crossed over that line. A State Attorney called a news conference which I attended as the new second banana in a bureau of a major metropolitan daily. The Legend In His Own Mind had previously known me as one of the minions of a smaller local rag, lovingly called "The Mullet Wrapper" or "The Nudes Tribune". The gaggle of reporters milled about in the attorney's office until some asked him why he didn't get started. His eyes darted about the room and he mumbled, "We're waiting for the Herald." The other reporters turned toward me expectantly, watched as I demurred, "The Herald is here," and broke into raucous laughter at the bewildered attorney. The legend was behind the times. Question, Sir: Who are the colorful characters?

Bulwer-Lytton

"It was a dark and stormy night", one of the most famous phrases in English literature. It's Snoopy's perennial opening line in the Peanuts comic strip when the beagle dons his "Writer" persona. Bulwer-Lytton is also a website subtitled Where WWW means 'Wretched Writers Welcome', home of an annual fiction contest for the worst opening sentence for a novel. Why you may wonder is the phrase considered so bad? For me the answer is a toss-up between use of the "to be" construction (there are, I am, here is) and telling rather than showing. When a sentence starts with a "to be" construction, it pitches readers headfirst into their minds instead of their senses. How about, "Velvety darkness smothered him, punctuated by nerve-jangling explosions of thunder and blinding lightning" -- dark and stormy with three sensory inputs: touch, hearing, and sight and feelings of jumpiness and suffocation.

Just Typos

Not even Grammar Stickler is immune from missing typographical errors, as a friend just pointed out. I'd left out the "r" in Writer in the upper right ad for my eBook. How embarrassing! I was grateful for the correction and took action immediately, as I like to model what I advocate. This is why I find it annoying when someone asks for help with a piece of writing, only to respond to assistance with a huffy, "Oh, that's just a typo!" I'm especially peeved when the petitioner makes the same mistake consistently both in the writing and in email messages. That's not a typo, it's sloppy writing. Get into the habit of proofreading everything you write, even email, especially blog postings, and especially if you're trying to peddle yourself as a writer!