Written Words

Writing Tips: don’t overload your sentences

2012-01-31T13:20:00.028-05:00

Writing is less about putting words on a page or screen than it is about putting thoughts in order.

Our job as writers, as professional communicators, is to clarify the world and ideas for our audience. That means illuminating—showing something that was hidden before—and simplifying—sorting out ideas, phenomena and events that are tangled and difficult to understand.

Consider these tangled ideas. By the way, I invented none of the examples I’m about to show you. They’re all taken from published documents or from former students. In either case, the writers should never have let anyone else see them.

We were informed of your government’s new initiative to link young people about to graduate from post-secondary education with small businesses who need skilled employment candidates by a teacher from Saskatchewan who is a member of our team of educators that is championing the inclusion of health literacy into high-school curricula.

How many ideas are crammed into that one sentence? Yes, it’s grammatically correct, but it has 5 dependent clauses, 9 prepositional phrases and 51 words. No, I’m not going to give an eighth-grade lesson in grammar or parsing sentences. I’m saying that’s too much for any audience. There are at least 14 different, if linked ideas in it.

In Grade 1, you learned (at least, you were taught; whether you learned it is a topic for another blog): a sentence is a single complete thought. While it makes sense to link thoughts together, when you get a chain long enough to wrap around your winter tires, it’s too long.

How about this one:

As he suggests, “the binary logic” of many sociological texts encourages an Eurocentric analysis that conceptually constructs an ahistorical, apolitical social science which avoids an analysis of the political and economic exploitation that is associated with racial and ethnic prejudice and discrimination.

That one starts with “binary logic,” goes through sociology, history, politics and social science, some other ideas and ends up with discrimination. It’s like wandering in a college campus and wondering how you got to the garbage room when you started in the computer lab and were hoping to get to the caf.

I call these “overloaded sentences”—they just cannot support that much information. By the time the readers get to the end of a sentence like that, they’ve forgotten the beginning.

Here’s one from fiction:

Had he known that Ralph had managed to break into the apartment and wire it quickly before he had followed the three of them to the video store, Andy might have given a small bit of thought to the intelligence of listing a good many words that clearly indicated his belief that his pursuers were idiots, but he didn’t, much to the displeasure of his unseen audience.

Organizational problem
Sentence overload is caused when you have so much to say and you try to get it all out at once. The solution: get a GRIP on your sentences as well as your whole document:

Goal: what are you trying to accomplish with these thoughts? What do you want your readers to do after reading?
Reader: whom are you saying it to? What do they already know, what do you want them to know?
Idea: of all the ideas in that long, convoluted sentence, which is the most important?
Plan: what other information does the audience need to understand your main point? How is this other information related to the main point?

Now, organize it. Put the most important idea first. If two ideas are equally important, make each one the main part of a separate sentence. Then use less important ideas as dependent clauses or qualifying phrases.

You don’t always have to repeat qualifying information:

Notably, policymakers in India have made financial inclusion a priority, according to speaker LD Patel, Deputy director of the XXX of India, where all Indian institutions have been requested by the central regulatory department of India to formulate board approved educational inclusion plans for the next three years.

The Indian government has asked all Indian institutions to develop plans to bring education to the poorest communities within three years, said LD Patel, Deputy Director of the XXX.

Sometimes, it seems as if the writer changed his or her mind halfway through the sentence:

It highlights the growing importance and recognition of healthy nutrition continues to gain in Canada and internationally with the availability of more resources, information and good practices to help develop strategic priorities, research, evaluation and programs.

The importance of healthy nutrition is gaining recognition internationally. There are more resources, information and good practices available to help develop strategic priorities, research, evaluation and programs.
Based on last year’s results, and since the target audience is very well-defined and the product was developed for, and extensively tested with that audience, we expect the following results in 2010/11:

The product was developed for a specific audience and tested with it. Based on those results, we can expect the following in 2010-2011:

From fiction:

Tristan blinked, his head moving up, not realizing he was so tired, normally he was more than energized and almost always ready to go.

This actually combines several problems common in fiction from new writers: more detail than the reader needs or wants, and telling instead of showing. I would amend it to:

Tristan’s head nodded involuntarily. “What’s up, Tristan?” Annabella asked. “You’re usually ready to go.”

Challenges:

Here are a couple that I received from students. My challenge to you is to turn these into readable prose. Leave your responses in the Comments box, below.

Have fun!

1: Management is pleased to be receiving a positive response from employees about the relocation of headquarters from Toronto to Calgary, although there are some concerns about the merger due to the cultural differences between the Calgary employees versus those from Toronto, so in response to growing concerns, management is taking action in order to ensure co-operation and compatibility between teams.

2. I recently completed a kitchen remodel and on July 2 I ordered by telephone double-glazed, oak French doors from Quality Doors, Inc, that were required for this job, which when they arrived on July 25, my carpenter told me were cut too small, measuring total of 2.31 square metres wide instead of 2.33 square metres wide, so my carpenter offered rebuild the opening but charging me for his time $455.50 because I waited three weeks for these doors, and my clients wanted them installed immediately.

I've been nominated for Kreativ Blogger Awards!

2012-01-29T12:15:00.000-05:00

I feel very pumped today, and I have received two nominations for Kreative Blogger awards, and at least one for the Versatile Blogger.

The first came from RS Guthrie, my very good Twitter and blogger friend and, more importantly, an excellent writer (his first two novels are Black Beast and Lost). Then, I noticed I had been nominated by several others, as well: Alan McDermott, author of Gray Justice. Finally, I just found that Wendy S. Russo nominated me for a Versatile Blogger.

First, thanks very much for these. Coming from such talented writer excellent books on the market and an top-notch blogs, it means a lot.

The way that the Kreativ Blogger Award works (apparently; I can’t claim to know much about it beyond what Rob wrote), I have to tell you 10 things you don’t know about me (and as Rob says, I have to make them interesting), and then nominate six other blogs for the award.

So, here goes:

10 interesting things you didn’t know about me

I have launched a stealth campaign to minimize capital letters in sub-headings.
I used to teach English in colleges in Ontario.
I have never been to eastern Europe, other than through Google Earth.
Even though I was born in Winnipeg, I did not learn to skate until adulthood.
I dented an elevator in Athens. That hurt.
My last name has changed twice in my life, but “Bury” is the one that I’m sticking with, and it’s my real, legal name. You can find me, if you try.
On the rare occasions when I do cook, I don’t like having anyone help me.
I am purposely trying to write books that are different from anything else every published, but you have to dig deep to see where the difference is.
I can fix things around the house, but it takes a long, long time, and I often break something else in the process. So it’s kind of a self-extending project.
I haven’t been able to find time for working out for months. Yes, Nike, get off my back. I’ll do the same too, eventually—once I get up the nerve to step on the scale again.

Six blogs that I nominate:

Rob on Writing—as I said, a great source of ideas, inspiration and straightforward insight into the difficult path ahead of the author today. Rob on Writing also has links to other blogs and sources that can be invaluable to readers and writers. A nomination for such an award from a writer of such calibre (yes, that’s the correct—Canadian means correct—spelling) means a lot. If you are not following Rob on Writing, you’re missing an excellent resource for information, ideas , insight and inspiration for writers and readers. Follow and subscribe to it.
Write Hook—Scott Morgan, my long-lost brother from another mother (and father), is the author who coined the phrase “write for the jugular.” Scott is an excellent writer, although to date he has only published two books: Short Stack, a collection of short stories and poems; and Character Development from the Inside Out, which is a guide book for writers. Scott’s writing style is as clear and as smooth as 12-year-old single-malt scots whisky.
Jambalian, by Alan McDermott, author of Gray Justice—funny, insightful, always cheers me. I can identify with Alan. I just wish I were as smart as he is, and had started seriously trying to publish fiction when I was his age.
Stephen Legault’s blog on writing—a great perspective from a writer who has been published by an actual publishing company, and writes successful books about a piece of history and geography that seems very remote, yet fascinating.
Van Brown’s Journal—Van contacted me through LinkedIn a few months ago because he liked my blog. I was so flattered, particularly because Van is a very talented, funny and self-effacing writer with laser-sharp insights, great experience and endlessly entertaining and valuable stories.
The Novel Project, by Roger Eschbacher—this professional TV writer has launched his own fiction career, and describes his ups, downs and successes in detail. Essential for any writer.
Steve Vorley, fiction writer—yes, I know that seven is more than six. Sue me. Steve’s blog is a really creative use of the blog format. He has regular interviews with writers, and it’s worth reading.

Some others that I heartily recommend:

Will Granger’s Anabar blog—a writer who deserves wider recognition
Rachel Harrie’s blog, Rach Writes—lots of links, resources and competitions for new writers
Rebecca Scarberry’s Scarberryfieldsforever—this dauntless contributor to the Kindle Books Review blog has launched her own blog recently. So far, she just has a short story, but I’m looking forward to more.
KD Rush—a self-named website that is so chock-full of stuff, I don’t know where to begin describing it. But check it out.
Jo VonBargen’s Two-Bit Bard—this is actually several blogs rolled into one: two separate poetry blogs plus a blog where Jo tells us about her life. I cannot believe the strength she shows in that one. And the poetry blog actually re-awakened my appreciation for poetry in general.
John Hansen’s Incessant Droning of a Bored Author—he interviews authors and reviews books. I just wish (very much) he’d rename the blog.
Wendy Russo’s blog—Wendy documents her progress on her novel and her life. Looking for links that can help you as a writer? Check her out.

There are so many more. The writing community is truly a supportive one, and I’m very proud to be included in the words, tweets, posts and thoughts of the many people out there who have read my words, contributed comments, retweeted and reviewed.

So, please, all of you, check out all the blogs above. If you think any deserve it (and many do), check them out, leave comments, tweet about them, list them on Facebook, whatever it takes. Let’s get the word out!

A writing plan: guest post by Stephen Legault

2012-01-26T09:18:00.000-05:00

This week's guest blogger is Stephen Legault, an author published by Touchwood Editions and NeWest. He contacted me via Twitter about self-editing, and agreed to tell us about the best and the worst he does (as a writer). In return, I've contributed a post to his blog on StephenLegault.com, where I tried to write about the writer's place in the political world.

Please let Stephen and me know what you think about either issue through the Comments.

The best and the worst of Stephen Legault

My thanks to Scott for hosting this guest blog. It’s a new experience for me to swap blog posts; I hope readers enjoy.

I’ve been writing for more than 20 years, having started with angst-ridden teenaged poetry penned under a street lamp, and proceeded to angst-ridden personal columns for my local newspapers. Five years ago, most of the angst out of my system, I started publishing books on activism and eastern philosophy along with three separate crime series with an environmental or historical theme.

The best thing I’ve done when it comes to writing—besides developing the discipline to rise very early each morning and pound out a few thousand words before the rest of the world wakes—was to develop a plan for where I wanted my writing to take me.

For a number of years, I was a consultant helping businesses and non-profit organizations develop communications and strategic plans, so the notion of business planning was familiar to me. If you have a plan for where you want to go, it’s easier to get there. If a business trying to sell organic coffee, or a non-profit trying to end homelessness would benefit from a plan to achieve success, why not a writer?

A writing plan needn’t be elaborate: for me it takes the form of a couple of charts. What books to I hope to write, and by when? Which do I have publishers lined up for? What do I need to do in order to find a publisher for those I’m not already under contract for?

Most importantly, how many books do I need to sell in order to make writing my day job? I love getting up at 5 am to write before the kids are up and my full-time work begins, but some time, I’d like to clear the mental clutter and dedicate myself full-time to scribbling. To do that, I figure I have to sell around 25–30,000 books a year. What do I need to do to reach that number? What does my backlist look like, and how many titles do I need to my name to reach that goal?

I plotted this all out in Word, and ran the numbers in Excel, and then went for a stiff drink.

But knowing what my goal is, and what I have to do to reach it, keeps me focused.

The worst thing I’ve ever done as a writer is to not learn from my own mistakes. Over 20-plus years as a writer, I’ve made plenty. The one I keep making may seem common-place, but it’s a serious threat to achieving my game plan. I suck at self-editing. In fact, my story editor sent me one of Scott’s blog posts as a not-so-subtle hint to get on top of the editorial process, and that’s how we came to be swapping stories.

I get so caught up in the story, the plot, the dialog, that I miss important grammatical mistakes. I make them again and again. I also use crutch phrases and clichés too often. Finally, I tend to add unnecessary description, such as the 156 times one of my character’s “nodded” in a recent manuscript. I went through and cut 152 of those in the seventh draft. After a while, the reader just gets dizzy.

To achieve my goal of writing for a living, I have to write the very best books I can. To do that, I have to be mindful of the mistakes I make over and over again, and keep my eye on my goals.

Stephen Legault is the author of four books, with two more set for publication in the next nine months. His novel The End of the Line is a historical mystery set in the Rocky Mountains in 1884 during the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway; Don Graves of the Hamilton Spectator called it “a whopping good tale…a riveting and winning mystery.”

Visit Stephen at http://www.stephenlegault.com/ or follow him on twitter @stephenlegault.

LOST: An independent novel review

2012-01-25T13:23:00.000-05:00

With his second novel, RS Guthrie has hit his stride.

RS Guthrie, author of Black Beast and Lost

Lost is the sequel to the excellent Black Beast, and features the same protagonist, Denver detective “Bobby Mac” Macaulay. This story pursues the same themes: an unending struggle against ancient evil, fought by a man destined to be virtue’s champion.

This second installment in the Clan of MacAulay series is leaner than the first, with a tighter writing style. It’s an enjoyable, fast and easy read, but it’s shorter than the first book. This is a smart move—Guthrie leaves you wanting more.

I have to admit, I was completely engrossed in this story. I read this e-book on my iPad in record time, and I was feeling stressed as I neared the end. I had to keep turning the pages to find out what happens next, but I was dreading the end because there would be no more to read! At least for a few months, until Guthrie brings out the third and last installment in this particular story (but, he promises, not the last appearance of Bobby Mac).

Plot
Lost picks up some months after the action in Black Beast, and explores more of the family situation of hero, Bobby Mac. This time, Guthrie delves into the relationship between Bobby and his brother, Jackson, who is a police chief in a small town in northern Idaho. Jackson calls Bobby for his help in solving a multiple murder that’s coupled with the disappearance of a child.

The part of Black Beast that I felt was strongest was the emotional conflict the character feels over his personal relationships with his partners, lovers and son. Now, Guthrie looks at the troubled, contradictory and completely believable relationship between these two brothers. The only criticism is that I would have loved to have read more about that relationship, maybe through a flashback or something.

Characters
Bobby and Jackson Macaulay are drawn from real life and show the weaknesses and strengths that any reader will recognize. Jackson, in fact, reminded me so much of one of my father’s friends, I could almost hear his voice.

I would have liked to read a few more pages about the love interest, Amanda. She is a well-drawn character, a believable career woman with complex emotions and a complicated life. But then, Guthrie almost ruthlessly adhered to the rule of moving the story forward.

The only character that seems a little flat is Father Meyer, Bobby Mac’s cousin. He seems more of a foil than anything else, the character who finds clues for the hero and then gets flattened by a falling anvil or piano.

Style
Guthrie clearly knows how to write. He follows the “show, don’t tell” rule, letting characters’ actions show their thoughts and motivations. He tells us only as much back story as readers need to understand what’s going on. This is a critical mistake that many new writers make—dropping long expositions about what a minor character did to explain what’s going on. Like “Office Kevin, having skipped breakfast that morning, scarfed down the last two doughnuts. It was okay, though, because he worked out regularly, as evidenced by his flat belly.” Or worse, “Jane listened sympathetically. She had been dumped by boyfriends twice in the past year.”

However, Guthrie does make full use of his descriptive chops where he can take advantage of the setting, and describes the mountain scenes, for instance, where it makes sense in the story.

He has the talent to cross some genre boundaries, skilfully blending an investigative cop story and an occult horror novel. That’s not easy to write without being completely cheesy, but there’s not a hint of dairy product anywhere. If you can accept the existence of a personification of evil, then the whole story is not just plausible, it’s hair-raisingly realistic.

With Lost, as with Black Beast, Rob Guthrie explodes the myth that commercial publishers have a lock on quality writing. I can only look forward to more from this author.

Without reservation, 5 stars.

Six sentence Sunday for January 22, 2012

2012-01-22T09:33:00.002-05:00

I may be posting this a little too late for the good people who run Six Sentence Sunday, but I do tend to sleep in a little on Sundays.

I just hope that the people who check the entries don't get down to #167 in the list before I get this out. At any rate, here are six more sentences from The Bones of the Earth. This excerpt is from a later point in the story, about three-quarters of the way through. The setting is an armoury in Constantinople, which is under attack by ...

The dragon opened its mouth, revealing terrible, long, pointy white teeth. It spat a green liquid toward Philip that hissed and steamed where it hit the stone floor. Some of the spit hit Philip’s forearm, and he fell screaming to his knees. His skin bubbled, smoked, cracked and blackened, then began to melt and drip off. The bubbling spread, down toward his fingers, which shriveled, dissolved and fell off. The bubbling spread upwards toward his elbow, dissolving more and more of the arm.

Of course, there is a longer excerpt from the first chapter at the tab on top of the page. And if you like it, you can buy it from Amazon (.mobi format for your Kindle) or from Smashwords (all formats available).

Enjoy! Leave a comment if you like.

Will Apple’s Author and iBooks2 challenge Kindle Select?

2012-01-19T14:01:00.000-05:00

Screen capture credit: Apple Inc.

You gotta feel for Mark Coker, the founder of Smashwords: Apple has just released a new iBooks2 app for the iPad2 and a free iBook Author application, which make it Apple-easy to publish e-books on the revamped iBookstore.

In its inimitable way (although many try to imitate it), Apple made a big splash at the Guggenheim Museum in New York today (I’m reading news reports ) with an announcement of epub-version textbooks. Although for now they’re only available in the US, they’re priced at $14.99, and the books are from the three major textbook publishers: Pearson, McGraw-Hill and Houghton Mifflin.

Major news outlets seem to be agreeing with Apple’s prediction that this will be a major benefit for students. Some news sources predict that college and universities will be quicker to use e-textbooks than high schools because of the relatively high cost of iPads. However, high-school textbooks can cost $80 or more — Pearson’s core Biology textbook is $80.97 US. A single iPad can hold all the textbooks for a student. With a $499 iPad plus $120 (max) for eight e-textbooks, that’s a savings of $20 per student. Multiply that be the number of students in the US alone …

A long-awaited shakeup

Once again, Apple has upset the traditional publishing industry to the immense benefit of the information-consuming world. Apple is also offering a huge help to the education system. And at the same time, Apple will shake up the publishing industry. It’s been shaken up a lot over the past several years, but its response hasn’t helped it. Instead of embracing the tectonic changes, publishing has tried to cope by building greater barriers. It’s like loading boulders onto the Titanic AFTER it hits the iceberg.

Apple is also offering publishing a solution, or at least a way to move forward. Along with the update to the iBookstore and iBooks, Apple is also releasing the new iBook Author app — a free application that allows anyone to create e-books in the .epub format. It even supports colour images and even video.

Finally, Apple is now allowing any authors to publish books on the iBookstore for free (Apple takes a 30 percent royalty, like Amazon). There is no up-front fee. Those with existing iTunes Connect accounts will have to set up a new account, the company says.

It upsets the new publishing industry, too

This is going to be a big challenge to Amazon’s dominance of the electronic book market—some say Amazon sells 90 percent of the e-books in the world. Apple’s ability to create media buzz could bring more readers to its iBookstore, which until now has not had a huge impact in the e-book market.

The iBook Author app and publishing facility could also be a big challenge, especially if there is a way to borrow books as with Amazon’s Kindle Select program. It could put a real dent in its appeal to small publishers and independent authors, too, who have to make their books exclusive to Amazon to participate in the program.

As for Smashwords and its founder, Mark Coker? He must be fuming. First, Amazon’s Kindle Select program takes away content from authors who, understandably, opt for the retailer with the 90 percent market share. Now, if iBook Author and the uploading process are as intuitive, smooth and visually attractive as every other Apple product, they’ll make his Smashwords system obsolete for the Macintosh users among those authors who are left. It’s a shame, really, because Smashwords provided that entry point to the e-book world for so many.

If you’re an author, I’d love to get some comments from you about this.

You have nothing to fear but ... yourself

2012-01-16T02:53:00.000-05:00

This week's guest post is from Scott Morgan, owner of the Write Hook: Writing for the jugular blog and author of Character Development From the Inside Out and Short Stack. As you will see, Scott writes directly.

As with all my guest bloggers, Scott is also publishing my words on his blog. Check it out, too. And remember, while the words below are his, you should still leave the comments on MY blog.

Let us both know what you think!

What's holding you back?

I don't give advice. Smart people don't need it and stupid people don't take it.

But I'll diverge from my normal path to offer one piece of advice to anyone out there wishing he (or she) could be a better writer: Listen to yourself.

Profound, huh?

Well, smartass, it is. You see, whether you want to believe it, you know what's best for you. If there's something holding you back, it's fear of upending one or more aspects of your life–which, often enough, is a life that's not making you as happy as you want it to in the first place.

So when it comes to writing, what is it that's holding you up? Afraid people aren't going to like what you wrote? 'Cause I got news. They won't. Not all of them anyway. But do you really care about that? I mean, if you're a shortstop, do you really care who won the Super Bowl?

Or are you afraid of offending someone? 'Cause I got news for you. You will. Somewhere, some prick will always be offended by something you say, no matter what you say. Your fear, probably, is that you don't want to be confronted with it.

I sympathize. I don't really care what kind of crappola people think, but I never want to listen to it. So I dig.

But here's the thing – without risking the occasional brush with crappola, you never get to the sweet, soft center of where you want to be. Because as much as some people will hate every word you say, more people than you expect will like you. They will support you and believe in you and champion your cause. But it takes a willingness to slough away the rust that's holding you up and a willingness to embrace a certain amount of distaste for the chance at finding out who you really are as a writer.

An online friend of mine (author Carey Parrish) reviewed my short fiction e-book Short Stack on Amazon. Somewhere in an entirely positive review, Carey said this: A talent like his is too much to keep secret and fortunately he isn't inclined to try.

I was floored. And I had to laugh, because until I got the hell over myself, I was completely and religiously disinclined to try. The first 99/100ths of my creative life have been swallowed by my belief that my creativity is mine and mine alone. That you weren't good enough to hear it. And that just because I wrote, it didn't mean you had to read it.

But what that belief really translated to was that I had no balls. I hid because I was afraid someone would tell me I sucked.

When I decided to stop wishing I was dead and start wishing I hadn't spent my life attempting new and exciting methods of self-destruction, I found an interesting thing had happened–I wasn't afraid anymore. I decided that the world did need to hear what I had to say, because somewhere one this pale, blue dot would be someone (even if only one) who would say "that's what I wanted."

When I got the hell over myself, I sat down and wrote Character Development from the Inside Out with one hand while fighting off the dread that I had nothing important to say with the other. And when I asked a publisher to read it, an amazing, unexpected thing happened: she said yes. And when she published it, I got speaking gigs.

And I got readers. Enough to put the book on one of Amazon's bestseller lists.

Do you know how many books I started before I got the hell over myself? Tell me, please, because I've lost count. I finished two of them, but neither saw the light of day because they weren't me. They were me trying to be something I'm not.

So. Do yourself a favor: listen to yourself. You're the only one who knows what you really want, and if you take yourself out of the running to get it, no one is going to put you back in the race. Go out there and get it. Keep failing and keep trying. Keep risking and keep writing. You'll be surprised where the current takes you if you bring your own oars.

Two independent book reviews

2012-01-14T11:02:00.004-05:00

This installment of Written Words has reviews of two very different types of books.

First is Secrets by SL Pierce: a taut, fast-paced thriller. Pierce is a professional writer. Her skill and knowledge of putting together a good read is evident in all her books. She doesn't waste words and knows how to make a reader turn a page.

The second, just to be completely different, is a middle-grade Arthurian fantasy that gently satirizes the genre while delivering an esteem boost for young readers. Dragonfriend: Leonard the Great, Book 1 is by another professional writer, Roger Eschbacher, who has a long list of writing credits and has begun publishing his fantasy novels independently. His knowledge of the field is evident in the quality of the book's production and marketing, but is really proved in his prose.

Secrets: a fast-paced, fun thriller

Secrets is a good, action-packed pot-boiler/thriller/mystery. With it, SL Pierce joins the growing ranks of independent authors who have met and exceeding the quality and professionalism of the protégés of the legacy publishing industry. Authors like Pierce, Rogers Eschbacher, James Wallace Birch, Richard Sanders, Paul Dorset, Elise Stokes, Mike Wells, Russell Blake, Alan McDermott and RS Guthrie, among many, many others, are proving that the commercial publishers, big or small, can no longer look down their noses as independent writers and scoff at their lack of quality, attention to detail or ability to craft taut stories that keep audiences reading.
Secrets has a solid plot with no holes. There is one big coincidence, which is the maximum that any novel can sustain. And the fact that the coincidence is what launches the story, it makes perfect sense.

The style is lean, active and compelling. The characters are mostly believable, and with the exception of the main character, I can identify with most of them, at least a little.
A brief synopsis: Gwen Michaels is a former US government assassin who leaves the death business for a quiet life with her husband, a lovable nebbish without a clue (aren’t we all?). The story begins with an attempt on her life that is not related to her former trade. Gwen then uses all her talents and training to solve the mystery: who’s after her, and why?

The book starts with action, and keeps up the pace to the end. It’s a fun read. The only problem is that this the lead character is too strong for my liking. She’s not infallible, but she’s hard to identify with. And she’s quite cold in some respects—I won’t write more about that aspect so as not to spoil the ending.

The ending is satisfying, in a chilling way. There are no loose ends, but there is an open door for a sequel, and from Pierce’s website, it appears there is at least one, with more to come.
If you’re looking for an action-packed read, Pierce delivers. You can get it from any retailer through Pierce's blog.
4*

Leonard the Great, Book One: Dragonfriend, has everything a middle-grade Arthurian fantasy needs: magic, romance, action, sword-fighting, a princess, monsters, lots of dragons and, the most important item of all, a regular kid who makes good.

Leonard is a simple page, serving the worst knight in the kingdom, Sir Ronald the Mediocre. When Leonard finds a depressed dragon, he devises a brilliant plan that will make his master famous for his bravery and skill in battle. Like all brilliant plans hatched by teenage boys, it goes spectacularly awry. From that point, the pace never lets up as Leonard finds he not only has to rescue the hapless Sir Ronald, he must pass through a dangerous enchanted forest to the home of the dragons to execute another brilliant plan that will save Camelot. Or destroy it.

Dragonfriend plays with all the conventions of the Arthurian fantasy, and Eschbacher does it skillfully and with a lot of humour. I found myself smiling and laughing, when I wasn’t on the edge of my seat. The characters were vividly drawn and rang absolutely true. We’ve all met these people in our own lives.

It’s a quick, easy and enjoyable ride, and I’m looking forward to the next installment in the Leonard the Great saga. You can buy it in whatever format you like, from whatever retailer you like, through Eschbacher's website. 5*

2012-01-07T11:09:00.000-05:00

Siggy Buckley, author of Next Time Lucky: Lessons of a Matchmaker and Intrepid Home Swapping—Insider Secrets for Successful Home Swapping, is my latest victim—I mean, guest blogger. She is a former "dating guru" or matchmaker who continues to give advice on dating, relationships and finding that special someone in her blog, "Next Time Lucky."

While Siggy doesn't normally write about writing itself, she agreed to share some thoughts on the important role of written communication in her world.

Online Etiquette and the Written Word

The written word, proper grammar and language usage are the tools of a writer. We bloggers and writers constantly work on perfecting our language skills to achieve maximum effect in our writing-whatever the genre. A field where these skills are essential as well may not have occurred to you if you haven’t dabbled in online dating.

My novel Next Time Lucky is about dating, in particular on the Internet. Everybody who has tried their hand there will have noticed that a well-crafted profile is the starting block for your launch to find a partner. There is a plethora of self-help manuals when it to comes to dating. “Dating for Dummies” is a title that appeals to me for its comic effect. I wonder how well it sells.

My working blog, as I call it, gives up-to-date advice and deals with trends in the dating business, although I’m no longer a professional. (I used to be matchmaker in Ireland). One piece of advice I read recently was to the effect that, ladies, you have the right to remain silent when approached by some unsavory specimen of the dating race. I chose to do so many a time over answering to some Tom, Dick or Harry who had just spotted my pic or profile, started drooling over what he saw and didn't even bother to read my most basic requirements, which were clearly open for everybody to see. If you're a smoker, why approach someone who clearly wants a smoke-free zone? What business does an alcoholic anonymous member have in chatting up an out-on-the-town-every-night party girl, other than for a laugh maybe? You would think he can’t read.

To convey these simple common-sense ideas to someone who is already smitten by your profile - or probably rather your picture — is not always as easy as you might think. I’d like to give you an example where I chose honesty and precision in my chosen words that proved to be too graphic for the recipient in this context.

Excerpt:

Cherie "The men I was chasing were elusive. On the other hand, I was approached by some, but I had no interest in them. One short-ass by the name of Ken annoyed me over the course of several evenings, contacting me again and again after I told him I was not interested. After all, I was free to pick and choose. I don’t remember the exact words I wrote, but it was something to the effect of I liked a man to be taller and somewhat more handsome. Oh boy, did I poke a hornet’s nest!”

(That’s where style comes into the equation, you writers may advise.)

Ken’s answer: "I suppose with your looks, requests to you border on the annoying. It is bad enough for one’s ego to have to send 10 messages off to get one reply, but when the reply is such as yours, you might as well have kicked me when I was down. I’m sure with a mind and a tongue as caustic as yours you will get the man you deserve, but it won’t be me. Ken.”

Cherie's response: "What a jerk! I had no intention of hurting his feelings. But he had not got the message the first time round. How explicit does one have to be? There you are, Cherie, you and your caustic tongue. I know diplomacy is not my forte, but neither is arse-licking ...

"Now Ken-the-Persistent had confirmed I was not cut out for diplomacy. So be it. But next time, I would just say 'stop' emphatically as many times as needed and squelch any explanations that might provoke my more resistant wannabees. So, Cherie, in some situations on the net, like in real life, it’s better not to know why you were dumped despite feeling other times that 'If I only knew why…' it would somehow ease the blow.”

What advice would a dating guru give under the circumstances? What advice would come from a writer? You tell me!

Thanks, Siggy!

Resolutions for 2012

2012-01-02T10:45:00.000-05:00

It’s the beginning of the year. I know, I should have posted this yesterday, on the actual first of the year, but I prefer to spend January 1 doing as little as possible. What do you like to do?

Anyway, here are my writer’s resolutions for the coming year.

finish those two novels that have been sitting in the drawer for years: The Last Tiger and Maurice: Walking out of the USSR
stop using “then” as a conjunction so often. I can get away with it once in a while, but not on every page.
Stop using “then” so much everywhere else. “First he did this, then he did that.” Yeesh!
resist the temptation to describe every little motion my characters make—for example, “she hesitated and glanced down, touched her face and shuddered just a little as her face reddened.” I think my readers will get it if I just writer “she hesitated as her cheeks became red.”
write more book reviews on Amazon, Goodreads and Smashwords
finish the process to list my books directly on Apple’s iBookstore.

I think that’s enough for one year.

What are your writer’s resolutions?

Announcing: The full Bones of the Earth is now available

2011-12-28T12:17:00.000-05:00

I thought I might as well make a formal announcement:

The full text of The Bones of the Earth, all three parts, is now available in e-book form from Smashwords and Amazon.

For those who have already downloaded Part 1: Initiation Rites, I will give you a coupon for a reduction in the cost of the full version equal to the cost of the part you've already bought.

I'm very happy and excited about this! I must thank, again, my cover designer, Lisa Damerst, and my editors, Roxanne Bury and Will Grainger, for outstanding efforts.

What is it all about?

I wrote The Bones of the Earth because I wanted to read an epic fantasy that did not reiterate all the stereotypes and tropes of the fantasy genre that I kept finding on the shelves in my local bookstore: typically, they start with a crude map of an imaginary land, a map that is so simplistic that it's obvious the artist never looked at a real map. Inside, two-dimensional characters have names that sound vaguely Celtic or Saxon. Place names betray that the authors were looking for short cuts to become the next Tolkein.

I decided to write a story that satisfied what I was looking for, something that's not found in most books. The setting is a place you won't find in any other story: eastern Europe in the darkest part of the Dark Age. I deliberately avoided romanticizing it. Life was miserable for most people.

Setting the story in a real place also saves me the work that took Tolkein so many years. I did not have to invent languages or history. I spent a lot of time in research, yes, but the result is that all the names of people, places and mythical monsters come from authentic sources. Yes, "Javor" is a real Slavic name, meaning "maple tree." Elli, Grat, Vorona (raven), Valgus, Photius—these are all names that real people had 1,500 years ago.

I have also made an effort to incorporate many ancient myths and legends from various cultures that would have had some influence on the people of the setting and time.

All that to say, please take a look at the book. You can take a fairly long peek at Amazon's version—it allows a free sample of about 20 percent of the text, which is about 80 pages. Also, I have a free e-pub version of about the same extent at the tab at the top of this page.

I invite any comments, as well. Let me know what you think of the story, style or approach. And let me know if you figure out what the bones of the earth are before you get to the end of Part 2.

Happy holidays!

Indie author interview with Elise Stokes, author of the Cassidy Jones adventures

2011-12-23T13:06:00.002-05:00

My latest guest is Elise Stokes, independent author of the outstanding MG novels, Cassidy Jones and the Secret Formula and Cassidy Jones and Vulcan's Gift. Both books are setting fire to the indie sales lists, and garnering great reviews, too. She is also part of Artesian Books, a real innovation in the world of electronic publishing.

I asked Elise to share her thoughts on writing, on being an author and on the business of bringing your work to an audience.

What is your goal as a writer? What are you trying to achieve with your writing—other than financial reasons, or trying to sell a lot of copies, why do you write?
Not to be dramatic, but when I write I feel like I can breathe. It’s like yoga for the brain. All the pressures of living on planet Earth just sort of melt away when I lose myself in this really cool world I’ve created in my head. Plus, it’s fun sharing this world with others, especially when they think it’s pretty cool, too.

Is there a central theme for your writing? One message you are trying to get across?
I really don’t have an agenda. I just want to entertain my readers. But if I had to pull a theme from this series it would be learning to be comfortable in your own skin. There’s a reason Cassidy is very fourteen. I want young readers to relate to her, see themselves in her and experience her victories as if they were their own. In other words, I want Cassidy to be a role model and to give girls her age a glimpse of what they can overcome and achieve. Guess I do have an agenda after all. 

Who do you think is your audience? Do you have a specific reader in mind for your books?
My target audience are girls ages 12 to 16. However—much to my delight—this series has proven to have great crossover appeal. Both genders, young and old alike, are Cassidy fans. I guess the action and bigger-than-life, Marvel-like characters makes the girl drama tolerable for the boys. Really, there is a lot going on in my stories.

What is one deep aspect of your main character, Cassidy Jones, that you did not specifically describe in your story, but that you hope that your readers discover or work out on their own?
Cassidy sees those she loves and trusts through rose-colored glasses. This is good for the reader to keep in mind since the story is being told by Cassidy. Her perception could be influenced by this flaw.

How would you describe your own writing style?I like stories that are fast-paced, have a goal, and are light on description but heavy on dialogue. In fact, I tend to skim through description to dialogue. I like learning about characters via their interaction with one another. So it comes as no surprise that this is how I also write. But I’m not a seasoned writer, so my writing style isn’t set in stone. It can be easily influenced by what I’m reading. This is one reason why I avoid reading when I’m writing.
What is your writing technique or process? For example, do you write in the mornings, or late through the night? Do you use outlines?
I plot out how to reach “the unveiling” in a skeleton outline. My goal is to keep everything relevant in the story, threaded together so tightly that my editor can’t find anything to shave off. For the most part, I write while my kids are at school. I’ve tried to write at night, but frankly I can hardly form an intelligible tweet after 9 p.m.

How many drafts of Cassidy Jones and the Secret Formula did you write before you published it?
Two: first draft and the rewrite. Aside from a few short stories in high school and college and the “novel” I wrote in 6th grade, Cassidy Jones and the Secret Formula is my first real writing attempt and the story just sort of flowed. This is not the case with the second book in the series, Cassidy Jones and Vulcan’s Gift, which was released the first week of December. That one dragged me through the woods! It was well worth the fight, however, because the result of all the toil and frustration is an unpredictable storyline and a very cool super villain that I can truly be proud of.
Are your characters based on people you actually know?
My youngest inspired Cassidy’s brother Chazz. My son has a huge imagination. If he’s taken with a character in a movie, he usually pauses the video so he can throw together a makeshift costume of the character, which he is really good at doing. The kid has an eye for detail. The first time he watched Indiana Jones he dug out a white dress shirt and left it unbuttoned almost to his navel. I’d never even noticed Indie showed that much chest before.

Though I didn’t intend this, Cassidy’s personality is a lot like mine. We share the same sense of humor, quirky ways, and shyness, which strikes us at the most random times. We are also loyal to the bone and can be rather hard on ourselves. I burdened Elizabeth, Cassidy’s mother, with my obsession of keeping a clean house. Years ago my husband had dubbed me “The Midnight Mopper.” Writing this series has forced me to lower my standards, though things can still get a little ugly around here on Saturdays, “family house cleaning day.”

If you could actually meet your villain in person, what would you like to say to him?
I’d say, “Arthur King Junior! Shut your trap!” The guy never stops talking.

What one marketing technique do you think has brought you the most sales?
Goodreads giveaways. It is the best opportunity out there for a new writer to get discovered by readers. Thousands of members participate in the drawings, and hundreds will enter for your novel. Incredible exposure and well worth the price of a paperback and shipping. I suggest listing your novel on a regular basis until reviews start to build. Credibility is crucial, because who’s going to risk wasting money on an unknown product?

Tell me about what you're working on that will help other independent authors find an audience?That would be Artesian Books, an online book retailer created for independent authors and small publishers that my husband Dave and I are launching soon. We’re offering quality books to our customers with incentives to keep them coming back, perks for book reviewers and bloggers, and opportunities to our vendors that are currently only attainable with top retailers to big house publishers with deep pockets. We have essentially created a new business model, which is much needed in this floundering world of publishing. As an author, I’m excited what this could mean for my series as well as for the works of other authors who become affiliate members. It’s a sweet opportunity for an indie.

Thank you, and happy holidays, Elise!

The worst and the best of best-seller Russell Blake

2011-12-21T08:56:00.005-05:00

This week's guest post is from indie author Russell Blake, author of best-selling political thrillers as well as the illuminating, if not exactly helpful, How To Sell A Gazillion eBooks In No Time (even if drunk, high or incarcerated). You can find his blog at Russell Blake, Suspense Writer.

Scott asked me to add to his considerable collection of accounts from authors recounting the best and worst things they’ve done for themselves.

First, an introduction. My name’s Russell Blake, and I’m a writer. By year end, I’ll have 12 books out: 10 thrillers and 2 non-fiction. All of which I have released since late May.

The Worst
Let’s talk about the worst things, first. Probably the single worst thing I do is integral to my process, and I’m not talking about the binge tequila chugging sessions, although some might argue that’s not so good, either. Then again, they haven’t stumbled a mile in my shoes, so they can bite me, as can my critics. But I digress.

When I write, I immerse myself in my work-in-progress for 12 or more hours per day. It’s just what I do. I call it an OCD approach to novel creation. The reason it is the worst is obvious—sitting for that long is physically damaging: circulation is impaired over time, as are interpersonal relations, as well as any motivation to go to the gym. A whole year can blur by while your head’s in your books. It’s not a particularly healthy way to live. So my New Year’s resolution is to limit my time to eight hours a day, which should translate into 5,500 words a day, six days a week. I’ll even take Sundays off. That should put me at 90K a month, with time to polish for a week. So I think we can expect a few more books next year, even if life intrudes, as it inevitably does.

The best
The best thing I have done is to just do it. I debated self-publishing, or even writing in any sort of serious way, for years. The reasons were myriad. The chances of success were slim. It was thankless, and required considerable investment of time and money. Even though the ladies love the ink jockeys (and who wouldn’t, given that we mostly look like George Clooney after makeup), it would be a sacrifice. The good news was that I wouldn’t have to quit any of my bad habits, as they are practically de rigueur for being a writer. So there was a ray of sunshine there.

The very best thing I’ve done is to set aside a year to live dangerously, which in this case meant doing this for real. I’ve written numerous works, but scrapped them all, except for a few forgettable non-fiction opuses best left buried. But they were required in order to clock my hours—the infamous 10,000 hours that Malcolm Gladwell refers to when discussing the time investment required to master something. I believe he’s right, because once you get there, it does become easier. That’s a lot of hours; literally years of time investment to make it. But there’s unfortunately no substitution for practice. Except for reading, which is also essential. How can you broaden your chops if you aren’t reading the work of other authors, and adopting the positives to better your own writing? Practice and exposure are the two biggies to improving your craft.

I wish there was a shortcut I could impart, but I don’t know any. If I had to give advice (other than the observation that the world’s not fair or forgiving, so just get over it already and move along with whatever you’re doing), it would be to commit to a certain number of hours per day to write, and then do it. And invest wisely in learning the rules of the road, so that you can be adept, even if you choose to ignore most of them some of the time. And of course, buy the work of indie authors whose writing interests you, early and often. Nothing self-serving about that (wink).

As a special promotion for readers of Scott’s blog, the first ten thousand customers are entitled to five minutes of free long distance Rikei healing for each of my books bought while this blog is live. No thanks are necessary. It will all come back to me in time, I’m sure. Now I have to go write some more. I’m already running behind...

Russell Blake is the bestselling author of the thrillers Fatal Exchange, The Geronimo Breach, the Zero Sum trilogy (Wall Street thrillers: Kotov Syndrome, Focal Point and Checkmate), King of Swords, Night of the Assassin, and The Delphi Chronicle trilogy (The Manuscript, The Tortoise and the Hare, and Phoenix Rising). Non-fiction includes the international bestseller An Angel with Fur (animal biography) and How To Sell A Gazillion eBooks In No Time (even if drunk, high or incarcerated), a parody of all things writing-related. Blake lives in Mexico, and enjoys his dogs, fishing, boating, tequila and writing.

Six sentence Sunday for December 18

2011-12-18T09:52:00.000-05:00

Here is the latest six-sentence excerpt from The Bones of the Earth, now available on Smashwords, Amazon and iTunes.

“Your actions have shown you to be one chosen by the powers of the world to accomplish wondrous deeds,” she said, as if she had heard his question. Her hands moved up his arms. Without losing contact with his skin, she moved around him and began spreading the oil on his neck and shoulders. Drops of oil set his skin on fire as they ran down his back. His vision swam, and he felt as if he were rocking back and forth on his feet, no matter how hard he tried to stand still. He couldn’t speak.

If you're curious about the Six-Sentence Sunday movement, check out their site. This week, I'm listed at number 141. Read some of the other excerpts and leave comments.

If you want to read more of The Bones of the Earth, click the tab at the top of the page for a longer excerpt and links to a long sample and the whole of Part 1.

And feel free to leave a comment about this week's excerpt!

How to Fund Your Novel: Guest post by Roger Eschbacher

2011-12-15T08:33:00.000-05:00

This week's guest blogger is Roger Eschbacher, author most recently of middle-grade fantasy Dragonfriend.

A professional television animation writer who now is at least partly responsible for Scooby-Doo. I asked him to tell us all about the funding model he used.

As just about any “indie” author will admit one of the biggest knocks against our tribe is that often self-published books are rife with errors (punctuation, grammar, typos, continuity problems, etc.). We know how jarring it can be to run across a typo in a traditionally published book, so imagine how distracting it can be to be poked in the eye by dozens of them.

Why does this happen? To be blunt, it’s because the author didn’t have the book properly edited. And by “properly,” I mean professionally. No matter how good at catching errors you think you might be, you’ll never get them all. No matter how good you might think your beta reader/proofreader friends are at finding embarrassing mistakes in your text or story, there are always more hiding in your manuscript. Always.

I can verify this through my own experience. I can’t tell you how many “final” reads I did on Dragonfriend, my recently self-published MG fantasy novel. I’d go through it, find and fix a bunch of errors, only to go back to the beginning for one last look and find even more. I realized I needed professional help. I needed a paid editor with a trained eye to go through my manuscript and find the mistakes that would embarrass me if they ever made it out of my computer and into the wild.

What does any of this have to do with funding my novel? Well…having come to the realization that I was in over my head as far as editing goes, I started looking around for someone to help me out. Guess what? Editors can be expensive! My manuscript was in the 75,000-word range, and quotes for an edit on a book that size ran from the upper hundreds to the low thousands on the sites I checked. Google “editing, novel, proofreading” yourself and be prepared for your jaw to drop to the floor. This is not a knock against the editors, by the way; what they do is very time- and labor-intensive (= expensive).

So what was I going to do? I knew I had to get my book properly edited, but I also knew I wasn’t exactly dripping with cash. I was frozen in place until I could scrape together enough funds for a professional editor. Frozen, that is, until I ran across Kickstarter.

Kickstarter.com is a site that exists solely for raising funding for “the arts.” Based on the artist/patron model of old, Kickstarter provides a platform where you can raise money from friends, family, and total strangers without having to beg in person. You simply set up an account and direct people to it with a “Hey, if you’re interested in backing my book project…” Amazingly, to me anyway, a lot of folks were willing to pitch in and help me out.

If you head over to the site, you’ll find that everyone from filmmakers to graphic artists to greeting card makers have a project going on. Oh, and authors too.

Here’s how it works. You sign up for an account, then pitch your project to the Kickstarter folks. My “project” was to raise enough money to have my book professionally edited and pay for its setup (cover design, proof copies, Createspace Pro Plan, etc.). Frankly, I think this step is included to make sure that only “creatives” get in the door. They’re very specific about not accepting charity or non-arty business projects. This site is about raising money for projects with artistic content.

Thankfully, my project was approved and I set about trying to determine the amount of funding I would need. Having priced out the costs listed above (I picked an editor quote somewhere in the middle of the pack) and factoring in Kickstarter’s five percent account fee, I determined I’d need about $2,100.00 to properly prepare Dragonfriend for publication. Kickstarter recommends that you research your costs and pick a sum that is very close to the amount of funding you will actually need. They say that an appropriately priced project is more likely to succeed, and I think that makes sense.

Next, you determine how long you want the project to go. The allowable range is between 30 and 90 days. Kickstarter recommends 30 days, advising that if a project is going to be funded, it’ll usually happen within that period of time. I wish I had listened to them. I chose 45 days, only to have my project achieve full funding at around day 25. You have to wait for the project to play itself out before Kickstarter releases the funds, so I found myself cooling my heels for the balance of time left in the project. Another reason not to inflate your request is that if you don’t reach your funding goal within the allotted time, the project fails and no one (yourself or Kickstarter) gets any money. The backers who pledged prior to fail won’t be charged either, which is good, but you obviously don’t want to fail. In short, determine a reasonable goal and don’t be greedy!

Next, you create your backer “rewards,” attaching fun things like bookmarks, signed copies, and future character naming rights to various donation price points. They encourage you to be inventive, so in addition to those traditional rewards, I added stuff like writing a “fake” unmasking scene from the Scooby Doo series I write on. The backer became the villain and was able to pick the name of their evil alter-ego in a customized script. Sure it’s silly, but three backers ended up receiving scenes thanks to some very generous donations.

Then you press the “launch project” button and get the word out that you’re trying to raise money for a worthy project – asking folks to become true patrons of the arts. I ended up raising $2,205.00, which I promptly put into play by hiring an editor. I chose Iguana Proofreading and opted for their complete package of a manuscript critique and proofreading.

I have nothing but good things to say about my Kickstarter experience. It provided the funds I needed to launch my book. Without it, I’d probably still be going through the manuscript and finding error after error after error…

What about you? Do you have any experience with Kickstarter or tips on hiring a pro editor? Please share them in the comments.

Link to my blog: http://thenovelproject.blogspot.com/

Link to my (now inactive) Kickstarter project: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/203009905/novel-leonard-the-great-dragon-friend

Link to Dragonfriend’s Amazon page: http://www.amazon.com/Dragonfriend-Leonard-Great-Book-One/dp/1453628487/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1320515683&sr=1-1

Roger Eschbacher is a professional television animation writer who's worked for Warner Brothers, Nickelodeon, and Cartoon Network. In addition to his middle-grade fantasy/adventure novel, Dragonfriend, he's also written two children's picture books, "Road Trip", and "Nonsense! He Yelled," both for Penguin.
Born in St. Louis, Missouri, he now lives in California with his family and a crazy dog named Lizzy.

A fast-paced page-flicker

2011-12-13T08:55:00.000-05:00

Indie Book Review:

Black Beast by RS Guthrie

Once again, an independent author proven that the big commercial publishers just are not effective at finding good writers. RS Guthrie’s debut novel is a good, fast-paced read that kept me turning pages — or at least, flicking the screen of my e-reader.

Black Beast is an attempt to marry supernatural horror with hardboiled cop mystery. It’s mostly successful, if a little uneven in spots.

Synopsis: Robert Macaulay, “Bobby Mac,” is a Denver, Colorado cop with an artificial leg and a lot of history. The story begins with a death-row visit to the criminal who killed Macaulay’s first partner and was responsible for the loss of Macaulay’s leg, as well.

Macaulay is then perplexed by a series of especially grisly murders in Denver, and other events that bring up old cases he had worked one.

Macaulay’s family history becomes much more present, though, when he’s visited by his uncle, Father West, who reveals that Bobby Mac is the heir to an occult weapon and a responsibility to fight an ancient evil.

Author Rob Guthrie successfully weaves together the occult and the fact-based murder mystery genres in this tale. I’m not sure whether plotting or character development is his strongest point. Macaulay and all the other characters are absolutely believable (except maybe for some of the buddies from the Marines — but then, I’ve never been in the armed forces). I really identified with the main character’s awkwardness and difficulty with his college-aged son, and the anguish over the death of his wife.

And as for plot, there is only one big coincidence in this book. Everything else that I thought was a credibility stretch is very nicely tied together by the end. To me, this is a mark of a writer who takes his craft seriously.

There are a few places where Guthrie goes a little over the top, mainly in his descriptions of horror and ancient evil and in descriptions of criminals, but I can forgive those. By far, most of the prose is tight and fast paced. I was never bored reading this book.

I cannot understand why no commercial publisher picked this title up. Oh, right — because Rob Guthrie isn’t a celebrity.

He should be, by now.

The perfect novel for a high-school student

2011-12-12T15:45:00.000-05:00

Indie author book review: Cassidy Jones and the Secret Formula
This is the perfect novel for a girl or boy.

While she starts on some well-travelled roads — a teenage protagonist who gains super-powers from an accident in a lab — author Elise Stokes actually shows more skill in weaving that plot point into the plot of this book. She knows what it means to be a writer, and demonstrates this with a clear, fast-paced writing style that keeps readers focused on the story, not on her ability to write.

Synopsis: Cassidy Jones is a 9th-grade teenager who is very self-conscious about her lack of athletic ability, among other self-perceived faults. She’s envious of the popular girl in school, Robyn, who is not only athletic and pretty, but seems able to do anything she wants. The first chapter of the story really brings to life the angst and self-doubt of the teen years. Later, Cassidy accompanies her father, a local newsman, on a story as part of an enforced learning experience. Again, Stokes vividly captures the emotions of a teen riding in the backseat as her parent tries to show her a small part of the adult life.

The assignment is to interview a world-leading genetic researcher. In the lab, Cassidy suffers an accident that involves some of the chemical the scientist is studying, and à la Spider-Man, gains super powers.

When that same scientist is kidnapped, her son, Emery — coincidentally, the same age as Cassidy —moves into the Jones’s because he has no one to look after him. This is the one big coincidence of the story, and as I’ve said before, every novel needs one but can tolerate no more.

Cassidy gradually discovers her new super strength and super speed, and teams up with Emery to find his mother and the kidnappers.

So far, pretty standard middle-grade stuff, right? But Stokes reaches a higher level by describing her characters’ reactions and emotions with skill, humour and absolute dead-on believability.

Why is this a perfect book for teens?

Because it depicts a girl and her family so well. The Joneses are not ordinary. Dad’s a local celebrity and Mom stays at home. A smaller and smaller minority of North American families can afford that lifestyle. But the situation is handled well. It makes sense, because Dad is successful in what he does.

The kids are also believable, with the behaviours and flaws that we see around us and within us all the time.

And the plot is not predictable. I’ve read far too many books and seen way too many movies where I can predict the next scene and the next plot development, because it’s been done before many, many times. While Stokes may have borrowed a page from Spider-Man to begin her story, her plot is original. There is a twist at the end that I did not see coming, and there were several points where my predictions about whodunit were proved wrong.

My only complaint is that the end of the plot was wrapped up a little too quickly. The emotional arc of the story was fully developed, but the logical plot was rushed. It would have been nice to read about Cassidy discovering the final details and her reaction to them. This was the one part of the book where I found myself saying (quietly) “show, don’t tell.” It felt as if the author were rushing to finish the book.

Cassidy Jones was clearly written as a character with a series of adventures ahead of her, and even though I’m very far from being an adolescent American girl, I’m looking forward to the next installment.

It’s not every day that you find a really good read, after all.

Six sentence Sunday for December 11

2011-12-11T09:02:00.000-05:00

Here is my entry for this week's Six Sentence Sunday. Looks like I just made it under the wire. This is from Chapter 5 of my novella, The Bones of the Earth: Initiation Rites, now available from Smashwords and Amazon.
This week, I'm entrant number 105. I hope I'm not the only entrant who's not in the erotica category.

Chapter 5: the Cave

By afternoon, Javor was panicking with every step as they crept along a ledge narrower than his shoulders. The ledge was covered with a thin layer of tiny pebbles, and each footfall slid and crunched and pushed a puff of dust over the edge.

Cliffs rose almost straight up on their left and dropped so far on the right that Javor felt dizzy if he looked over. There was no sound but the wind. Above, the sky roiled with gray clouds. Clouds don’t move like that, Javor thought.

For more hot excerpts, check out Six Sentence Sunday.

The best decision and the biggest mistake: guest bloggers Wodke Hawkinson

2011-12-09T13:47:00.001-05:00

Karen Wodke and PJ Hawkinson are collectively the writing team known as WodkeHawkinson, authors of Betrayed, Catch her in the Rye, Blue and the soon to be released Night Roads.

I asked them to contribute to the series “the best thing and the biggest mistake writers have made," and they graciously accepted.

In return, I described my editing process on their blog.

Our best decision and greatest mistake so far
Thanks to Scott for the opportunity to guest post on his blog! Scott asked us to discuss the best thing we have done as writers, and the biggest mistake we have made.

We feel the best decision we've made so far is to self-publish. It was not a decision made lightly. We researched the subject and took into consideration not only the stigma often attached to the self-published author, but also the difficulty of self-promotion. Ultimately, we decided to take the plunge on our own, and we are glad we did.

As self-published authors, we have complete control over the content of our books, our covers, and our marketing. Marketing and promotion are often the twin obstacles that intimidate authors considering self-publishing. It’s a valid concern. Independent authors cannot place their books into brick-and-mortar stores as traditional publishers can.

For us, paperback sales have not been high, even though we feel our books have a fair price. However, online sales of the e-book versions are steady and rising, especially for our novel, Betrayed. As for our paperbacks, we have recently discovered a few new venues, which include local bookstores and book signings. Since our last book signing was successful, we are gradually expanding further into that segment of the market. Even traditionally published authors must devote some time to promotion (unless they are mega-famous), but indie authors have to hit it a bit harder. It's all part of the business of writing.

As for our greatest mistake so far, we both agree it was wasting over a year of valuable time pursuing a traditional publishing contract. During that time, we were not idle, for we were working on our next book. But, that time was lost with regard to the promotion of our work. Traditional publishers often have policies that prohibit simultaneous submissions and they control the response time. A writer is often left hanging for months waiting on an answer.

For any new authors holding out for a traditional publisher, we wish them luck. It was not the right choice for us. It's nearly impossible for an unknown author to pitch a book to the big traditional publishers, at least without an agent. And, beware; a good agent is not that easy to come by for a new author. It's difficult to attract an agent if you are unpublished, and difficult to become published without an agent. This is a vicious circle — one we chose to avoid.

One of our marketing strategies did not produce the results we were seeking. Before releasing Betrayed, we put out two short story collections, Catch Her in the Rye and Blue, and priced the e-book version low as a way to introduce our writing to readers. Although we have made some sales of these books, the end result wasn’t what we had planned; it seems readers prefer novels to short story collections. Even knowing this, we put out a third short story collection entitled Alone, simply because we enjoy writing short stories. We don't regard this move as a mistake, but more of a learning experience. We have to be pragmatic, as writing is our livelihood. We'll put more emphasis on our novels from this point forward, because that's where the readership is, but we'll never abandon the short story format altogether. We already have the next short story collection in the pipeline, Night Roads, even though we have put the project on hold for the time being so we can pursue our two upcoming novels.

The decision whether to self-publish or pursue traditional publishing is one with which many authors struggle. There are good arguments for either path. For us, going indie was the right choice.

-Wodke Hawkinson

Links:

Our website: http://wodke-hawkinson.com/

Our reader/author site: http://findagoodbooktoread.com/

Our books on Amazon: Kindle store > Wodke Hawkinson
Twitter: @WodkeHawkinson

What do you think about Wodke Hawkinson's decision?

Have you ever read something and wondered “didn’t the writer edit this? At all?”

2011-12-07T15:14:00.004-05:00

My job as editor means I read unedited writing. Most of the time, the writer has tried to self-edit, with varying success. I don’t mind that. Unfortunately, I have read a few novels lately that seem as if no one has even tried to correct the text, beyond using the spelling checker in the word processing software. It’s aggravating to read 300 pages filled with grammatical mistakes, clichés and unclear sentences.

Here are some of the worst offences:

Too much detail

This is a sin that I know I must watch for in my own writing. It’s not necessary to write “she put the envelope on the desk and slid it across to him.” Just tell us that “he” took, or better yet, opened the envelope.

And you don’t have to tell us everything a character ate for breakfast. Get to the action. If you want to emphasize that he or she is health-conscious, then describe the grapefruit, yogurt and peanut butter (or whatever) once. One of the more annoying aspects of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series is the number of times Stieg Larsson described his characters eating Billy’s Pan Pizza or liverwurst sandwiches. How does repeating that detail add to characterization or plot?

A few other examples from recent reading (titles and names withheld to protect the guilty):

— “nod in agreement” — Most readers will understand that “nodding” indicates agreement. You could just write “agreed,” but ask yourself if your story or message really needs this detail.

— “collapsed to the floor” — A floor is generally what people and things collapse to, unless it’s the bare ground. If you’ve established your setting already, your readers know what characters are collapsing to.
— “‘You’re going to have to leave,’ said the waitress as she came back to my table.” — If she did not come to the table, how would the customer hear her?

New clichés

You’ve read about all the standard clichés to avoid (like the plague ;)). But new clichés have emerged — phrases that sounded fresh once, but have had the life squeezed out of them through overuse by lazy writers.

— thin blue line, meaning the police force
— splitting headache
— fallen on deaf ears
— snapped like a whip
— peppered with gunfire
— master plan
— pushing the envelope
— out of the box
— going forward, meaning the future
— hit on
— tagged and bagged, meaning a dead body
— more than meets the eye — the writer’s job is to show the reader more than their eyes will see.

Think of new ways of getting these images across. No, it won’t be easy, but did you think the writer’s job would be easy?

Finally, the worst cliché of all, found in Hollywood scripts and beginners’ novels: everyone is attractive. Look around you: how many people do you see in your office or on your bus that are really that attractive? How many men are muscular and fit with washboard abs? How many women are beautiful?

Flawed characters are much more believable than perfect ones. Those flaws can be physical, as well as psychological, economic or moral.

Wordiness

In writing, using too many words to express an idea is a felony.

Read over your work carefully, and ask: can you delete these words or this phrase without reducing the amount of information in the document? Delete them!

Watch for phrases like these:

— mutual cooperation — all cooperation is mutual, or it’s not cooperation
— with a look of disappointment — try “she/he looked disappointed”
— with reluctance — “reluctantly”
— long drawn-out voyage — just “long” will do, or express this in a new way
— swirling vortex — all vortices swirl; it’s what vortices do
— rises up — I’ve never heard of anything “rising down” (although I remember upsydasium, the element that “fell up” from Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons)
— the colour of bronze
— the month of December — December is not anything BUT a month
— place of business — This can be anything. Be specific. Use “store,” “office,” “restaurant,” or whatever is the case.
— due to the fact that — write “because”
— dead corpse
— are in evidence — write “are.”

Simplicity

Finally, remember to keep it simple. Don’t try to impress the reader with literary flourishes, and don’t show off your vocabulary. A book, document or report is not about the writer, even when it’s an autobiography. It’s about telling a story or a message to an audience.

The following are a few examples I see mostly in science fiction and fantasy, but also in historical fiction and even in business reports:

Don’t write use instead

countenance face
assistance help
perpetrator attacker/invader/burglar — be specific
fatigued tired
attempting trying
sufficient enough
regarding about

Do you have any tips or pet peeves about needlessly complex, overblown or wordy writing? Leave a comment.

The best (and the worst) of being an author: Guest post by Andy Holloman

2011-12-05T09:34:00.004-05:00

The latest author to volunteer his thoughts on the best and worst of being an author is Andy Holloman, author of Shades of Gray and blogger of Musings of a Debut Novelist (and other nonsense). Based in Raleigh, North Carolina, Andy is a former travel agent and now author. When he’s not writing guest posts for me, he claims to be working on his next novel.

The best parts (and the worst parts!) of being an author

A big thanks to Scott for inviting me to guest post and I really like his topic suggestion.

For me, the best part of being and author is getting to interact with readers. My debut novel, Shades of Gray, has just been released and I’m finally getting a chance to hear from readers and reviewers.

I’m fascinated and thrilled that folks have been enjoying the book. Also, I truly enjoy the comments that readers provide because they often find different meaning from the work than I had intended. This is wonderful because it opens up a whole slew of new perspectives—and this is just not available to us authors while we are creating a novel. I LOVE readers and I LOVE readers’ comments!!

Now, on the the WORST part of being an author: I truly despise the editing and rewriting process. Although any novel requires multiple rewrites, this is the worst part to me because it requires less creative juices than the actual construction of the story. Likewise, editing doesn’t excite me at all. I was fortunate to have three different professional editors review my book, so I was able to avoid the bulk of this work.

However, no author is ever immune from editing. Unfortunately it is an essential part of the process by which a book gets “made.”

Six sentence Sunday for December 4

2011-12-04T08:29:00.001-05:00

It's Sunday, and I'm participating in Six Sentence Sunday, again. The sample below is from Part 2 of The Bones of the Earth, "Tests."

This excerpt is from Chapter 12, and takes place in ancient Dacia, north of the Roman Empire — a land long reputed to be haunted.

"One day as they crept through thick brush toward the road, Photius stopped dead in his tracks, his hand out to stop Javor. He held his finger over his lips and pointed with his other hand. Peering between the branches and leaves, they saw something their minds could not accept: a young woman, a girl, really, naked, tied spread-eagle to two rough logs cut and lashed together in an x-shape, then propped in the middle of the road. She was thin with long, light-brown hair that cascaded over her shoulders. They could see her ribs under her small breasts. Javor thought she was probably the same age as he was, perhaps a little older."

You can check out some other fine samples of upcoming and published work at http://www.sixsunday.com/.

What do you think of this, or any other samples? Leave a comment below.

The best and worst of being an author: Guest post by Wendy S. Russo

2011-12-01T09:23:00.000-05:00

Wendy S. Russo is the third fellow writer and blogger to participate in the Best and Worst series on the author's life.

A wife, mom, and IT analyst by day, Wendy S. Russo enjoys inquisitive characters, slow reveals and snowballing climaxes. She keeps a blog and is actively seeking publication for her YA Sci-Fi romance, January Black. Her blog is called simply Wendy S. Russo: Writer in wife/mom clothing.

The best thing I’ve ever done for my writing? That's easy … Zoloft!

I’m really not joking. What I’ve found in recent years is that when I have a difficulty in my life, regardless of what it is, it’s usually a symptom of something larger. Where there is one symptom of a problem, there are usually others. I struggled with one particular WIP for ten years. Toward the end of that stretch, I started taking Zoloft to deal with episodes of anxiety. Within six months, I had shelved the WIP, edited 80,000 words out of my first novel, and written my third novel. I dealt with my anxiety … my writing problem resolved itself. Coincidence? I’m not a believer in coincidence within complex systems.

But, that’s not a fun answer, is it? So how about I tell you about the second best thing I have ever done for my writing? I hesitate to mention it because it usually triggers this question: “Slash?” No. Sorry to disappoint you. Yes, I have written Star Wars fan fiction, but no…I did not have Luke and Lando crossing lightsabers on The Brokeback Falc—

[Wendy fires off a quick email to Marie Sexton about a gay Luke/Lando parody. Marie replies, "That’s been done every which way…and yes that is an innuendo."]

I’m sorry, where what I? Oh yes…Star Wars. I claim my fan fiction masterpiece with pride; I really do. Also, I encourage anyone who wants to write a novel but doesn’t know where to start to try it.

Writing a novel is a lot like building a bookshelf from scratch. Whether you’re throwing stuff together, or planning it out to the very last detail, you still have to know how to safely use the table saw. Think of fan fiction, then, like building from the pieces of an IKEA box.

I’ll talk about Star Wars because that’s what I know. The back story is provided. The alien species and worlds, the weaponry and advanced technology, the ships, the characters…it’s all provided in “Essential Guides” published by LucasFilm. They have a dozen series set within a timeline that covers thousands of years. It has a supporting cast of thousands.

This is what I did: I rewrote “Sleeping Beauty” in a setting 24 years after Return of the Jedi. I set her up as an Old Republic Jedi Master who’s come out of suspended animation with retrograde amnesia, so she has no idea who she is. I put her on a ship with Mara Jade and then crashed it on a world where Luke Skywalker and Han Solo just happened to be at the time. I tossed in some romance and some planet-hopping terrorists, and just had a really good time. And you know what I got out of it? A lot of great lessons in composition, world and character building, and how to use dialog.

Was it good? Does it really matter? I got a trilogy out of it. My second project was a two volume fantasy epic; it weighed in at 280,000 words and took me only ten months from start to finish. Without those Star Wars novels, I may never have finished a first novel at all. Without them, I wouldn't have had the confidence to start an epic, and I probably wouldn’t be writing this post now.

This is about when I did the worst thing ever for my writing. I took a Short Novel Writing class. Oh, no, no, no! Don’t get me wrong. I don’t regret taking the class. I got an “A.” Given a chance, I’d take that class again in a heartbeat! Where it went wrong had nothing to do with the instruction and everything to do with what I did with it. There were things I had done wrong with the SW trilogy. I continued to do these things incorrectly in my fantasy epic. And there I was, in a formal setting, with a very respected Southern Lit author explaining to me why these things are wrong. The professor gave me some cool new tools, like story types, timeline variations, foreshadowing…. She taught me how to keep from bouncing from one POV to another, to cut excessive detail, and to avoid deus ex machina. And you would think these are pretty good things, right?

They are splendid things, and they’ve done great things for me. But at the time, I didn’t simply add/replace tools in my storytelling toolbox. I let the tools rewrite me. I used to write by the seat of my pants…(280,000 words in ten months, remember?) I plowed right through that epic like it was nothing. Now, I'm a plotter. I look at that shelved WIP I have, and I see another epic-length fantasy. I'm five chapters in and I've already worked it to death. Just looking at the old scenes frustrates me because I love them, but even after years apart, I just don't care enough about what comes next to pick it up again.

There really is something to be said about doing things in moderation.

Try and not write lightening, and other mistakes in your and your fellows’ writing

2011-11-29T11:59:00.001-05:00

There are some errors that drive me crazy, not because they’re so terrible — anything can be corrected — but because they appear so frequently, and they’re really so simple that it’s hard to imagine how people make them.

Lightning image from Suvro Datta
on freedigitalphotos.net

“Lightening” for “lightning.” People who should know better make this mistake all the time. Even some websites where I found the images of lightning called it “lightening.”

“Lightening” is a progressive verb, meaning “making lighter”—in weight or in colour.

“Using bleach is lightening the colour of my shirt.”
“Help from the community is really lightening my workload.”

The flash in the sky that accompanies thunder is “lightning.” There’s no e in it.

“Try and” is another common error.

“I’ll try and get there before 8:00.”

It’s a childish expression. To interpret the above sentence strictly, you get two ideas: “I’ll try,” (what are you trying?) followed by “and get there.” Are these two different things? The speaker intends to say he or she will try to arrive before a specific time. Solution: “I will try to get there before 8:00.”

“Two-month anniversary.” Newscasters, who should know better, kept using this phrase as the Occupy Wall Street protests continued into their third month in November. An anniversary is something that happens once a year. The syllable “ann” comes from the Latin word for “year.” The protest may have reached the “two-month mark” or “point,” but not an “anniversary.”

The most awkward sentence construction I have ever seen takes this form:

“This causes problems for our and our supplier’s accounting departments.”

The first time I noticed it, in a memo brought to me by a student from her employer, I thought it would never happen again. However, I have seen this kind of phrase in a few places lately:

“The document must bear your or your representative’s signature.”
“This copy is for his and his agent’s records.”

The writers of these phrases are trying use words efficiently. The effort is commendable, but it leaves this dangling modifier: “his and ...” Read it aloud and you’ll hear how strange it seems.

The solution: rewrite the whole sentence. Start over by thinking about what you want the reader to do after reading the sentence. (That’s the G for Goal in Get a GRIP).

“The author and his or her agent should retain copies in their records.”
“Please sign this document yourself, or have an authorized representative sign it on your behalf.”
“This causes problems for our accounting department as well as our suppliers.”

That’s the Writing Tip for this week. Use the Comments section below to add your own!

Six sentence Sunday

2011-11-27T08:49:00.000-05:00

I have finally done it. I have finally remembered to register in time and get myself to the computer before 9:00 a.m. on a Sunday. Here is my entry for Six Sentence Sunday.

Six Sentence Sunday is a simple blog hop for authors and aspiring authors. You sign into a Linky list at http://www.sixsunday.com/ between 6 p.m. ET Tuesday and midnight the following Saturday, including the link to your blog; then before 9 a.m. that Sunday, you put exactly SIX sentences from your novel—any novel, published or in progress—on your blog. Readers then follow the link on the home page to read the samples. If the author asks for a comment, you can leave one, but it's not mandatory.

Sounds simple, but for some reason, I've managed to let it slip past me, week after week, until now.

So, here are six sentences from Chapter 2 of The Bones of the Earth, now available on Amazon and Smashwords.

“I can’t kill a sleeping man,” Hrech said in a very small voice.

Javor look at Hrech directly, something he almost never did. “You know what they’re going to do to the girls—rape them repeatedly. They’ll take turns with them, and when they get tired of them, they’ll kill them and go to another village and take more girls. We’ll never see them again alive, unless we do something right now. Are you with me or not?”

Hope you like it. Comments welcome!

The best and worst of being an author: Guest post by RS Guthrie

2011-11-26T14:27:00.000-05:00

Rob Guthrie is becoming known on the Internet, not just as the independent author of Black Beast: A Clan of Macaulay novel, but also for founding RABMAD, or Read a Book, Make a Difference, where authors donate a portion (or all) of the proceeds of their works to good causes.

I asked Rob to tell answer two questions: what's the best thing or aspect in his personal experience of being an author, and what is the biggest mistake he's made.

As you'll see, Rob, in his inimitable way, decided to answer those questions in reverse order.

In return, I've written my best and worst on Rob's blog, Rob on Writing.

Over to you, Rob:

The worst and the best of being an independent writer

As indie writers, we must carry a machete to cut through the tangled mess of the publishing world. I personally prefer two. This way I can double-fist them, cutting through twice the vine work, and also have a backup when one blade becomes too dull to be of any use.

Seriously, how many pre-published indie writers understood the magnitude of marketing that would be required to make even a cursory attempt at reaching the masses of readers? Not I. In my deluded mind, I envisioned an endless supply of readers, just waiting for the next great book. I was realistic: I knew that eventually the work would have to stand on its own merit. But I never dreamed it would be such a challenge to reach the readers.

That was my biggest mistake. Not figuring out the marketplace—and more importantly, the level of effort required to make a go of book promotion—before putting out my first book. The reason I consider that a mistake is that I feel I have more or less sacrificed my first work to the altar of acquiring marketing base. In other words, I sell diddlysquat while learning how to sell more than diddlysquat.

Which is okay, because I think that is part of the equation for any writer, indie or not: you have to get something out there. A sacrificial novel, as it happens to be in my case. I just think I would have put something a little less involved. Perhaps a collection of short stories or a novella. I put a lot of work into my first novel and I fear by the time I have finished honing my marketing plan, achieved my true rhythm, and established my reader base, the first book will have become a giveaway to enhance interest in the second, third, and so on.

In a short time I have learned one incontrovertible fact: writers need each other. I never would have guessed this maxim beforehand. I likely wouldn’t have believed it, even if someone had shared it with me. But the best decision I made was to join the Twitter and Facebook writer communities and to saddle up with a collection of likeminded indie writers.

Cross-promotion. That is the way out of the forest.

As one, we are weak—as many, we are a force.

Too many writers still don’t get this concept. I think the biggest misconception is also the one that keeps many writers from joining forces: the idea that we are competitors, not allies. If this were, say, the auto industry, that might be true. Readers, however, unlike drivers of automobiles, have a unique qualifier (particularly in the digital “99-cent” age): a turnover rate that approaches the relative speed of light.

A consumer keeps a car for a minimum of three years. The average is probably more like five. A reader, depending on speed and time available, can read up to a book a day. And I think there are more readers today than ever, probably in no small part due to the lowering of price by the digital market (not to mention the ease of access—literally press a few buttons and your book is at your disposal).

My point is, there are plenty of readers for all of us. There really are. That our biggest task is grabbing market share is a false challenge. The mirage in the distance. As indie writers our biggest challenge is NOT ensuring enough consumers for our product. It is NOT creating the best product we can (although that is a close second). The biggest roadblock for the indie writer, by far, is getting his or her work out to the readers. Period. Nothing else comes close.

Call it what you will: getting noticed, finding a readership, showcasing your product. If you have not yet realized how deep in the jungle an indie writer is, you haven’t really tried to sell your book yet. We indie writers are half a world away from our audience:

The readers are THERE…they just don’t know you are.

The good news is we can help each other send out the word from the mountaintops. We can build buzz, product, credibility, and most importantly, we can leverage our collective reach to establish an audience. Think of it this way:

Bill writes a great mystery. So does Suzy. If by helping each other, they can reach 1,000 people they would not have had access to alone (all, presumably, mystery lovers), what do you think the chances are that the majority of readers will read both books? Why wouldn’t they? Assuming they are both entertaining, well-written, engaging mysteries that is (remember, I said before that eventually your work has to stand of its own accord).

Another example. Say you are a reader. You aren’t going to attend a mystery writers' conference only to pick one excellent author or book. In a perfect world they would all be great and you’d have an endless supply of reading material, right?

I’ll repeat it one last time for effect: the best decision I ever made was to join with other likeminded authors and to cross-promote. It is through writers helping writers that we will walk from the darkness of obscurity into the light of a hungry, awaiting marketplace.

You can find Rob's books on Amazon and on his site, RSGuthrie.com.

Guest post: Alan McDermott on being an author

2011-11-23T15:52:00.005-05:00

I've asked some bloggers to contribute guest posts, where they answer two questions:

- what's the best thing you've done, as a writer?
- what is the hardest thing, or the biggest mistake you've made?

I am contributing posts on the same subject to their blogs.

The responses have covered topics from the kind of writing they do, when they write, their writing process and even managing their personal lives.

The first is Alan McDermott from the south of England, author of Gray Justice (which I reviewed on this blog last week). His blog is Jambalian.

Take it away, Alan!

The best and worst of being an author

The best part is easy. You might expect me to say it’s looking at those sales figures and seeing them tick over, but to be honest the thing that pleases me more is when I get a review from someone totally impartial. There haven’t been that many (I think around 16 in total, spread over a few sites such as Amazon, Smashwords and Goodreads), but each one gives me the determination to keep going on the next book.

Readers might think that the book in their hand was written by someone spending hours at the keyboard in an idyllic mountain retreat, but I’d bet that 90 percent of the time the author is like me, working a day job and coming home to a family. As any parent knows, that leaves very little time for anything, never mind writing a novel. This means I have to get up at dark o’clock every morning in order to scrape a couple of hundred words together before setting off for the office. When I get home there are three lovely ladies waiting for me, and they all want a piece of Daddy, and when I get an hour to myself in the evening I am so worn out I can just about say Hi to my friends on Twitter before the sandman comes calling. Weekends are not much better, but at least I can manage a thousand words over the two days.

It’s a tough regimen, but every time I see a new 4- or 5-star review it tells me that someone got a lot of pleasure from my book, and that makes it all worthwhile.

The hard part about being an author? To be honest, I don’t think there is an easy part. Notwithstanding the above routine, I had to come up with a storyline which gallops along at such a pace that the reader cannot put the book down. Having written that story, I then had to tame the beast that is impatience. The beast rears its head as soon as the last word has been confined to the page and screams “Publish it NOW!” I succumbed with my first novel and boy, did I pay the price. I’d given copies to friends and family the day before I published it on Smashwords and the emails soon started coming in, mostly entitled “List of errors.” I cringed as I realized I had given away over a hundred copies and all of these readers would have their reading experience ruined by needless typos. Even after fixing these errors, I got feedback from customers telling me they had found even more! Lesson learned, and for the next instalment I will be doing a heavy re-read and passing it to a few friends well before I publish it.
The next hurdle is probably the hardest to overcome. You now have a perfectly-formatted, error-free book, you think it’s a fantastic read, but how do you get it into the hands of readers? Sure, I’ve got a few friends on Facebook, but when I announced the release I got a couple of responses, both saying “well done,” but neither offering to read it. So I went back and told everyone they could have a free copy, and six people took me up on the offer.
Next came the Google search performed by all new authors: “How to sell my ebook?”

Up came about 150 million results and I started scrolling through. Most of the links took me to writer blogs and the general consensus was that I should get a Twitter account, which I duly did. I signed up and began telling the whole world about my book. After no sales that week, I discovered that people had to be following me in order to hear what I was saying. So I went in search of authors and the numbers began to rise, but still no sales. As I started clicking on blog links in the tweets of others, I discovered some of the cardinal rules of Twitter: don’t just tweet about your book; don’t send new followers direct messages asking them to buy your book; do always thank people who retweet your words; do try and make genuine friends rather than just potential customers. The list goes on, but these are the ones I have concentrated on.
One of the last things I ever considered was having my own blog. With no time to eat, never mind write, how could I begin to pile more work on myself? Nevertheless, it was seen as an essential part of the whole writer-selling-books deal. I already had Jambalian and I added a few posts about the book, but I realised that a proper blog was needed and created a free Jambalian blog on Blogger: http://jambalian.blogspot.com/.

I have tried to keep the focus on writing without saying “BUY! BUY! BUY!” but I find it hard to get time to even think of a topic, never mind commit one to pixels. I’m getting better, though.
At the moment, things are moving slowly, but having stuffed impatience back in his box, I am prepared for the marathon.

Now to get some writing done…

Writing tips: don’t try to be a writer

2011-11-21T15:37:00.000-05:00

Some readers have told me they like writing tips. Here’s the most important: keep it simple.

Too many people try to be writers. They get stuck trying to construct new kinds of sentences, trying to shine or to equal Shakespeare or Fitzgerald. Or worse, they try to write like a business person speaks—or worst of all, like a politician.

Instead, try to tell your story or get your point across.

Some writers and editors recommend writing without any revising. Just get the words down, worry about grammar, spelling, tense, voice or anything but the ideas. That requires knowing clearly what those ideas are. (See my previous series of posts, “Get a GRIP” for more about making sure you have a clear idea of what you’re trying to write before you start writing). Just state as simply and as bluntly as you can what you want to say. Almost always, that’s the most effective—that is, that kind of writing achieves the goal you started with.

Don’t be afraid to make mistakes; you can always go back and fix them. Writing means re-writing. Once you have a draft, you can move sentences and paragraphs around, change words and clarify your expression. But you can’t do that until you have something written down.

Examples:

Wherever possible, use verbs instead of strings of nouns and adjectives.

Instead of:

“On issues related to ...”—write “about”

“in the six-month period” of “over the course of”—write “between Date 1 and Date 2”

“expressed discontent with”—write “were dissatisfied”

“taking a leadership role”—write “leading”

“relates to the fact that”—write “because”

“in recent years”—write “recently”

“would expect to”—write “expects”

“these measures enabled management to discern any areas in which improvements can be made by operations”—write ”management could identify improvements operations could make ...”

“the regulated firm is typically given 30 days to respond”—write “the regulated firm usually has 30 days to respond”

“X achieved high rankings for new online presentation of resources and tools”—write “X revised its website, making online tools and resources easier to access.”

I recommend dropping the phrase “achieved high ranking,” because that focuses on the organization’s goals, not the reader’s. Why should they care about the company’s satisfaction rankings? What they care about is what it does for them. Yes, there may be some value perceived in the testimonial aspect of high satisfaction ratings, but still, what is important in that example is the new functionality of the website.

See how much shorter and clearer the revised messages are?

The next post on writing tips will focus on what to watch for when you’re re-writing. In the meantime, tell me about your own pet peeves—what phrases or styles of writing bug you the most?

The message of Occupy Wall Street

2011-11-17T14:58:00.001-05:00

“Protesters and Officers Clash Near Wall Street and in Zuccotti Park”—NY Times

“Dozens arrested in Occupy Wall Street march in New York”—Globe&Mail

“Occupy protesters march on NYSE”—Chicago Tribune

From the Guardian - OWS protesters re-entering Zuccotti Park Credit: Mario Tama/Getty Images

I had expected to read a lot of negative reaction and analysis about the Occupy Wall Street movement in the major mass media. I was wrong. MSNBC continues to portray the protesters as unable to articulate a single message. But most of the other major media present credible, balanced and even sympathetic coverage. CBC radio has repeatedly made this point.

Today, November 17, 2011, the state apparatus in the US is moving in concert to shut down the protests across the country. In several cities, they appear to have succeeded. By latest accounts, the protesters have been pushed out of Manhattan’s Zucotti park but are now disrupting the streets in other parts of the city, and they haven’t been defeated nor have they surrendered, yet.

Still, it looks like the movement is reaching a turning point, one forced on it by the government. So I thought I would blog about my thoughts on the movement and its portrayal in the media.

First, I should state that I’m largely in favour of the movement. It’s fundamentally democratic. This is a broad-based group of people gathering in public areas around the world to voice their opinions. Whether you agree with them or not, in democracies, they’re allowed to speak their minds.

It’s not surprising that the state would oppose their ideas. It’s not a conspiracy, but it does prove the theory that the government apparatus of the US, at least, is controlled by the wealthy elite.

However, the elite’s and the state’s response has not been effective. From the beginning of the protest, the elites and the mass media have tried to portray the movement as disorganized and incoherent, without a clear message.

That argument against the OWS protests is an illustration of the “Big Lie” school of propaganda: repeat an untrue statement loudly enough, often enough, and people will believe it.

Actually, I find the message is pretty cohesive. Lately, the “99 percent” mantra has come to sum it up. Yes, the protesters represent a number of different causes: financial and tax reform, eradication of poverty, reduction of unemployment, elimination of debt, even environmental protection.

But this is not incoherent. What ties these causes together is that, if successful, they would benefit most people, at least in the West. However, they’ve been blocked for decades by the corporate elite that controls the politics of the developed democracies. The message is simply that the 99 percent are fed up with the way the wealthiest 1 percent blatantly abuse their power to benefit themselves at the expense of the majority.

The movement has broad support: professionals, trades people, teachers, professors, even airline pilots have demonstrated. The behaviour of the protesters have been exemplary. Until today, there have been no real problems (notwithstanding two deaths over so many thousands of participants). There has been no looting, no rioting, no bad behaviour. In Ottawa, for example, the Occupy protesters moved their tents and other effects to make room for Remembrance Day ceremonies.
The only disreputable behaviour has been on the part of the state against them, pepper-spraying seniors, bludgeoning people, making mass arrests people for walking on the street.

Things are starting to look ugly in New York now. But it’s still a good time to ask: has Occupy Wall Street succeeded?

Superficially, no. Debt and unemployment are still high, the financial system has not been changed, the rich are getting richer, wealth continues to concentrate in fewer hands and the middle class continues to see its position erode.

But they did succeed in raising the issues and increasing awareness of the concentration of wealth. People — voters — are now more sensitized to these issues.

The test will come not in the next election, but in the next scandal where the top 1 percent are caught with their hands in our pockets, again. What will the state do? What will the people do?

What will you do?

So much for a writer to do ...

2011-11-15T14:39:00.000-05:00

It’s almost time to launch Part 1 of The Bones of the Earth, the first novel I have actually finished writing. But while I could post the EPUB on Amazon and Smashwords tomorrow, there are still so many tasks that I have to do as a publisher.

I have already done a lot. I have written the book, then read it, rewritten it, edited it, re-edited, re-written, re-read and re-written again.

I have given it to two different editors and accepted most of their advice. I have found a terrific cover designer in Lisa Damerst, who has given me a dynamite cover.

The publisher’s job

As an independent author, the publisher’s job is my responsibility. There is so much advice to follow from blogs, websites, books etc. — too much to read it all, let alone implement it. But it seems that most agree on one thing: the importance of the author’s “platform.” All the book-promotion pundits make it seem deceptively simple, if time-consuming.

I started building my “platform” with this blog; I also have a presence on Twitter, goodreads, LinkedIn, Google+ and, of course, Facebook. I know I have not done enough to take full advantage of social media yet, but I am working on it.

At this point, I have to do the following at least:

- make more friends on goodreads (hint!)

- create a fan page on Facebook

- expand my Google+ page and Circles

- join writer-specific social networking sits like the Independent Author Network and Scribd, and possibly paid promotion sites like Book Buzzr

- start a blog tour.

Then, I must follow the advice of last month’s guest blogger, marketing expert Becky Illson-Skinner:

- join some writing groups where I would meet real, live people in the flesh, as opposed to online.

- set up some events such as book signing or library reading.

I have been fortunate to receive a number of positive reviews for my short stories. Those for Dark Clouds, my little Hallowe’en story, were completely unlooked-for; I also got some unsolicited and very positive reviews for my benefit story, Sam, the Strawb Part; even the reviews I requested were all positive. I feel good about that.

In the meantime, I keep blogging (see?), commenting on others’ blogs, reviewing books, tweeting and reading; and of course, I’m working on my next work for NaNoWriMo. Doing that requires writing 1,700 words a day — not a huge amount, but making sure that I do it every single day is a challenge.

Then, there’s life to live: a family, events, and of course, work. Did I mention that this blog is not my day job?

Time to revise the old saw: an independent writer’s work is never done!

Indy book review: Gray Justice, by Alan McDermott

2011-11-12T15:50:00.000-05:00

Tom Gray has a cause. It looks like revenge, but it’s more than that: he wants to change a system that he thinks is rotten. He’s sure that most of the people of his country think it is, too, and the government is just too hidebound, incompetent and cowardly to do anything. So he takes matters into his own hands and uses terrorist tactics to bring about that change.

That’s the premise of Alan McDermott’s Gray Justice, a novel that reads like a season of 24.

His action sequences are great. They’re fast, gripping and lucid. I can tell exactly what’s going on, I can picture where every character is and where they’re moving. The plot is strong, with no excess details and no dangling subplots. McDermott, like his main character, knows how to focus.

The characters have clear motivations. We readers know exactly why every person in this story does what he or she does.

Overall, I liked this novel, independently published as an e-book by the author. A portion of the proceeds from sales of the book go to two British charities: the British Heart Foundation, and Barnardo’s the leading children’s charity in the UK.

The book is not perfect. While the main character is nominally Tom Gray, it seems to me that more pages are devoted to Andrew Harvey, the special security agent tasked with stopping him. There are sections that are information dumps, especially when the author introduces new characters and tells their back-stories. It could have used a friendly, but firm edit early on.

Some of the dialog is a little forced, but most is believable. I can hear people speaking that way.
Another problem is that Tom Gray is just a little to capable, cool and calculated for me. I have trouble believing that anyone could plan a caper down to this level of detail, calculating every move his opponents will make (with one major exception that drives the second half of the book). But that’s the only credibility stretch in the book, so we can forgive the author. My book, after all, breaks credulity from the get-go.

A point here about the political dimension of the book. The main character proposes changes to the UK’s criminal justice system with much stricter sentences and prisons and even the reinstatement of corporal punishment. I could point out the practical futility of many of the proposals. On the other hand, [SPOILER ALERT! IF YOU DON’T WANT TO KNOW THE END OF THE STORY, SKIP THE REST OF THIS PARAGRAPH], the story itself does show how some of the ideas backfire. Personally, I think that the reasons for crime are deeper than the punishments for them.

The point is that McDermott tells a compelling story. I read this book in record time because I wanted to find out what would happen next. And that’s the mark of a successful novelist: he makes you want to read more.

Word of the year: “bailout”

2011-11-09T12:00:00.003-05:00

What does it mean to “bail out” a business or a country?

Italy is going to get a financial bail-out from the taxpayers of the rest of the world. A lot of that will come from countries that have managed to stay out of financial trouble, but a lot will also come from taxpayers in countries that are facing their own financial challenges, including unemployment and government austerity measures.

Just days ago, Greece’s bailout was settled—although it’s still uncertain that the Greeks will accept it and avert worldwide financial chaos. Portugal and Ireland have received bailouts recently.

Three years ago, taxpayers in Canada, the US and elsewhere bailed out automotive manufacturers, at the same time that the whole world, it seemed, had to bail out the banks and other financial companies. And what did taxpayers, the source of all this money, get in return? Job security? Housing security?

No.

We seem to be caught in a never-ending cycle of crises and bailouts that spark more crises. We taxpayers have to bail out these companies, and now whole countries, because not doing so would cause the end of the economic universe we now inhabit, according to the powers that be.

(It’s interesting that the men—and it’s overwhelmingly men—who warn about doom and make the decisions never suffer from the chaos they preach. But that’s the subject of a whole different series of posts, or probably more fitting, a completely different blog. Or may a movement that would involve occupying public spaces near stock exchanges ...)

The different meanings of “bail”

The current usage refers simply to “rescuing,” but it comes from a different source. Which one applies most closely to this situation?

“Bailing out” means parachuting from a doomed plane. But that doesn’t fit—we are not getting out of failing economies, but getting more committed to them by pouring resources into them.
It can also mean scooping water out of a sinking ship—this is closer, but what we’re doing is putting something INTO the economy, so that doesn’t fit, either.
“To bail out” means to pay money to get out of jail pending trial—this may be the closest meaning to the current situation, but it raises questions: will there be a trial? Of whom?
According to the Concise Oxford Dictionary, “bail” also refers to detaining with intent to rob. Is that what the financial elite is doing to Greece, Italy and other countries? What are the strings attached to the rescue plans?

Which image comes to your mind when you read “bailout” of a failing economy: a falling plane, a sinking ship, getting out of jail or robbery?

Two reviews of independently published novels

2011-11-08T13:20:00.001-05:00

Dead Heat
By Richard Sanders, 2011

Richard Sanders is a pro. Even if you don’t read the introduction/foreword, where he tells the reader of his time at People magazine and the low points in his life, the tight and clear style of his writing tell you: this writer knows what he’s doing, and he does it very well.

There are a few typos and a missing word or two in this e-book, but no more than any commercially published novel.

Dead Heat, a political thriller, proves that independent authors measure up to the best of commercially published titles with a fast-paced plot devoid of any holes. There’s action almost from the first page, and at no point does the story risk losing the reader’s interest. There is only one coincidence, which comes in at the beginning and launches the story. After that, the plot moves logically. As I said, Sanders knows what he’s doing.

On the other hand, Sanders threw in quite a few red herrings. Several times, I thought I had the killer worked out, thought “oh, no, he’s going that way?” But Sanders proved me wrong. I did not see the ending coming, and the resolution made perfect sense.

The strongest point, though, are the believable characters. Most of them are likeable, in some way, but the real test is that I feel like I have met most of them at some point in my life. I’m sure I’m related to some of them.

From the details and the emotions Sanders describes in his characters, it seems he also has been around at least one political campaign. He captures the political reality in the US today in all its pathetic, aggravating, exhilarating, tawdry, shameful and inspiring highs and lows.

I also have to wonder how much of an investigator he was: all the details rang true. Thankfully, the hero does not exhibit any outstanding heroics. He’s not Superman or Bruce Willis, which is a relief—there are way too much ridiculous heroics in this kind of literature.

I literally could not put this book down. Here, again, is an independent author that the big publishers should be looking for.

Xannu - The Prophecy
By Paul Dorset, 2011

Xannu - The Prophecy is further proof that commercial publishers have no monopoly on writing talent or writing quality. This is a good read with believable and entertaining characters, and a plot that pulls you along.

Dorset sets up a YA fantasy that follows many of the conventions of the genre: an invented world where countries have strange names, technology is at the level of the middle ages and magic works. Strange monsters plague humanity. At first, that was a turn-off for me. I am looking for something different. But I found that right at the beginning of the novel, when the main character has a conversation with the Power Almighty.

Dorset also inserts another twist on the fantasy trope with characters who travel between his invented world and a very prosaic, middle-class suburban reality. That's not really new, of course---think CS Lewis---but I really identified with Dorset's homey characterizations. He is very good at breathing life into his characters.
All his characters are fallible and funny, even the Power Almighty and his opposite, the power of evil.

There's a lot of humour, from the personality of the bumbling warrior-hero, to the frustrated ire of the Power Almighty (not so almighty, it seems), to the name of the tall quasi-humans, "Upthairs."

Personally, I was a little dismayed by the appearance of the princess and other royalty in this book. Maybe that's just me, but I enjoy stories about regular people far more. Still, in this plot, the royalty makes sense. And again, they are believable characters in their roles.

The quality of writing is very high in this e-book. There were no more typos or formatting errors than I have seen in typical print books from the biggest publishers. With books like this available on e-bookstores, there's no way that the big publishers can claim to be better than any independent author.

There is only one drawback: to get to the end of the actual story, I have to buy the next book in the series!

Guest post: author and blogger Becky Illson-Skinner

2011-11-04T08:29:00.001-05:00

Becky Illson-Skinner is an author, blogger, sister, lover and more. Her blog, Mystery Writers Unite, is an online community where writers can meet to talk about the art, joy and passion of mystery writing.

Thank you, Becky, for this guest post today on selling written words.

Increasing sales of the written word

Probably one of the biggest challenges for any new author, regardless of the genre of their book, is to build a fan base and reach their sales goals. I’ve always loved marketing and graduated from Business Marketing with top marks. I understand how to market a product—I know marketing, but that is only part of the equation and probably the smallest part.

The biggest challenge is that the average person is bombarded by approximately 3,000 ads per day, all vying for their spending dollars. In addition, most people won’t buy something the first time they see it or hear about it unless the product is a name brand and the buyer is motivated (i.e., they need it). All of these things work against the new author.

By now, you’re thinking “Tell me something I didn’t know.” I respect that and I’m relieved you already know the things that work against you in getting yourself known to the masses. Don’t give up hope! There are things you can do to get yourself known and increase your sales. Also remember that the first book will be the hardest to market and subsequent releases of your work will be easier.
Here are some avenues that you can utilize that won’t cost you a fortune:

Appearances:

1. Host a book event in your area—Find other authors in your area that you can team up with and plan a fun, interactive book event with things for visitors to do. Don’t jump into this head-first; instead, do some research like you would for your book. Check out other book events that happen in your area to see what has worked and what hasn’t.

2. Have a book signing—There are many different types of venues (craft sales, flea markets, festivals, coffee shops, mall kiosks, etc.) that writers can capitalize on and be a part of to give readers a chance to meet the author in person and obtain a signed copy of a book. Believe it or not, having a signed copy of a book adds prestige to the book for the readers.

3. Approach your local library—Ask if they would support a “Meet the Author Day” that would consist of live readings from your book and prizes. You could even see if some other local authors would like to join you and partake to cut down on the costs.

4. Join groups—Find out what kind of interest groups exist for your book genre (e.g. book clubs). Ask if they would like to have you attend one of their meetings to do a reading, and offer signed copies of your book for sale at a discounted price. Make sure you have a prize to offer and a small thank-you gift to the organizer.

Internet:

5. Social networking—Make sure you are signed up to all the social networks and make connections with other authors, bloggers, writers, media gurus, etc. The more people you know…the more people know you.

6. Book reviews—Try to have at least three people a week read and review your book. Make sure that they are willing to post a review of your book either on Goodreads or Amazon. Once they have provided their written review, make sure you thank them and then link to that review and get the word out about the review. People tend to be more likely to buy something that someone recommends as opposed to being approached by the author of the work.

7. Links, links, links—please don’t undervalue links! These are the life-blood of the Internet and the more you have the better. The only way to climb the social net ladder in search engines like Google and Firefox is to have other pages pointing back to you. The more you have, the faster you will move up in the page ranking and the more visible your online presence will be. It takes time but it is time well spent.

8. Use a signature in your emails and always include a link to your book—this may sound simplistic but many people miss doing it.

Apostrophes and pronouns: a confusing combination

2011-11-03T12:34:00.003-05:00

I don’t like to rant about little things, but I’ve seen too many instances where supposedly professional writers and editors use “you’re” when they mean “your” and “it’s” instead of “its.” So, I'm dedicating this post to my quasi-regular "grammar tips" feature in hopes of clearing up the confusion.

Most writers, editors and readers I know are willing to forgive the occasional typo, even if it shows a misunderstanding of the right way to do things in English, as long as the overall quality and meaning of the content is good. But little errors erode your credibility, and especially for new writers or those striving to establish a “platform,” that can be a killer.

The source of confusion, I think, is that in English, apostrophes are used for contraction as well as possession, and sometimes, also, for plurals.

I have two proposals to dispel this confusion.

First proposal: discover the consistency

Consistency in spelling is rare in English, a language that seems to have more exceptions than rules. But when it comes to pronouns, the apostrophe always indicates a contraction. In other words, the apostrophe replaces a letter or two.

It’s = it is—“It’s cold in Winnipeg in January.”

Who’s = who is—“Who’s at the door?”

We’re = we are—“Open up! We’re freezing out here! This is Winnipeg, and it’s January!”

They’re = they are—“You better let them in. They’re confused about the date.”

You're = you are—"You're right. It's November, but it's still cold."

That means the respective synonyms without apostrophes are possessive.

Its = belonging to it—“The cat lost its toy under the couch.”

Whose = belonging to who—“Whose cat is that, anyway?”

Their = belonging to them—“They left their cat here because they didn’t want to bring it back to Winnipeg in January.”

Your = belonging to you—"Your cat is very fat."

Second proposal: eliminate the use of apostrophes as plurals

At one time, the apostrophe was used to pluralize single letters or symbols used as words in text and other unusual cases. For example, “The x’s in the expression represent unknown quantities.” “Make sure you dot your i’s and cross your t’s in the contract.”

While this makes sense when you listen to the pronunciation, it leads to confusion. How often have you seen an apostrophe used for plural on signs and even in ads?

When I first became an editor (not long after Caesar conquered Gaul), the new idea was to use italics to set off characters used as words and eliminate the apostrophe. To wit:

- “The xs in the expression represent unknown quantities.”

- “Make sure you dot your is and cross your ts in the contract.”

The change will take some getting used to, but I think it will reduce confusion among non-professional writers.

What do you think? By being careful about using apostrophes in combination with pronouns, can we writers bring about change and increase understanding, at least in this small way?

Don’t carve your outline in stone

2011-11-01T08:49:00.000-05:00

Of all the tools and techniques for writers that I have written or spoken about, the outline gets the most resistance. Students, bloggers, aspiring writers and tweetmates argue “I like to write by the seat of my pants” or “I can’t use an outline.”

But I have yet to find a professional writer, one who has been published and earned a living from it, who objects to outlines.

Remember, you’re writing your outline on paper or a computer, not carving it in stone. You can change it after you write it. The idea is to get all your ideas onto paper (or screen). Then you can move them around, change them, add some, take others out—whatever makes sense to you.

Once it’s written down, the outline will show you the logic of your argument, proposal or story—or the lack of it. An invisible outline, one that’s only in your head, just doesn’t make these errors visible.

Don’t like the order? Change it! Even after you start writing the draft, you can change the order of ideas. It’s your work, after all.

I do this all the time, with every document. In fact, I did it with this blog post. I jotted down a scratch outline of words, short phrases and the occasional full sentence. I thought about my outline, moved some ideas around, then started adding words to turn those phrases into full sentences and paragraphs. Even while I was writing these paragraphs, I reordered the ideas and moved a couple of paragraphs around.

I cannot imagine writing something as long as a novel without an outline. How else can you make sure you get your hero from the introduction to the conclusion without skipping over something important? Especially with the current trend to non-linear storytelling, where the plot is not chronological but rather thematic, I cannot see how anyone could tell a coherent story without following an outline. There’s just no way to make sure you’ve covered everything you have to cover.

I know this is still going to raise some objections, and I invite you to argue with me. You know you want to. Yes, you do!

Post your objections or different perspective in the Comment box. Tell me about your outline.

And you “pantsers” out there: tell me all about your novel written without the outline. How long did it take you?

Hieroglyphics image courtesy www.copyright-free-images.com

2011-10-29T08:27:00.000-05:00

It's Hallowe'en! Time for the Coffin Hop Web Tour!
October 24-31, 2011

Glowing Green Ghosts image courtesy Freeimages.co.uk

What better month than October for horror writers to crawl out of their coffins and spread the Halloween spirit!

Join in to win great horror fiction and Halloween goodies! I'm entering my newest spooky story, Dark Clouds. Click the tab above to download a FREE e-pub copy!

Enter my contest by clicking the Subscribe button on the right. Every subscriber gets one entry into a draw for a Free e-pub copy (or MOBI, for Kindle owners) of my upcoming Novella, "Initiation Rites" in November. Follow this blog using the buttons in the lower left column for another entry.

Click on the links below to participating authors' websites. Each author has a contest to enter on their site.

Over 80 chances to win!

Dark Clouds:
Chapter One of The Mandrake Ruse

Matt always knewwhen his mother arrived in town: the wind would swirl from every direction atonce, sending the neighbour’s weather-vane spinning clackety-clack and the yellow and brown leaves whirlingalong the road like a child’s top.

“Let’s get out of here,” Matt said to his wife, Teri.They packed a few things into a single suitcase and drove out of town, over thebridge to Wakefield. “We might as well stay somewhere nice,” he said.

“It’s too bad it’s so expensive,” Teri replied. Shelooked worried, but not about the money; she was weary of her mother-in-law’santics.

They arrived at the hotel; Teri loved the way itsrustic pretence did not mask its luxury. She lay on the bed and squirmed on thethick duvet. “This is so nice.”

Matt flopped down beside her and tried to undo abutton. “There’s lots of time for that,” she said, gently pushing his hand awayfrom her blouse. “I want to take a walk and see the fall colours.” She smiledand kissed him lightly, then sprang off the bed and opened the door. Mattsighed and shoved his feet into his runners again, then followed his prettywife out.

They found a path that climbed a hill through ayellow and bronze forest. At the top, rock like a shield held the trees backenough to give them a view of the river where it bent to flow south towardOttawa. They looked for the city’s skyline, holding hands. “Let’s make loveunder the trees,” Matt said.

Teri pushed his shoulder. “Silly,” she said, but thenshe frowned as she looked at the sky.

Matt followed her gaze. Overhead, the sky was blue,but black clouds were drawing together to the south, blotting out the sun. Agust ruffled Teri’s hair. She cried out, blinking and rubbing dust from hereye.

A small black cloud detached itself from the hostover Ottawa and headed toward them, fast. Matt put his arm around his wife’sshoulder and pulled her back to the path. “We have to get off this hill, now.”

Somehow, the clearing had become wider, and theopening under the trees to the path, where they would be safe from the sky, wasfarther away. Matt recognized the phenomenon: his most common nightmareinvolved an expanding landscape that pushed his destination farther and fartheraway when he was racing against time to reach it. He held Teri tighter andstarted running.

Too slow. The black cloud got closer, was right onthem and turned into a hail of dust, rocks and sticks whirling around them.Matt choked on dust. The wind knocked Teri to the rocky ground and she criedout again.

The Coffin Hop Horror Web Tour—the gory details:

1) Have a spooky fun time!

2) Invite your friends and spread the word!

3) This tour starts: Monday, October 24, 2011 at midnight (PST)

Thistour ends: Monday, October 31, 2011 at midnight (PST)

Winnerswill be drawn and posted november 1, 2011

4) Meet and mingle with the authors! Experience a newdestination at every stop! Participate in every site's contest and be enteredfor chances to win multiple prizes! Every blog visited is another opportunityto win!

5) Participation at all sites is recommended, but notrequired. The more sites you hop, the better your chances of winning prizes.

6) Did I mention to have a spooky fun time?

***Authors have full discretion to choose an alternatewinner in the event any winner fails to claim their prize(s) within 72 hours oftheir name being posted or after notification of win, whichever comes first.Anyone who participates in this tour is subject to these rules***

Commenting can be a frustrating aspect of blogs

2011-10-25T15:45:00.002-05:00

Bloggers who have Comments sections on their blogs: please make sure it’s possible for people to leave comments.

I try to be a good blogger and a good member of my Internet friends’ blogs. But I am frustrated with some of you blogmates out there, even some whom I follow and that are listed in the sidebars. The problem is with the verification systems: if you don’t allow a full range of options, you lock some people out of the comments. For some weird reason, my Blogger/Google account will not always let me use that identity to leave comments.

If your verification system only allows the potential commenter to log in using the Google, OpenID, Wordpress or AIM systems, it seems I cannot log in.

Protecting against spam

I understand why bloggers put verification on their comments: they’re trying to protect agains spammers, bots and other nefarious codes and coders that infest the Internet. But often, they protect themselves against people who want to leave legitimate and often very helpful comments.

Let’s not forget that one of the main reasons blogger enable comments is to increase their profile and spread the word that their blogs are worth reading.

Wordpress blogs seem to handle this security question well. I am always able to enter my name, email address and URL, and then the system posts or at least accepts my comment.

Blogger/blogspot varies: sometimes, the Login list includes “Anonymous” and “Name/URL.” However, almost as often, these two options are not in the list.

The variation is understandable: Google’s blogspot interface can be confusing. The various settings are buried in different parts of the Dashboard, Settings and Profile, and the various tools and gadgets that enable commenting have their own settings.

But blogmates, I implore you: there are so many interesting blogs that I’d love to comment on, and I cannot because of your security settings. Check your settings. I promise, I won’t spam you.

For the techies out there

If anyone can explain to me why I get an error message when I try to select my Google Account in the verification list, I would really appreciate it.

If, under the Comment field, the instruction reads “Comment as:”, and then the drop-down list has “Google Account,” when I select that option, I get this error message:

“Your current account (scott[at]writtenword.ca) does not have access to view this page.”

However, if the Comments section opens up as a separate window, I usually see this:

“Choose an identity: (Google Account).” That works perfectly.

I only have one Google account. Why does it work in one setting, and not in another?

Any thoughts or ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Third Platform Building Campaign Challenge

2011-10-23T10:19:00.000-05:00

Rachael Harrie's latest challenge was to write a 300 word story to "show, not tell" in 300 words or less:

that it’s morning,

that a man or a woman (or both) is at the beach

that the MC (main character) is bored

that something stinks behind where he/she is sitting

that something surprising happens.

Just for fun, see if you can involve all five senses AND include these random words: "synbatec," "wastopaneer," and "tacise." (NB. these words are completely made up and are not intended to have any meaning other than the one you give them).

So, here is my entry, at exactly 300 words, excluding the title. I've used two of the words, but cheated a little, turning "wastopaneer" into a name. Let me know what you think.

Lakeside Resort

I hate this crappy place. Little wooden dock, little dented boats that stink of gasoline and puff out black clouds. Little ripples on the rocks sound like a hundred cats lapping milk.

I hate all these little kids. And this crappy little beach. It’s not a real beach. This crappy resort just dumped sand on the edge of the water. And the sand is crap, too. It’s rough and won’t stick together to make a sand castle. Anyway, that stupid baby would just stumble over and wreck it.

Oh, no. It’s crying again. Why don’t its parents shut it up?

Its mom picks it up and smoothes its hair. “Tacise, Tacise,” she says, kissing it. What a stupid name!

“Why don’t you go in the water, honey?” Mom says. I try to look up, but the stupid sun is in my eyes. I look at the water, but the ripples reflect the sunlight into a million shards, assaulting my brain.

Ripples. Not white surf like in Sara’s vacation pictures. I slurp up the last of my stale coke. “Nah,” I answer.

“Why not? It’s a beautiful day!”

“It wouldn’t be fun.”

“Swimming isn’t fun?”

“Swimming in the ocean would be fun.”

“My, who’s a spoiled princess?” says Dad, sitting up. I thought he was asleep.

“Daddy, this place stinks!” He just gives me his mock pout. “Literally. People are slaughtering fish over there!”

Cold! I scream and turn around, dripping and splashing. The baby’s annoying big brother, maybe four years old, runs away with a pail, shrieking with laughter. “Wasto Paneer!” his father yells, running after him. “You come back here!”

Dad is laughing. “You might as well get in the lake now, princess.”

Stupid vacation.

Breathless blog contest entry

2011-10-21T10:45:00.007-05:00

Brenda Drake, author of Brenda Drake Writes (under the influence of coffee) has launched another contest for writers: "Can You Leave Us Breathless?"

Here's how it works: on October 21, writers post a 300-word excerpt from their work (or write something new) to their blog and enter their links in Brenda's LinkyLink list on her blog. Then we're all supposed to read and comment on others' entries.

It now being the 21st, here is my entry, an excerpt from Chapter 2 of my soon-to-be-released, rule-breaking magic historical realistic novel, The Bones of the Earth. (You can read all of Chapter 1 by clicking the tab at the top of the page.) I look forward to your comments!

From Chapter 2: The Rescue

Krajan dismounted and grabbed Elli by the chin. His mouth twisted into a horrible smile.

“Elli!” Javor yelled and lunged toward them, but his father caught him from behind, pinning his arms and pushing him to the ground.

“No, Javor! They’ll kill you!” Javor managed to break free in time to see the girls’ mothers run out, screaming. Another raider stepped in front of them and hit them with a heavy club. All the other villagers groaned, but no one had the courage to move. The women tried to get up, but the Avar hit Grat’s mother on the head again. She fell into the dust and did not move. Elli’s mother backed away on hands and knees, crying.

Roslaw and some other men ran up with bags of food. “No, please, leave the girls alone! Take the food, take it all, but leave our daughters!”
Krajan backhanded Roslaw savagely. The warrior’s heavy leather and steel gauntlet made a sickening crushing sound as it connected with the headman’s face, and Roslaw slumped into the dirt, bleeding from the nose and mouth.

Mladen, Elli’s father, sprang forward with a scythe, screaming “Everyone together! We outnumber them!” Faster than anyone could see, another raider drew a sword and slashed down. The scythe clattered to the hard ground, Mladen’s severed hand still gripping it. The Avars cheered and laughed; Mladen fell to his knees, gasping and staring in disbelief at the empty space at the end of his arm. Blood spurted over and over again onto the ground, splashing Elli and Grat until the Avar thrust his sword into Mladen’s neck, then kicked his body down. Still on her hands and knees, Elli’s mother shrieked. The village men cried out, but still no one dared move.

Krajan remounted. “We take these,” he declared.

300 words

Get a GRIP, part 5: the Plan

2011-10-18T15:02:00.000-05:00

While this is part 5 of this series of posts, this is the fourth step in pre-writing—the stages you have to follow before you start writing even the first draft of your brilliant document. If you recall, I call the process “getting a GRIP”:

G – goal or purpose—what you hope to achieve with your writing
R – reader or audience—the most important ingredient
I – idea or thesis—what you’re trying to say

Now, the Plan, or outline.

Creating an outline is the biggest favour you, as a writer, can do for yourself.

I know, there are a lot of writers who say they prefer writing “by the seat of their pants.” I’ve learned that approach wears out a lot of pant seats.

With an outline, you can make sure that you have covered everything you need to cover in your document, whether it’s a memo, a report or a novel. An outline is like a road-map: it helps you tell, at a glance, whether you’re getting toward your destination or resolution, what are the obstacles in the way, and whether there isn’t a better route to follow.

I have tried writing both with and without outlines. Once, I interviewed a very interesting typeface designer. I thought he was fascinating, and I even thought I had a great lead. So immediately after the interview was over, I turned on the computer and dove right in. I wrote about a thousand words when I realized I could not logically go any further, and I had not written anything important, or even readable, yet.

So, I deleted everything and started over. I wrote a new lead and another 400 to 500 words. Got stuck. Deleted. Started over again.

Eventually, I realized that I needed to figure out what I wanted to say with this article, and in what order. I moved away from the computer, took out a pen and a piece of paper (I know, I’m a cave-man) and wrote a thesis statement and an outline.

You don’t have to write down an outline; if you can remember a lot of different ideas in the right order, you can do it in your head. But you still need an outline. To put it another way:

The time required to write an outline plus a good document is less than the time required to write the same quality of document without an outline.

Why create an outline

An outline helps you:
- make sure you include everything you want/need
- organize your ideas
- make sure you leave out information or ideas that don’t belong.

How to create an outline

I start by gathering all the ideas, information, facts, quotes, research and whatever else I’ve gathered in my research, then jotting it down (on paper or on screen) in the order I think of it. Someone else a long time ago called this the “scratch outline.” You might call it brainstorming, except that it involves just one person (usually). Write everything down. Some of these ideas are gold, and you might lose them.

Don’t write whole sentences, yet. Just jot or type single words or short phrases. You’re trying to get the ideas down as quickly as possible, while they’re still fresh and hot in your mind.

Once you’ve run out of steam and can’t think of anything else to write down, start looking for links. Play the Sesame Street game: “some of these things belong together.” Look for similar ideas and linked facts, and for categories as well as items within those categories. You’ll probably need to make another list after this.

Once everything is grouped, start looking for a logical order to put them in. Here, you have a lot of choice: chronological (for an incident report, for example), or most important to least important (like a newspaper article). Proposals often use the “problem-solution” approach: describe a problem, explain why it’s a problem, the show the solution and its ultimate effects. Advertisements do this, too: “Does the opposite sex run away from your bad breath? You need Moosebreath Away!”

Word processors have outlining tools or views that make creating and rearranging your outline easier.
Don’t worry about making it perfect. Just try different arrangements of ideas and facts. Move them around and imagine the sentences you can craft around the short phrases in your outline. You can fill them in now, if you think of something particularly good.

Don’t be afraid to add new ideas that you realize you had left out, and be even less afraid of taking things out if it seems that they don’t belong.

It really helps if you already have a thesis statement written; however, I sometimes find the main point comes out once I start massaging all the information I have. But a complete thesis statement is a must for a finished outline. UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES GO BEYOND WRITING YOUR OUTLINE UNTIL YOU HAVE DECIDED ON YOUR THESIS STATEMENT. Think of it this way: if your outline is your road map, then the thesis statement is your destination. You don’t start a journey without deciding where you’re going, do you? Okay, so do I, sometimes—but when it’s something as important as writing, don’t do it.

Summary
Start with knowing your goal, identifying your reader, and writing your thesis statement (although it may evolve)

Make a scratch outline

brainstorm
generate Lots of ideas
jot down short phrases or single word

Play the Sesame Street game: “some of these things belong together”

group similar ideas
look for general categories and specific items within categories

Organize the ideas and information

choose from logical, chronological, problem-solution, geographical, etc.

If you’re having trouble deciding on which order to use, go back to the first steps: what are you trying to achieve, who is your audience, and what is the main idea you want to tell them?

Fiction
I firmly believe in using an outline to write fiction. You need to know your characters and setting, and you need to know where your story is going. Otherwise, it doesn’t go anywhere and your beautiful prose does nothing but bore the reader.

Kirsten Lamb agrees with me (although she may not have heard of me). She has devoted several recent blog posts to the idea of structure of novels. “Novels have rules. When we don’t follow the rules, bad things happen. Just ask Dr. Frankenstein.”

You have to know where your plot is going and why your characters are going there. I’ve read a lot of wannabe writers’ blogs, where they say they let the characters lead them. I don’t know if any of them have finished, let alone published a book.

Having an outline for your plot allows you to spot those plot holes, figure out your characters’ motivations and pace your plot developments so they don’t bore the reader, nor leave them breathless.

In future posts, I’m going to put in some exercises on outlining. In the meantime, I’d love to hear from anyone who has been happy with the result of their document, whatever it may be, that did not have some kind of outline at some point. Remember, even if it was just in your head, it was still an outline.

Get a GRIP, part 4: the Idea

2011-10-14T14:02:00.000-05:00

What is the one thing you have to say?

The third step you have to take before your write anything is to decide on the main idea of your document. No matter how long or short it is, you have to be able to sum up the point in one clear, complete sentence.

When U2 released The Joshua Tree, Time magazine quoted Bono as saying “Writing songs is easy. Writing good songs is hard.”

Writing anything is easy. All you need is something that leaves a mark on something else. A computer just makes it faster for your fingers to keep up with your brain.

But something worth reading has to be about something. In high school, we learned that “something” was called the thesis statement. It sounds impressive, but all it means is the main point.

A lot of people have trouble with this. They stare at the blank screen or page, or write sentences and paragraphs, then delete the whole thing and start over and over again.

Their problem is that they don’t know what they’re writing about. Before you start to write your document, write that thesis statement: one sentence that sums up the main point.

To do that, you have to go through the first two steps in the GRIP process: you have to have a goal or a purpose for writing—what you hope your document will accomplish—and you have to know whom you are writing for. Once you know that, write your thesis down: the statement that will motivate your reader to accomplish your goal. For this to work, as I have said, you have to know what motivates that reader.

Some books recommend the “hidden words” technique. Start with “The most important thing I have to tell you is ...” After you fill in the blank, you delete the opening clause—“hiding” it.

Every good letter, memo, report or proposal has a thesis—a single sentence that sums up what it’s about. Short stories and shorter poems, too, have to be about a single thing if they are to succeed. Longer novels can be about several things, but there has to be a single main theme.

I just finished reading Too Big to Fail, Andrew Sorkin’s minute-by-minute telling of the 2008 financial meltdown. At 555 pages, plus index and list of sources, it has a single thesis statement: “In the end, this drama is a human one, a tale about the fallibility of people who thought they were too big to fail.”

However, you don’t need to write the thesis statement explicitly in your document. It’s usually best to get to the point immediately, but depending on your goal, your reader and the context, you might decide to put it at the end, or to imply it and let the reader come to that conclusion. That technique is occasionally used in sales and advertising messages, but it’s hard to pull off. Advertisers are very good at this. The thesis of every beer ad is “Drink this beer and you’ll get laid!” Of course, they don’t say that explicitly. But that’s the message.

Writing the thesis statement is not easy. It may not be the first thing that you do. But you have to do it.

First, have a clear conception of the goal of your document. Write it down in terms of action that you want the reader to take.

Next, make sure that you know your reader as well as possible, including whatever motivations might support that action in your goal statement, and anything about the reader that would work against it.

The thesis statement has to compel the reader toward the action of your goal. Take your time with it. Write several versions and think about them. Write down other facts or ideas that will go into your document. But before you actually start writing the body of your memo, report or proposal—or whatever it is—you have to settle on the thesis statement.

“A vote for our candidate will keep your taxes low.”

“The accident was the result of poor safety training.”

“A new copier will save money over a year.”

The thesis can be long, it can be a compound, complex sentence, but it has to be a complete, grammatically correct sentence. Often, the writing of it can crystallize your thinking; I sometimes find that I had a vague idea, but writing it down forces me to make it real and concrete.

Fiction

Novels can be long and complex. They can be about a lot of different things. But there still has to be a central, main theme that links all the other subplots and conflicts.

Moby Dick: Captain Ahab wants revenge on the whale—other subplots include the growing of characters like Ishmael, questions about the existence of God and the nature of good and evil.

One of my favourites, Foucault’s Pendulum: Our imaginations drive our behaviours, even when we don’t know it—plus a lot about the foolishness of conspiracy theories and some touching observations about the different sides in war.

There are many more. Now, I’m going to ask you to enter in the Comments the main themes or thesis statements of your works in progress. Remember, each one has to be a single sentence. I’ll respond!

Get a GRIP, part 3: the Reader

2011-10-12T14:21:00.000-05:00

What’s the most important part of writing? Right. The reader.

Consider the readers’ needs. Write for them. Keep in mind why they should care about what you have to say. What’s in it for them? How can you make their lives or work easier or better? Why should they spend time reading or watching or listening to you, when they could be paying attention to so many other things?

To answer those questions, you need to know as much about them as you can:

demographics – age, sex, education, income, where they live
occupation: what do they spend their working lives doing?
needs: at work, at home
desires: some are common: food, shelter, sex, belonging
o more, however, are specific to each reader’s job, life, demographics
predispositions and attitudes
- perceptions – how will they react to particular words?

Sometimes, it’s predictable: some people respond in a particular way to words like “tea party,” “capitalism,” “democracy.” We probably can all make reasonable assumptions about how the different sides of the Occupy Wall Street protests will react to those words.

What that means is that your knowledge of the audience should help determine the words you choose. You can use common social media slang for a teen audience, but it won't make any sense to seniors. That's obvious. You'll have to work much harder than that, however, when it comes to your own specific communications.

When you’ve drawn a detailed picture of your readers or potential readers, connect it to your purpose (Goal, the G in GRIP): why should your readers do what you want them to do? To answer this, you need to have clarified your own goal. See the previous post.

For instance, if you want your audience to buy your product or service, what benefit will they get from it? Is that benefit enough to motivate them to get over the inertia required to make the change from what they’re doing (or not doing) right now?

For examples: your boss What is he/she motivated by? Interested in? Biggest challenge right now? What has he/she responded to before?

If you want to get his/her approval on a new initiative, such as buying a new copier-printer for the office, first answer “Why should he/she?” How will that action make his/her life/job easier? What about the proposed purchase is similar to decisions he/she has made in the past?

Be concrete. “The new ABC model 123 copier/printer operates 12 percent more efficiently and uses less toner and paper. This means the office can save $1,200 per year.”

Maybe the boss doesn’t care about saving a small part of his/her budget, but just wants copies NOW. “The new ABC model 123 copier/printer has proven to operate 10 percent faster than our current model, and jams 15 percent less frequently. This translates to three fewer paper jams per week at our current volume.”

What motivates your audience?

There are thousands of books and other resources looking into that question. I’ll leave it with this rule: the more you know about your audience or readers, the better you can shape messages that motivate them. Your research does not have to be that complicated, however. Just talk to people. Find out what they like, what they don’t like. And remember, every reader is an individual.

Fiction

What do fiction readers want? The biggest publishers wish they knew.

Do they want more of the same? Sometimes; multiple sequels and copycats of Harry Potter show that. How many book series about sexy vampires clog the bookshelves these days?

But the breakaway best-sellers, the trend-setters, are books and stories that touch their readers’ emotions deeply. There’s no secret that Stephanie Meyer’s work resonates with young women. Something about her characters and their struggles reaches those readers. I don’t have space, time, or inclination to go into that, here. The point is that these writers have, intuitively or otherwise, given their readers something they want. That something is motivating enough to get millions of people to go to a bookstore (physical or electronic) and pay 15 bucks or so for a copy.

Your challenge

Take out something you are working on right now. Then, on screen or on paper, write down answers to these two questions:

1. Whom are you writing this for? Specifically: your boss? Your sister? Describe what motivates that person. What does he or she like, dislike, need, avoid?

2. What do you want that reader to do? Make this concrete. What specific action do you want your reader to do after he or she finishes reading your document?

Then, put that in the Comments section and I’ll respond.

Get a GRIP, part 2: the goal

2011-10-11T14:01:00.000-05:00

In my last post, I outlined GRIP, which stands for the four steps that every writer should complete before starting to write:

- set a Goal

- know your Reader

- state your main Idea

- make a Plan, or an outline.

This post focuses on the G: setting a goal.

Communication as a tool

If your life or career is a journey, you can think of your writing as a vehicle to get you from where you are to where you want to be. What are goals of a written document?

- Advertisement: to increase sales or acceptance of a product, service, idea or maybe an electoral candidate

- Proposal: to sell a project or get someone to make a decision

- Incident report: to share information so that, for example, a problem can be solved

- Progress report: to show progress to someone in charge, and perhaps to remove obstacles to further progress.

It seems that determining your goal is not easy. A lot of my students used to have trouble with the idea of the “goal” or purpose of writing. “Why am I writing? Because my professor gave me this assignment.” Unfortunately, many people take this attitude into their working lives. “My boss told me to write a report.”

A goal is an essential element of any strategy. If you don’t know where you’re going, you can’t tell when you get there.

A goal or purpose statement is different from the thesis statement. The thesis statement is what the document or statement is all about. It’s the most important thing that you want your audience to understand. Deciding on your writing’s destination is the last chance that you, the writer, can focus on yourself. In writing down your goal, you focus on your own needs or desires. Ask yourself: what do you want to happen? What result do you want from this document?

After the reader has finished reading your document, what do you want him or her to do?

You have to make this as clear and as concrete as possible. You goal should not be: “to raise awareness of this issue.” Go further than that: “After reading this document, I want readers to donate $x to this specific charity.”

Goal examples

Instead of:
to raise awareness of X cause

Write:
to have readers donate $N to the X society today

Instead of:

to advertise my product

Write:
to increase sales in y sector by z percent in the next quarter

Instead of:
to increase my profile

Write: to reach up to 2000 Twitter followers by the end of the year

Have a specific, concrete goal so that you can tell quickly when you’ve achieved it. Once you do, then you can set another goal for another document. Every document should have its own goal or goals. Yes, you can have more than one goal for a document: to get the boss to respect me, and to get a bigger bonus at the end of the year.

Fiction

What about fiction? Can a short story or novel have a goal?

Certainly. One of Dickens’ goals was to raise awareness of, and then affect the poverty in the England of his time; Orwell wanted to warn people about the insidiousness and direction of totalitarianism when he wrote 1984. To Kill a Mockingbird and Uncle Tom’s Cabin are two other very well known novels where the author had a definite social purpose in writing them.

You can also have a goal for the plot itself. What do you want your main character to do by the end? I know that some writers claim they “write by the seats of their pants,” but I find it much better to have a result or conclusion in mind before I start writing. A lot of great ideas for stories or novels begin as an arresting line or an interesting situation. We’ve all done those exercises in creative writing class where we take a picture as the set-up for a story. The question that causes “blank screen syndrome” is, “where to go from here?”

What should your story destination be? Answer this question: what do you think your main character can accomplish? Or at least, what is he/she/it going to try to do in your story? If you have a quest, it’s easy: the MC is going to try to find the holy grail, or recover the embarrassing photo-negatives, or save the girl next door from the biker gang. You might want to picture your end scene: girl and boy at the altar, or relaxing at the luxury resort, or hanging from the gibbet.

The point is, now you have an end point to drive toward. That makes it so much easier to figure out how to get your plot from your opening to the closing. You can have a lot of fun putting in a lot of detours and side-trips, but at least you’ll be able to tell whether a line of dialogue or a particular scene help advance the plot, or just get in the way.

Now that you know where you’re going, it’s much easier to figure out how to get there. But before you get to plotting your course with an outline, you have two other steps. Taking those steps require that you know the first two rules of communication:

- Know your audience

- Know what you want to say.

The next post will address the Reader, or audience.

How to write, step 1: Get a GRIP

2011-10-08T10:47:00.000-05:00

The next few posts on this blog are going to focus on something that I like to tell myself I know something about: how to write.

Since audiences seem to like step-by-step guides, I’ll start with the two basic rules of writing:

Know what you want to say. Be able to sum up your main message, your thesis statement, in one clear sentence.
Know your audience. Know whom you’re writing or speaking to. What motivates them? What are they interested in? What will they likely agree with, and what will they argue about? Why should they care about what you have to say? And if you’re writing advertising or sales messages, why should they do what you will ask them to do?

“But Scott,” you say (I know what you’re saying.) “Writing is hard. Can you make it easier with a step-by-step process we can follow?”

Of course. Start by getting a GRIP. Before you write your next letter, or blog post, or proposal, or novel, before you jot down that spectacular opening sentence that came to you in a dream or in the shower, get a GRIP:

Goal—a reason to write, a purpose, something you are trying to achieve
Readers—know who they are (see rule #2 above)
Idea—your message (see rule #1, above)
Plan—make an outline.

Theory

I promise, the theory won’t take long and won’t hurt that much. Well, it won’t hurt me, anyway.

We write to communicate, to get our ideas from our minds into the minds of our audience. Here’s the theory part: we encode our ideas or our thoughts using language in the form of spoken or written words. We then transmit those words over a medium to an audience.

That’s the basic model of communication I was taught way back in stone college. The model holds up for every form of communication from speaking to one person to broadcasting radio to Twitter. The theory has four key elements:

Source—the encoder of the information
Message—the information that’s encoded and sent
Medium—the way the message is sent: speech, written words on paper, bits over the Internet
Receiver—the computer, the radio player, but ultimately, the mind of the audience.

I tend to focus on elements 2 and 4, and accept elements 1 and 3 as givens. I can’t do much about my mind as the source (although sometimes I wish I could), so I’ll have to take what I have. And I adapt to the medium as I find it, whether that’s a podium at the front of a classroom, or a telephone, or Twitter, or this blog. I have to adapt the message to the constraints of the medium. I won’t get into the McLuhanesque “is the medium the message” discussion now, because that would break my own rule #1.

Elements 2 and 4 map well to my rules: message and audience. See how all this fits together?

Enough theory. Let’s get a GRIP.

Before you actually start writing your message, whether it’s a memo to the boss, a sales report, an accident report, a proposal, an advertisement or a novel: get a grip.

Writing your document, whatever it is, is like any other major project. You don’t throw your clothes into the laundry with separating whites and colours, you don’t start cooking pasta without boiling the water first and then adding oil and salt, you don’t paint without at least wiping down the wall.

Before you start that beautiful opening sentence that came to you in the shower, write down the answers to the following questions first. You can write them on the computer, but often I find using a nice pen or fine marker on a good pad of paper is more satisfying.

GRIP: goal, reader, idea, plan.

Goal—why are you writing? You could be drinking beer, making love or sweeping the garage. You better have a good reason for writing! Your writing has to have a concrete goal, an aim, something to achieve. You want to sell something? You want people to vote for your candidate? Maybe you just have a story to tell.

Communication is a tool we use to achieve something. Sometimes, the act itself is very satisfying, but writing for ourselves is not really communicating. It’s like masturbation: it feels good, but it doesn’t accomplish anything, and no one will pay attention for long—and those that will, you don’t want to.

Reader—As I said above, you need to understand whom you are writing to. Once you’ve figured out what you’re trying to achieve with your writing, you need to connect your purpose to your audience. For example, if you’re trying to convince your community to elect a particular candidate, you have to be able to tell your readers what’s in it for them. How will they be better off?

The more you know about your audience, the better you can make your message. Do some research. What interests this audience? What makes them pay attention? What do they need that they don’t have? What do they not want to have? What makes them happy, what makes them mad, what makes them turn and stare, goggle-eyed?

There are some things that all people, everywhere, always, want: food, sex, safety, shelter. But the more specific you are, the more effective you can be.

Idea—the message. After you know your goal and your audience, write down your message as one sentence. In high school, I was told that this was the “thesis statement.” I was impressed at the time. “Thesis” sounded like an expensive word. But all it really means is the main idea.

Before you write your undying prose or poetry, you have to be able to sum it all up in one sentence. If you can’t do that, you haven’t clarified it. And if it’s not clear to you, you cannot make it clear to anyone else. Steve Jobs’ message? “Apple computers are fun and cool.” Mitt Romney’s message: “God will smite you if you don’t elect me President.” See?

This is perhaps the hardest part of all. Don’t be afraid to try it several times. Write it down, change it, cross it out, start over, try it from a different angle. Change the order of your words and phrases. Don’t worry if it’s a long sentence. It can be a complex-compound sentence with subordinate clauses and qualifying phrases, but it has to be a single, grammatically-correct, complete sentence. One thought.

Spend some time on it.

I know, it’s hard. But you can do it.

Plan—Now, the part that all my college students hated the most. After you figure out why you’re writing, whom you’re writing for and what your point is, make an outline.

After all, even though your main message, your thesis, is one sentence, you’ll probably need more than one sentence to convince your readers to achieve your goal. If that weren’t necessary, there Apple wouldn’t have such an extensive website.

An outline is like the frame of a house. I always start with a “scratch outline”—just a list, in no particular order, of all the ideas I want to get into the document to support the main idea. I try to make sure I have all the facts that I have found in my research, all the ideas I had as I was working on the other steps, all the arguments for and against the main idea.

Get them all down on paper or screen, then put them into order. Play the Sesame Street game: “some of these things belong together.” Look for categories and items within categories. Then, put them in a logical order.

What order? Well, that depends on your goal, your idea and your audience. You can use a chronological order if you’re writing an accident report: “I pressed on the brake pedal, but the brake did not engage. The car continued until it hit the wall. Then it stopped.”

A lot of proposals use a problem-solution order: “Do you have bad breath? Use Scope!”

In a future post, I’ll present some exercises to help you with making an outline. But for now, I think that’s enough.

Summary

Before you want to write, you have to know what you’re writing and you have to know whom you are writing for.

Before you write the first line, get a GRIP: write down your goal, your reader, your main idea, and your plan.

And when you get stuck (all we writers get stuck from time to time), go back to those first two rules: what am I saying? and whom am I saying it to?

I hope to blog to you again soon! And I hope you’re reading here!

Is poliltics another form of communication? Or is it the other way around?

2011-10-06T14:49:00.001-05:00

It’s interesting to see that I’m not the only writer with a writing blog who strays into politics.

Jo VonBargen, poet and blogger from Texas and a blog followmate (see how I just made up that word? Am I a writer, or what?) also alternates her posts between writing about the writing process and the daily challenges she faces as a writer (and some of them seem huge!), and writing about her political mileu. Her latest post (as of this writing) states, in part:

“I want to make the politicians fear the voter once again. I want those fat cats up on Capitol Hill to be reminded in a very vivid way that they are the employees…and we are the employer. I want them scrambling and bowing and scraping. And I want to take every lobbyist up there and throw ’em on a bonfire. Oh, don’t get me started…. just keep a light in the window and howl loudly!”

And this, I think, is fair. I called my blog “written words,” intending to write about about good and poor writing that I found on the corporate, political and social scenes. That is, any form of public communication from just about anyone.

It didn’t really turn out that way, and I veered into the political world, too. Well, these are still written words, after all—I wrote them.

But I am really intrigued by how closely Jo VonBargen’s stated views match my own. In the same post I just mentioned, she brings up something I have thought about every US election since 2000: why do the Americans have such a ridiculously overcomplicated way to count votes?

“We want democracy back in the US! Go back to paper blinkin’ ballots! Then the actual vote can be examined—and we don’t have to take the word of some secretive company that their software is accurate.”

VonBlargen’s post voices the often inchoate rage of those like the Occupy Wall Street protesters. In response to that prompt, she wrote to me “I think we're gonna have people in the streets all over America very soon, just like in Europe and the Middle East. As the dollar erodes and people struggle to buy gas and food, the anger level is going to explode.”

Well, I hope things don’t get violent or nasty. But to refocus the topic on communication itself, I am more and more encouraged by the increasing voice that those outside the political, financial and media elites are getting now. Occupy Wall Street was almost absent from mainstream news coverage for the first two and half weeks. Now, I see it in the newspapers and on main TV stations almost every day. And the coverage does not any longer just dismiss this as unimportant, or the flavour-of-the-month for movie stars desperately seeking publicity.

And that, readers, is the promise of all this communication technology realized.

RABMAD: Writers can make a difference

2011-10-05T13:47:00.002-05:00

Do you follow RABMAD? You should, because it’s helping raise money for a host of good causes.

“Read a book, make a difference” is the brainchild of author RS Guthrie. He launched “Read a book, make a difference” when he was inspired to donate the half the proceeds of the sale of his books to support the tuition of a boy named Ben Fieber, who has Down Syndrome and autism, so that Ben can attend non-profit The Joshua School in Colorado for children with disabilities.

Guthrie’s books include The Black Beast (available on his website and through Amazon Createspace), and his latest, Dark Prairie, to be published by New West. You should read his own inspiring story at http://www.rsguthrie.com/.

But Guthrie didn’t stop there. He registered two URLs, http://www.readabookmakeadifference/.com and http://www.rabmad.com/, to encourage other writers do follow suit and donate some of their proceeds to good causes. Any good causes the writers choose. RABMAD.com became a portal to authors who joined, for free—all at Guthrie’s trouble and expense.

Some of the authors include:

• Melissa Foster, author of Megan’s Way and Chasing Amanda, who supports Provincetown Cares, which stages a benefit performance each year during Women’s Week and National Breast Cancer Awareness Month as a way to promote research, education, screening and treatment for breast cancer as well as other serious health issues affecting women

• Alan McDermott from the UK, author of Gray Justice (available on Smashwords), who supports the British Heart Foundation and Barnardo’s, the UK’s leading children’s charity

• Martha Rodriguez, author of the children’s book A Reel Cool Summer, who supports Literacy Volunteers of Leon County, FL, where she has been an adult literacy volunteer tutor

• Bert Carson of Birmingham, Alabama, author of Fourth and Forever and the upcoming Truth—Yours, Mine, Ours, supports the Heifer International agricultural education charity.

There are many others, and the list is growing. So if you’re an author, get involved! You can make a difference. And readers, check out what these writers have to offer. Not only might you discover a talent you didn’t know about before, but you could also make a real difference to people who need help.

99 %: The message is clear

2011-10-04T14:25:00.000-05:00

The Occupy Wall street protest has been critized for not being clear. That's not true. The message is clear for anyone who wants to hear it: the 99 percent of the population is fed up with the self serving of the top one percent.

Photo source: http://www.negotiationisover.net/

Occupy Wall Street is finally getting some major media coverage. For three weeks, this demonstration has continued in the heart of Manhattan’s financial district, but has been largely ignored by the mass media. To their credit, the protesters been steadfastly peaceful and ruly, if not quiet.

The protesters have been criticized for being “disorganized,” and “lacking focus.” Indeed, there are several interests represented there: protests against corporate greed epitomized on Wall Street; financial mismanagement or outright malfeasance; unemployment and poverty; climate change and environmental degradation.

But there is a clear message that arises from this, and it’s easy to see. “We are the 99 percent,” the protesters repeat. And they’re protesting one thing: injustice.

This really is an “American Autumn,” inspired at least partly by the Arab Spring. Like the protesters in Tunisia and Egypt, they are gathering in the locus of U.S. power. It’s not Washington (although there may be plans for similar protests there and in other cities, as well). In the U.S., the shots are called by the money interests, and those are centred in Manhattan.

It’s telling that the media that is owned by corporations that are traded on the New York Stock Exchange have given short shrift to the Occupy Wall Streeters. But they will have to start paying attention, because this protest isn’t going to just go away. It’s into its third week, and it’s growing and spreading.

The 99 percent are protesting the actions of the one percent who control so much of the U.S., its economy and its politics and laws. The moneyed one percent have commandeered the laws of the U.S. to their own benefit, and to detriment of the 99, probably since the U.S. was formed; however, that bias has been obvious since the Reagan years, the slashing of social service budgets, the outsourcing of jobs and whole industries to anywhere that poverty and lax labour laws reduce costs, and tax breaks for the one percent. This regimen became egregiously blatant under W. Bush.

The 99 percent are the true representatives of the Tea Party of 1773, not the collection of dupes who now call themselves the Tea Party. In 1773, the Boston colonists who threw tea into Boston harbour were not protesting a tax so much as the injustice of the way it was applied. Their slogan was, remember, “no taxation without representation.”

Today’s Occupy Wall Streeters are protesting the economic and financial policies engineered by and for the financeer class. The tax policies do not represent their interests. Middle- and lower-class Americans are getting poorer, and have been for a long time.

The one percent had better pay attention.

E-Book review: Discontents, by James Wallace Birch

2011-10-02T09:26:00.000-05:00

Discontents, by James Wallace Birch, 2011

Discontents is the second independently published book I have read, and I am impressed.

There is a lot to like in this story. Birch demonstrates his own social awareness and a little of his politics. He’s sympathetic to the same ideals that I am, but also skeptical and a little cynical—like me. And he’s realistic.

This is a political thriller from a different perspective. The main character is not a super-spy, a cop, a politician or a reporter. He really is an outsider, an overeducated, underemployed, disaffected young man who sees the hypocrisy that Western capitalistic society depends on.

The story begins in the author’s own voice, where he describes how he receives a letter one day from an former friend in high school—a friend who ended the friendship by stealing the author’s girlfriend. Then the central character, Emory Walden, leaves to backpack in Europe. In the letter to the author, Emory tells the story of what happened to him after he returned to his home town, and how he found some shadowy organization is trying to kill him.

During his travels, Emory began a blog that criticized Western governments and their corporate buddies—typical young radical stuff. The blog became a hit among discontented youth, whence the title.

When Emory returns to Washington, DC, he realizes he has become the figurehead of a nebulous young revolutionary movement called FAY, for Fear the Art of Youth. Its main accomplishment seems to be large public marches and graffiti.

Emory finds a low-level job and crashes with another friend, Pat, and continues blogging. His star-blogger status attracts a certain kind of young woman, including Pat’s girlfriend; when she puts moves on Emory, Pat throws him out. Violently.

At this point, Emory is contacted by Fletcher Spivey—possibly the hokiest name in literature. Spivey is an old man who made a fortune in the kind of target marketing that makes corporations drool and civil libertarians quake in fear. Young Spivey had been a radical, the kind who wanted to wake people up, to make them aware of how they’re being fooled by the marketers. But he suppressed those convictions when he took over the family business. Now, in his old age, his career behind him, he wants to sponsor Emory and spark a revolution. He sets Emory up with an apartment, a fake identity as “Liam Logan,” cash and an untraceable Internet account. Emory just has to keep blogging, exhort young people to rebel, and to sneak out at night to make graffiti.

Of course, Emory does more than this; he also pursues a romance with Carolyn, who knows him as Emory Walden.

Eventually, Emory’s recklessness catches up with him: the police arrest him for his graffiti. His sentence is exile from DC. (That was a bit of a plot stretch, but maybe Birch was being metaphorical.) One young cop who knows that Liam Logan is really Emory Walden beats him up; Spivey’s assistant, the beautiful but maimed Ella Alice, takes him to a private doctor, who discovers that Emory has a brain tumor and probably won’t survive an operation that might extend his life beyond the three months he’d have without it.

At this point, Emory begins to suspect the FAY movement, of which he is the hidden head—none of the marchers in the streets even know what he looks like—has been infiltrated by the government. Lying in his hospital, he wonders if it’s the local police, the FBI, CIA or NSA. When Fletcher Spivey asks Emory if he would donate his organs if he does not survive the brain operation, Emory finally bolts.

The story is refreshing. The perspective of the real outsider—not someone who has found a comfortable place within this society, but a truly disaffected young man with no prospects—is a welcome change from the standard thriller on the bookshelves. I liked the way that Birch criticizes what’s wrong with our commercial, materialistic society, but at the same time the radical counterculture. The “discontents” are not heros. Birch describes how they’ll march, protest, blog and complain about what’s wrong with society, then drive fancy cars to overpriced nightclubs and spend their parents’ money.

Discontents disproves the arguments that snobbish commercial publishers use to scoff at independent literature. The style is professional: simple, lucid prose. There are a few typos, but I’ve yet to find a commercially published title without any.

The action and the dialogue are mostly believable, and there are no plot holes. The conclusion is satisfying on many levels: it’s plausible, logical, and leaves no loose ends. But it’s not too tidy, either, and not cloyingly sweet—like a Hollywood movie can be.

About the only real criticism I have is that Fletcher Spivey’s dialogue is not believable. He’s effusive past credibility. I know that Birch was trying to portray a wealthy, patrician type, but Spivey goes too far.

What I really liked was the realism the author portrays. He is ambivalent: he criticizes our own society and culture, as well as the counter-culture. Even Emory lives quite comfortably off the largess of one of the powerful that he criticizes. The most sympathetic character in the story is Renton, a homeless man who displays the grace of an acetic.

Overall, five stars to this smart, engrossing story for making me think while entertaining me with a satisfying story and believable characters.

Book Review: Makers, by Cory Doctorow

2011-10-01T11:16:00.000-05:00

Makers, by Cory Doctorow

e-book available as free download

With Makers, Cory Doctorow has done something I wish had: he has clearly linked the capitalistic need for economic growth with the waste it generates, the overload on the environment, symbolized by overflowing landfills, and the obesity epidemic in the corrupt, capitalistic West. At the same time, he jabs, lightning-fast, at big capitalism, sleazy journalists, earnest and good journalists who are nevertheless short-sighted business people, the police and the International House of Pancakes.

Doctorow deserves the success he has had as a writer and novelist. His style is clear, simple and fast-paced, and his characters are so believable, I fell like I’ve met them all.

Makers is set an unclear, but small number of years in the future, just after a huge economic collapse that leaves behind empty strip malls and abandoned homes on crumbling highways across America. On the other hand, maybe it’s history.

The story starts with Suzanne, a reporter with a San Jose paper who is covering the announcement of a merger of Duracell and Kodak. Since no one buys batteries or film anymore, “Kodacell” ditches those products completely. The new CEO, the brash young money genius XX, announces a radical new business model: Kodacell is going to back small-scale entrepreneurs who invent innovative new products. This sparks a “new work” revolution. People around the world start making new inventions and innovations geared at everyday needs. It works until it falls apart in a typical boom-and-bust cycle.

The focus of the novel is on the first cell, started by two self-employed engineers named Perry and Lester. They harvest discarded technology from landfills and set up a laboratory-shop in an abandoned strip mall in Florida. They explain to reporter Suzanne that so-called obsolete technology, like last year’s iPod, still contains powerful technology that can be repurposed. The demonstrate with a bunch of “Boogie-Woogie Elmo” dolls: toys that are actually robots that can walk and dance and talk. Lester and Perry reprogram them to drive a car.

With Kodacell money behind them, Lester and Perry begin developing all sorts of new technologies, which eventually coalesce into “the Ride.” This is an amusement-park type ride which shows past technologies and toys in American homes through the decades. It’s heart-wrenchingly nostalgic, as well as energizing: Perry and Lester open-source the Ride and copies, or actually different versions, pop up all across America, and then the world. (Strangely, there is little mention of Canada in the whole book—and Doctorow is a Canadian writer!)

From both geek and social consciousness points of view, one of the most interesting parts of the story is how the sharing of the Ride’s content adapts the content itself, as well as the society it reflects. There could be a whole doctoral thesis on this idea, but this novel is far more interesting.

One of the most delicious aspects of the book is the villain: the Disney corporation, or more specifically, a rising executive in Disney. Doctorow is a skilful enough writer that he can evoke revulsion at the culture-constraining aspect of Disney, while admiring how well it does what it does.

The story is not perfect (but what is?) I can’t believe the utopia of the squatter society. Surely, any conglomeration of people that size would have some bad people, and without any kind of policing, there should have been a lot of crime. At the very least, criminal gangs would have moved into the squatter town, unopposed by anything.

Maybe Doctorow is trying to make a point here, that problems are caused by the power structure that represses people with little wealth, but I cannot believe that. And it’s a shame, because everything else is absolutely credible—even the Elmo dolls that can drive a car.

Debt doublespeak, or Is the economy producing more than we can consume?

2011-09-29T10:25:00.000-05:00

The sound bites and news clips from politicians and economics meisters of the world about the Greek debt crisis—seemingly the epicentre of the current economic turmoil—defy logic. To avoid defaulting on its debt, Greece needs more bailout money. Without it, say the financial experts, Greece will be bankrupt.

Isn’t needing to borrow more money just to pay the interest on your existing loans a definition of bankrupt?

Last weekend, the G20 met in Washington. Soon after that, Canadian Prime Minister Harper, Finance Minister Flaherty and Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney conferred—a “historic” meeting.

What links all these? Their common goal: restoring economic confidence. The turmoil in the stock, commodity market and currency markets is causing a lack of confidence among consumers and investors; without confidence, we don’t buy stuff. And if we don’t buy stuff, the factories and shipping lines around the world grind to a halt, which leads to a recession, which leads to job losses, so we consumers won’t be able to ... buy stuff.

Other than Somalia, there are no major famines in the world. Food shortages are typically caused by war, crime or grossly unjust distribution of wealth. In the West, obesity is a greater problem than hunger.

The point is, there is enough of what everyone needs to go around. There is enough food for everyone in the horn of Africa; the challenge is in getting it to them.

Even if a recession were to quell factories in China, India, Mexico and North America, even if workers were unemployed, I doubt there would be mass starvation. There would just be more debt.

The other side of the debt coin, as Margaret Atwood pointed out, is that someone is lending all this money.

Something that no one ever mentions is that there is a lot of money that somebody wants to lend, even at ridiculously low interest rates. In North America, at least, it’s easy for almost anyone to get a credit card. The capacity to produce money and goods of all kinds is huge.

Perhaps part of the problem now is that the economy produces more than we can consume. That would explain rising obesity rates.

Forty years ago or so, the Club of Rome published a book called Limits to Growth. It predicted that the world’s economy could only grow so much until it depleted Earth’s resources. The book was pooh-poohed by those in power. But maybe the Club of Rome was just looking at the question from the wrong end: maybe the problem isn’t the limit of production, but of consumption.

No one needs a new iPhone, big-screen TV, diamond-encrusted watch or SUV. But if we all want to have comfortable retirements, we have to make sure other people keep consuming at the level they used to. Or we have to change our dreams.

In the 40s and 50s, science fiction author Frederick Pohl wrote a series of satiric stories about the problem of over-production: in the future, the economy produces so much that people use robots to consume the over-production of other robots. In this particular dystopia, the upper classes don’t have to consume as much, while the lower classes are plagued with consumption quotas.

Like hand-held communicators, lasers and space travel, this may be one science-fiction ideas that could come true.

What do you think?

How I fixed my Apple Mail program

2011-09-26T12:07:00.000-05:00

I got up early on Sunday morning to write the next entry for my travel blog, scottstravelblog.wordpress.com. First, though, I decided send out a few more emails about my newly-published story, Sam, the Strawb Part. (See my earlier post, "A Smashwords virgin no more," about my experience in e-book publishing.

Suddenly, my Mail program quit and gave me an error message. I tried to relaunch, but within two minutes, the program quit again. The error message gave a long list of details, but of course none of them made any sense to me.

Disk Repair told me that there were some permission files and indices that needed fixing. I ran the program and restarted. While the computer went through that routine, I went to do some chores. Washed floors, windows, bathrooms. After the repairs, Mail still crashed.

I looked online for answers; there is (not surprisingly) nothing in Apple’s Support site. Google showed lots of forums and bitching about the problem of Mail suddenly quitting unexpectedly, but the discussions were not helpful.

So, I called Apple’s Help line. After about 5 minutes of voicemail and waiting, I got in touch with a representative, who asked for my name and my computer’s serial number. Sonia listened to my description of the problem and put me on hold; five minutes later, a man came on the line. He had my account information, but after he listened to my description of the problem, told me that my 90-day free telephone support period was over and, while he knew what was wrong with the system, it would cost me $49.95 to find out what it was.

I said “thank you, good-bye” and hung up. Fifty bucks? I resolved to try to solve it myself.

I went back to Apple’s site. Searching through the Support and Products pages brought up only one hint, which turned out not to be so good. I deleted Mail from the Applications folder, then reinstalled it from the Install DVD that came with the iMac. When I tried to launch Mail after that, I got an error message that said the current version of Mail is no longer compatible with the OS. In the intervening 11 months since buying the computer, the online upgrades had rendered obsolete the version of Mail that came with the computer. Running System Update didn’t help.

I went back to chores. Filled a bucket with water and some vinegar to wash the windows. Got an idea, and reinstalled Snow Leopard from the DVD. While the computer did that, I painted two window frames. When the installation was finished and the computer restarted, I launched Mail again. It opened this time, but crashed in about a minute.

I got fed up. I called Apple’s support line again and said, politely but firmly, that the machine is still under the one-year warranty, the problem is in the OS (Mail is considered part of the OS), and I wanted to be put in touch with someone who could tell me how to fix the problem. After a few clicks and voicemail shuffles, I was connected with Dan, who politely and patiently helped me fix the problem. He spent close to an hour with me and was very courteous throughout.

It was frustrating, because after a while Mail would crash within a few seconds of launch, and there was not even enough time to check the advanced Preferences. Eventually, after eliminating some other possibilities, Dan suggested moving some .plist files from the Library-Mail folder.

That stabilized Mail. I had to re-enter my account settings, but once I did, Dan tested it with an email, which worked fine. I even got all my old emails and folders back!

Lessons learned:

- back up using Time Machine regularly

- be firm but polite about demanding the support you’re entitled to under warranties

- extend the AppleCare protection before the year is out

- take advantage of rebuilding and verifying cycles to do household chores.

7 things about me ... no, wait, 10!

2011-09-22T12:03:00.000-05:00

I have also been remiss about participating in two games of blog tag. I’ve been tagged by Barbara McDowell, http://writenowlife.wordpress.com/, and Sher Hart of http://www.sherahart.com/sf-writers-fancies-blog.html, who generously gave me a “Versatile Blogger Award.” Thanks, Sher!

Of course, there’s always a price. In this case, I have to write seven random things about myself, then pass it on to four other bloggers. Here are the seven:

1. I got hooked on writing when I was very young, like around the fourth grade or so. It was through Composition class, when I discovered that anyone could make up stories. So I did. I like the process of writing as well as having written.

2. I always try to be different in my writing. I do not like clichés. In my stories, the main characters never fit into a mold or stock character.

3. I like to travel. When I get to a new city or town, I love just to walk around for a couple of hours and poke into out of the way places. I like museums and such, but I also like just looking at neighbourhoods and sitting in a cafe or restaurant.

4. I may have undiagnosed ADD. And I love pie. And you know what bugs me? People who don’t finish what they start to say ... oh, wait, I have to check my Twitter account.

5. I’m not as funny as I think I am.

6. I drink too much coffee. But I’m not addicted. WHERE’S MY COFFEE?

7. I never read forms carefully enough.

There. Seven random things about me, for the Versatile Blogger Award. I have to come up with three more for another blogging tag game . Barbara McDowell, of writerolife.wordpress.com, wants me to write 10 random things about myself.

8. I often stay later at work than I have to.

9. I don’t fix things when I should. Now the warranty’s expired! Ohtenose!

10. I find Facebook frustrating.

There. Now, to tag a bunch of other bloggers. Get into it, pass it on, it helps raise our profiles! At least among other writers and bloggers.

Bloggers who deserve to follow this include:

James Wallace Birch, author of Discontents and the Posterous blog: http://dttla.posterous.com/

Joe Crubaugh, author of satirical Cleo Matts thrillers: http://joecrubaugh.com/blog/

Cheryl Sonnier’s “Off wi’ the fairies”: http://offwithefairies.blogspot.com/

Sherry Davis Zander’s “Writing 4 Effect” http://writing4effect.wordpress.com/

Consider yourself tagged!

Blogs worth following

2011-09-21T13:56:00.000-05:00

I guess I dropped the ball on the First Campaigner Challenge from Rachael Harrie's Platform-Building Campaign. Sorry.

So, I 'm not going to wait any longer. First, here are some blogs that I think you should check out:

Of course, Rachael Harrie's "Rach Writes ..." http://rachaelharrie.blogspot.com/

Now, some writers that are in the same Campaign group as me:
Michael Haynes "A Writing Blog" http://michael-haynes.blogspot.com/
Sher Hart's "SF Writer's Fancies Blog" http://www.sherahart.com/sf-writers-fancies-blog.html
Michele Chiappetta's "The Chipper Muse" http://www.thechippermuse.blogspot.com/
Bill Jones Jr.'s "This page intentionally blank" - interesting serial - http://thisblogblank.wordpress.com/
Niiganab: http://niiganab.blogspot.com/
Of course, there are many more, including the First Contest winner or runner-up, 1000th Monkey. But she does not need any more help from me!

Anyway, they all write interesting blogs and I'm subscribing to them, where I can. Check them out!

Weasel-word watch: when not saying it, says more

2011-09-21T07:52:00.000-05:00

This week, not communicating has done more in official circles than saying anything at all. Unfortunately, the results are not good for most people.

Yesterday, the Air Canada flight attendants’ union caved in to the threat of back to work legislation and accepted what will doubtlessly prove to be disappointing for the workers. But no matter what side of that debate you took (or maybe, somewhere in the middle, like me—I have never Air Canada flight staff very helpful or friendly, compared to those on other airlines), the fact is that the threat of back-to-work legislation was as effective as the legislation itself. Maybe it was even more effective, because it achieved the government’s goal without the time, stress and expense of debate in the House of Commons.

Meanwhile, today at the UN, diplomats are scurrying to convince enough members of the Security Council to abstain from voting on Palestine’s request for full membership, so that the US does not have to veto it. It’s curious—we all know that the US opposes Palestinian statehood now, but somehow, it’s better that it does not veto this change in UN status. But the message is still clear.

We as readers, writers, communicators and citizens need to think about this. Why do we accept this kind of weasel word use? Why do we let politicians bully us into accepting what we do not want, without even explaining what they’re doing? If we would argue when someone says something we disagree with, but accept it when they say nothing, but achieve the same results or perform the same action?

Mercedes’ new ad for its coupe is one of the stupidest TV commercials I have ever seen.

2011-09-20T11:09:00.000-05:00

Have you seen it? It starts with close-ups of chains wrapping around part of a car. The far ends of the chains are fastened, somehow, to a mountainside. There are a lot of quick cuts between the car and the mountain, but they’re so fast it’s hard to tell exactly what’s going on. In the meantime, a car’s engine revs and revs, faster and faster.

Finally, the silver sedan takes off down the road and the chains unfurl until they reach their limit. At this point, we see that the chains were wrapped around the rear doors. As the car continues, the chains rip the doors off, and the car, now a two-door coupe, rockets along until is drifts to a stop.

Am I supposed to be impressed that some maniac ripped the doors off an overpriced car?

How does this make anyone want to drive a Mercedes?

Fail.

A Smashwords virgin no more

2011-09-16T12:21:00.001-05:00

Yesterday evening, I published using Smashwords and Amazon for the first time. The subject was my short story written in support of Asperger’s Syndrome and other autism-spectrum disorders, “Sam, the Strawb Part.” I’m happy to say that it’s now available on both Smashwords’ and Amazon’s sites for the low, low price of just $1.99. All proceeds from sales go to Children at Risk, and Ottawa-based charity that supports children with autism spectrum disorders and their families.

I am also happy to say that it was very easy. I had already registered accounts as a buyer with both Smashwords and Amazon, as a customer, and they don’t require any further steps to register as a publisher.

The important thing with publishing on Smashwords is to set up your document properly. Follow the Style Guide. Keep your document simple, using only one or two standard fonts, and don’t add extra elements like running headers and footers. Smashwords’ “Meat Grinder” formatting and publishing application will take care of that. And don’t add page breaks or extra tabs or hard returns (Enter), either.

You can add hyperlinks and images, as long as they’re embedded. You can also have a hyperlinked table of contents, which is essential for a longer, technical book, nice for long novels, but not necessary at all for a short story. If you want to include a ToC, make sure you follow the Style Guide carefully.

Smashwords demands that you put “Smashwords edition” or “Published by [publisher] on Smashwords” in the copyright information at the front of your book. The Style Guide also recommends that you add your author bio and photo at the end. I complied with their recommendation to add hyperlinks to my own website, blogs and Twitter account.

Don’t forget about an International Standard Book Number (ISBN). This is essential for listing your book on some retailers’ sites, like Apple’s iBooks. You can get your own—I did—or you can go through Smashwords for that. Remember, every edition should have its own ISBN. I registered two numbers, one for the Smashwords edition and one for the Amazon edition. The rules governing ISBNs stipulate that you use different numbers for each format, which means MOBI (Amazon), PDF, LRF and so on. And another one for paper, as well. Smashwords automatically converts your manuscript into all the different electronic formats and, eventually, distributes them to different retailers in the formats they require; however, it has no way of assigning different ISBNs to each of them, yet. If you want to follow the letter of the ISBN rules, then you’ll have to register your manuscript for each different version, get a different ISBN for each one, and then upload each one separately to Smashwords, selecting just one format for each ISBN. I did not do that, however. Maybe next time.

Finally, the cover. Save the image and and text—title, author, publisher, tags, etc.—into one JPEG file. Since it’s one image, you can use the craziest typeface you want. Smashwords associates the cover and document files and puts them together quite nicely.

Then, in the Smashwords publishing interface, all I had to do was fill in the information about title, format, uploading the cover image and uploading the document file. It took a few minutes for Smashwords to process the files, but I watched Boardwalk Empire on demand TV while I waited.

The last step was to update my publisher and author information. I added the same picture that I have on this blog and copied the bio from the back of the story, plus links to my LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook pages and my blogs.

Done! My story was right there!

Next, the Amazon version. I copied the file, and saved it as a different version. I changed the ISBN for the Amazon version and took out the mentions of Smashwords. Then I logged into my account and selected “Self-publish with Us” at the bottom of the page. Follow the instructions, upload the cover and document files, update the author information, and it’s done. The interface notified me that it had successfully uploaded the files and that it would take 24 hours to appear on the catalog, but I found it this morning, maybe 13 hours later! Thanks, Amazon.

If you want to see (or buy) the story, you can go to http://smashwords.com/b/89276.
To view my Smashwords Author Profile, visit http://smashwords.com/profile/view/ScottBury

So, you see, it’s quite an easy process. Now the hard part, to promote it. I’ll keep you posted on how that is going, too.

Starting to publish

2011-09-14T14:24:00.000-05:00

I am about to try publishing through Smashwords for the first time.

Before I use a publishing system like Smashwords, Createspace or Amazon for my long novel, I thought I’d ease the learning curve with something short. I decided on a short story called “Sam, the Strawb Part.” It’s about a boy who, among other things, slurs his words so much it’s almost impossible to understand him. “Strawb part” is what others hear when he says “strawberry pirate.”

What is a strawberry pirate? You’ll have to read the story to find out. I plan to make it available by the end of this week—I know, it’s coming fast—and all proceeds from the sale will go to charity.

Smashwords
From what I’ve been reading, the Smashwords system seems pretty easy to follow. The service began only a couple of years ago, and according to its President, Mark Coker, has released over 44,000 books by 17authors and publishers since then.

Smashwords sells the books through its own online retailing system, and any books produced through it can also be bought through Sony’s online bookstore (for the Sony e-reader), Barnes and Noble (for its Nook), Diesel, Apple’s iBookstore (for iBooks for the iPad) and others. Of course, Amazon has its own publishing system. I’ll try that next, and I’ll write about my experience with it, too.

Signing up for Smashwords is free. The company makes its revenue by keeping a percentage, I think 15 percent, of each sale. The rest goes to the publisher or author—the source of the book.
After signing up, the first step in publishing a book on Smashwords is to download and read The Smashwords Style Guide. This is one of the best step-by-step guides I have ever read. The writing is clear, there are lots of pictures, and it’s organized extremely well. The order is completely intuitive.
I’ve read it, and I think I understand it. I have a lot of experience in publishing, but one of the early warnings in the guide not to assume that what you’ve learned in publishing, particularly paper publishing, can be transferred to e-books.

I like the idea that my Smashwords book can include in-line pictures, although I don’t plan on having many, other than a cover image and a back image of my own face. You can use hyperlinks, as long as the hypertext is embedded properly. This is important, as I will use some images that require attribution via a hyperlink. And you can also have a linked table of contents—crucial for longer and technical works, but not really for a short story.

One limitation of Smashwords is that it really wants to start with a .doc file, which means something created using Microsoft Word. Yes, I know it’s the de facto standard, and it’s pretty open in the sense that there are several programs that can create or save .doc files. But it’s still a commercial system. It’s a minor point, but I think it would be nice of Smashwords could accept other file formst. On the other hand, that would make the system more difficult, complex and therefore costly to maintain.

Anyway, it’s not a problem, since I have an old version of Word that I use fairly regularly. And Smashwords, or at least its head, Mark Coker, seems to prefer the older version that I use—the one that creates .doc files, not .docx files.

Next, the Guide advises writers to make Word behave itself. First, turn off most of the AutoCorrect functions. I couldn’t agree more. It drives me nuts when Word helpfully changes the whole document to boldface when I only wanted to boldface a single word.

The Guide explicitly tells you which features to reset, and illustrates them, too. Other warnings that bear repeating: don’t indent with tabs or (worst of all) multiple spaces on the space bar; don’t hard-return after every line, and so on. And finally, the Guide prescribes the title and copyright information required for listing in the Premier Catalog, and ends with some advice about the end matter.

I cannot recommend The Smashwords Style Guide highly enough. It could help with publishing through almost any system, I think. So, I’m going to put “Sam, the Strawb Part” through the process, and I’ll post the results and my thoughts about it right here, and on Twitter, too.

Writing tip o’ the month: Make sure you’re saying what you want to say

2011-09-13T12:01:00.000-05:00

Here’s something that bugs me: sentences constructed as “this needs to happen.” For example, on a news report about the lack of mental health care workers in Nunavut, the journalist said “more nurses need to be hired in Nunavut.” Maybe nurses do need to be hired. Professionals need jobs. But that’s not the point the journalist wanted to make. What the writer was trying to say was “The territory needs to hire more nurses.” This is what I call a “false active” sentence. Grammatically, it is active—the subject performs the verb. However, the idea that the writer wants to express is that the object of the sentence needs the subject: “Nunavut needs to hire more nurses.” In other words, the sentence is structured in reverse of the intended meaning. It all goes back to the writing process that I outlined oh so long ago: get a GRIP. What are you trying to say? State your main idea in one clear sentence. This will allow you to express all your ideas clearly to your audience. Then, if you apply that focus to the entire written piece, whether it’s a news article or a novel or anything in between, you can be sure that you’re writing what you want to express. I admit that most audiences can interpret the real meaning. But we’re not always dealing with native English speakers. So let’s be clear, and let’s make sure we are actually writing what we mean.

Like to read? Check out these blogs

2011-09-12T12:49:00.001-05:00

I’ve been following and participating in Rachael Harrie’s Writers Platform-Building Campaign, as I’ve mentioned. I try to visit a couple of blogs of other participants each day, and comment on blogs that I like.
This is by no means a comprehensive list, nor even a systematic one. I just randomly clicked on some of the blogs and links in Rachael's page. If I liked the story, blog or writing style, I took note of it. And if I didn't like the writing or the story, I'll just ignore it from now on.

Here are some that I think are worth visiting. Maybe I'll have a chance to review some more.

KM Walton’s “Some Things I Think,” http://skateorbate.blogspot.com/

Michael Haynes’ “A Writing Blog,” http://michael-haynes.blogspot.com/

1000th Monkey, http://1000thmonkey.blogspot.com

Richard P. Hughes’ “Writing and Living,” http://richard-writingandliving.blogspot.com/

Barbara McDowell’s Blog, http://writenowlife.wordpress.com/

Jolene Stockman, http://jolenestockman.blogspot.com/

Michelle Helene’s “A Wanderer in Paris,” http://wanderingparis.blogspot.com/

JR Williams’ “My Road to Freedom,” http://jr-williams.com/blog/

Rebecca Emin’s “Ramblings of a Rusty Writer,” http://ramblingsofarustywriter.blogspot.com/

Shelly Koon’s “Dark Writes,” http://shelleykoon.com/author/

SL Pierce’s “Pierce Books,” http://slpiercebooks.blogspot.com/

I like their writing, their contributions to the Campaign, and/or their blogs, themselves. Check them out!

One more thing: I have to give some extra praise to SL Pierce's writing. Her entry led me to her site, with more of her stories. I really liked "Never, Ever Bring This up Again." A great example of the noir mystery with lots of twists and double-crosses, deftly condensed into a very short story (but just a little too long to fit Harrie's requirements). And I'm very intrigued by her other stories, as well. Great characters!

9/11: where I was, 10 years ago

2011-09-11T21:43:00.000-05:00

Barbara McDowell from the #writecampaign blog circle pointed me to this entry from a blogger who was in the US military in 2011. LadyJai writes a touching and very illuminating post about her personal experience in 9/11, 2001. It's a relief from all the hype and self-serving nattering from the so-called journalists and insane conspiracy theorists.

Jai asked about others' experience on that day, so here is mine:

I had thought September 11, 2001 would be a significant day. At the time, I was working at Canada's central bank, and the Deputy Governor was holding a breakfast meeting that was supposed to launch some significant initiative. How silly that seems now, in comparison!

We came out of the meeting a few minutes before 9:00, and a coordinator in the communications section said "A plane just hit the World Trade Centre." There's a World Trade Building here in Ottawa, and I first thought of it. But no, it was soon obvious that something far more important was happening.

I hoped at first that it was an accident, but when I heard of the second plane hitting the other tower, well, we all knew we were watching the unfolding of a horrendous plan.

"It has to be Arab terrorists," said someone else in the communications section. I tried to argue that we didn't know anything yet. I pointed out that the previous case of US terrorism, the Oklahoma City bombing, was an example of domestic, home-grown terror, but that wasn't convincing anyone.

And I was drowned out: all the news channels and commentators were talking about Arab or Muslim terrorists, US enemies from the Middle East. We heard about a plane hitting the Pentagon, rumours of a fourth crashing in Pennsylvania, a fifth missing. We watched TV news reports of all the aircraft being diverted to the closest airport, about hundreds of US flights landing in Canadian airports.

It was all so hard to believe. All these news reports, all this coverage, and almost no information.

We watched replay after replay of the planes hitting the buildings. Then we watched, live, as the South Tower collapsed. I nearly collapsed, myself. The greatest horror I'd ever imagined, on TV, in front of me, and it was real.

There have been so many events that followed from that day, so much change in the world. There have been hopeful signs, but much (truthers, birthers, ravers from all sides and every shade of the political spectrum) that is discouraging.

Still, I am hopeful. The US has been the home of so much good, and so much pain, as well. Americans have shown the best and the worst qualities of humanity. But I am still hopeful that the best will win out, finally.

To all my US friends, I wish you the best on this most painful anniversary. I think you will, finally, make the right choices and embrace the best of yourselves.

It's time, long past time, to put aside the ridiculous enmity between the "West" and the "Muslim world." We are all brothers and sisters, after all. We all want the same for our children.

My heartfelt best wishes to all. Never again! It's up to each one of us.

Pre-internet memes: "I am sorry for writing a long letter"

2011-09-07T12:26:00.000-05:00

Who said “I am sorry for writing such a long letter. I did not have time for a short one”?

I’ve read it attributed to Mark Twain, Samuel Pepys, Oscar Wilde and now, Goethe. Did they all say it? If so, who said it first? And when did it become a pre-Internet meme?

I agree with the idea, but it has become a cliché, all the more annoying for the fact that it is so misattributed.

I would love to hear who actually said this. Let me know if you know.

Campaign Challenge: 200 word flash fiction

2011-09-06T11:37:00.000-05:00

Here is my first entry for the Writers' Platform-Building Campaign. The challenge is to write a story or poem of 200 words, beginning with the words, "The door swung open."

I'm claiming extra points (are there points?) for having the story at exactly 200 words, excluding the title, and ending with "the door swung shut."

Here goes:

The Ruined Prison of Richard the Lion-Heart

The door swung open with a drawn-out squeal. Two little girls echoed with squeals as they scampered out. One squeal turned into a whine as Daddy picked up the smaller one and admonished her in gentle French as she squabbled to stay in the ruins.

The door squealed again as Max bent his 6-foot-four frame to enter the dungeon. “Hey, Richard the Lion-Heart,” I said as I got the camera ready. It beeped and whirred as Max shut the cage door and made a sad face.

I joined Max in the dungeon. Strange how it was so cool inside, high up on this mountain overlooking the Danube, which sparkled green, far below the ruined parapet of the Burgruine Durnstein.

“Is that where Richard was imprisoned?” Natasha asked as she stepped carefully down the path. King Richard I was imprisoned on his way back from the Crusades until he was rescued by a minstrel. Now, tourists picnicked and took pictures, and wondered about the people who built and lived in this place so long ago.

“Guess so,” Max answered. He stepped out to freedom, and we followed him down, more mindful of the shifting gravel underfoot as the door swung shut.

Why is open Wifi so scarce in Ottawa?

2011-09-02T16:33:00.000-05:00

Take a look at some of the lists of free, open wifi spotsavailable in Ottawa today. It's pathetic. Look at this site: published in 2007, itshows maybe seven places in Ottawa-Gatineau with free wifi. Today’s list fromthe ogWifi organization,which promotes free, open Wifi in Ottawa and Gatineau, lists 12 sites in thisurbanization of a million inhabitants. And the number has hardly grown in thepast two years—a period in which wifi technology and wifi access around the world has exploded.

The list does not include places that charge one way or anotherfor wireless Internet access, such as Bridgehead coffee shops, where you haveto buy something to get a password. (Even then, most of the time my iPad cannotfind the network.)

Let's compare that to other major cities. I found that Vienna, Austria and Lausanne, Switzerland, have free, open wifi access in large public areas such as squares and plazas. Granted, it may be slow, but it's well ahead of nothing at all.

I heard years ago about proposals to offer free wireless accessthroughout downtown areas of Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa. And there is freeaccess in a couple of areas, such as around Parliament Hill, reportedly.

But this is pathetic. Why not have free, open wifi access inmost public areas of the city, which would allow anyone with awireless-equipped computer to get onto the net?

Could it be because the alternative is 3G access through a cellphone account? Access which is much more expensive?

Could it be that there are few sponsors for wifi access, becauseCanada's two Internet access providers are also the two main mobile phone andland-line providers, namely Rogers and Bell?

Is this anti-competitive behaviour?

What do you think?

The third Writers' Platform-Building Campaign

2011-09-02T14:34:00.000-05:00

Now I’ve done it.

I agreed to join the Writers’ Platform-Building Campaign, a “crusade” organized by author and blogger Rachael Harrie. Her blog is Rach Writes, at http://rachaelharrie.blogspot.com//.

I was informed about the whole campaign by another blogger on a LinkedIn forum that I participate in sporadically. Actually, I do a lot of stuff sporadically, but that’s another story.

What appealed to me about the campaign is its purpose: helping writers build their Internet presence by sharing blog links and tweets. Sounds simple. But I found out about the campaign on the last day to join, August 31, so I jumped in and tried to sign up without thinking too much about it. After all, what’s the worst that could happen?

Well, I don’t know. I’ll give it a try. I’m going to put some links in this blog to some of the other blogs that I found through the campaign and that appeal to me, somehow. And I’ll tweet about them, too. Since you can see all my tweets in the column on the right, you’ll see them, too.

I’m just a little nervous about how much work this will all entail. It sounds simple, just a few clicks here and there; but as I’ve found, all this social mediaing takes a lot of time.

I’ll tell you what it was like at the end of the month.

I’ve started my next novel

2011-08-29T09:57:00.000-05:00

It’s completely different from the one that is now in the publishing process, The Bones of the Earth. I plan to launch that one in late September.

Completing and getting close to publication of my first novel energized me. In July, I participated in the JulNoWriMo, the novel-writing month for the summer (based on the better-known NaNoMo, the National Novel Writing Month, which is every November). I learned that I really could write a complete, novel-length work of prose in 30 days.

The other thing that I learned was for that to work, I really had to have an outline—a plan for how to get from the premise of the book to the conclusion in a way that made sense and with a plot that didn’t have huge holes, or that wandered into dead ends.

I guess you could say that I was inspired. By the end of July, I had actually completed two novels! So I had no more excuses to put off completing another one. I took out the work that had been making me feel the most guilty about not finishing for so many years: it’s a biography, in novel form, of my late father-in-law. The story focuses on his experience in the Red Army during the Second World War.

I had started to write is as an adventure-war story. The story itself is quite thrilling: a college student gets drafted into the Red Army, gets wounded at Kyiv, returns to the fighting, gets captured by the Germans, manages to escape with the 12 men in his command and get them across occupied Ukraine, enters the resistance against the Nazis and then against the resurgent Communists, gets re-drafted into the Red Army and fights as an enlisted man from Estonia to Berlin. I had written probably 40,000 words in the story before I stopped it when the subject of the book passed away. That was over seven years ago. It’s sat on my shelf since, and while I’ve looked at it and done some work on it since, mostly checking facts, it’s bothered me that I have not been able to finish it.

On my vacation in early August, I worked out the outline. I guess it was a boost in confidence that allowed me to change the focus and the style of the story. I wrote out the outline while staying at the Hotel de la Paix in Lausanne, Switzerland. Now, I can say that I began writing the novel in the same hotel that hosted James Joyce, Scott Fitzgerald and other internationally known writers.

Me, working out the framework of my next novel on the balcony of my suite at the Hotel de la Paix, Lausanne, Switzerland. In the background, beyond the crane, is Lac Léman (Lake Geneva).

My plan now is to write or re-write at least 2000 words a day and finish a draft by the middle of October. I know that’s realistic. I have a lot of the book already written, but I need to re-write it for a new tone and style I’ve decided on.

I’m going to post more on this blog about my progress or any snags I run into. I’ll also Tweet about my progress @ScottTheWriter. Hope to write to you again soon!

Tolerance is not that hard: resolving the Muslim-Western divide

2011-08-22T12:22:00.000-05:00

“Sharia: a law unto itself?” by Jonathan Wynne-Jones (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/8686504/Sharia-a-law-unto-itself.html) looks at the conflict that is causing so much anguish in the U.K., the West and around the world. It brings up a question most politicians, at least in the West, want to avoid: are these two worlds irreconcilable?

The article is about how Sharia Law has been allowed by the U.K. legal system for use in marriages and divorces and other “community” or “family” disputes, and how some in the U.K. are concerned that it is creating a parallel legal system that denies women’s rights and other human rights.

The article mentions posters that proclaimed some London neighbourhoods as “Sharia-controlled zones,” where gambling, alcohol and music were banned, and how some Britons complain that in their areas, they can no longer buy non-halal meat, and where swimwear ads are spray-painted.

While the article is even-handed, the response in the online comments is very negative and polarized. Many mention the origins of Sharia law and its links, or lack of them, to the Quran. They bring up the historical fairness and justice of Western/Christian societies, Muslim civilizations, mutual massacres in history and so on. It’s discouraging to read the knee-jerk vituperation on both sides of this argument.

I would like to move the discussion forward, starting with three assumptions:

1: there are profound differences between the Muslim and Western value systems, but there are profound commonalities, as well.

2: I don’t think I’m going out on a limb by saying that peaceful accord is what most of us want.

3: we can’t change the past. If you look, you can find all sorts of evil in history perpetrated in the name of just about every religion. We can, however, choose what to do now and what kind of future we will strive for.

As far as I understand it, the British, and most Western, value systems and legal systems prize equality of all, coupled with accommodation for multicultural traditions and values. This occasionally conflicts with the values seen in the Muslim societies, especially those governed by explicit Sharia law. As Wynne-Jones points out, these conflicts are apparent in divorce and inheritance laws, among others.

Still, migrants from other countries to the U.K. came because, presumably, they thought they would be better off in the U.K. (in this case) than in their home countries. And part of what makes the U.K. more attractive, I would argue, is the social value and legal system, which includes equality of all before the law (and in commercial dealings, employment, etc.) Some of the values that make the West so attractive to so many include equality, tolerance of differences and freedom of expression.

Immigrants will change the society they come to. That’s neither good nor bad (personally, I like all the new restaurants), it’s a fact. An immigrant citizen is as much as citizen as someone born in the country, be it the U.K., Switzerland, Canada or the U.S.

Which means that, while I do not like the face veil, I won’t object if a woman wants to wear one. I have the right to say that it’s harmful to women’s rights, that it’s useless and that it opens a person to some pretty vicious criticism. But if you want to do it, fine. (But not for I.D. , in court or to vote.)

And if you only eat one kind of meat, that’s your choice. And if you do not want to drink alcohol, by all means. But at the same time, no one should be preventing me from walking around without a face mask, or buying pork or alcohol or both together. (Yum!)

This is where, I think, many people in the West feel threatened by the influx of Muslim immigrants and their invoking of tolerance and anti-discrimination laws: they’re afraid of losing some of their choices. But the solution is not name-calling, dredging up ancient conflicts that really don't involve anyone today or repeating extremist ideas. Nor is it insisting that others adhere to our own ways of doing things. As I said, if you don't want to drink alcohol, that's your choice. But you should not stand in front of someone else choosing to do so, as long as he or she is not hurting or endangering anyone. We need to tear down borders, not put up higher ones.

I know, it sounds so trite. But it's really simple. We can get along.

So I am asking all who read those, and those who don’t as well (pass this on!) to move on from the knee-jerk reaction and reminders of past massacres. To both sides: tolerance is not that hard. Now, how can we bring equal rights to all? Do Muslims want equal rights for women? Let me know.

Skype on the iPad2

2011-08-20T12:00:00.000-05:00

I needed to make a couple of phone calls in Lausanne, Switzerland, and turned to Skype as the cheapest alternative.

While my Rogers (a big Canadian provider) cell phone could access the wireless system in Austria, it apparently is not compatible with the Swiss phone system. Or so, everyone who sells prepaid phone access told us. I'm not sure it was true, because both Rogers phones that we brought along showed they had a signal. However, I did not want to waste 10 francs to find out. (Have you seen how it's appreciated, lately? Almost 40 percent against the Canadian dollar in four months!)

So, when we needed to make a couple of phone calls, I downloaded Skype to my iPad2. Again, better preparation would have helped. Fortunately, Lausanne, Switzerland has several open WiFi spots in public squares. Unfortunately, the access is slow. It took nearly half an hour to download the Skype app.

Skype works well on the iPad2, except for one thing: the microphone doesn't seem to deliver enough volume. Also, I found that the Kensington case/Bluetooth keyboard covers the microphone. I cannot even see it. I had to take the iPad out of the case to make myself heard on the phone.

Skype's iPad app could be more intuitive. For one thing, the button for dialing a new number disappears just when you need it. I found I had to click on Contacts just to bring the dialing button back to the top of the screen.

As for a phone, the iPad2 is awkward. I guess you could hold it up to your head like an oversized iPhone, with the front camera near your mouth and the speaker well past your ear, but it would be better with ear buds.

The vagaries of free WiFi

2011-08-18T23:18:00.000-05:00

Using the basic iPad2 for mobile electronic Internet access leaves you dependent on the willingness of others to offer free, unprotected WiFi access. And you know how vulnerable you are when you travel and depend on others for anything.

In my case, as I travel through Austria and Switzerland, I am surprised both when WiFi is available as well as when it is not. I have come to expect it in hotels, and I do not understand why hotels that provide free WiFi access sometimes put password protection on it. If someone next door hitches a ride on your bandwidth, how does that really hurt you?

It’s annoyingly ironic when a hotel provides free Internet access to all paying guests, but through a wired port. They’re being quite generous when they even have an Ethernet cable ready to plug into your laptop—except that in my case, I don’t have a laptop. The iPad’s complete wireless advantage turns into a disadvantage in this case.

But then there are times when access is bafflingly impossible. For instance, yesterday I sat down in a Starbucks in Geneva (another surprise: a sign on the door celebrated the location’s 10^th anniversary!): partly because I needed an air-conditioned break; partly because I still like Starbuck’s American-style coffee, even though I was in the land of European-style coffee; and partly because I wanted to log onto the Internet.

Now, while Geneva’s Starbucks location offers free, open WiFi access like all other Starbucks, my iPad2 could not connect to the network. The Settings screen showed the Starbucks wireless connection, but I never got the Web page where I would agree to Starbucks’ terms and conditions.

I went over to another person who was surfing the net with his Toshiba laptop (the kind with the screen that rotates so that you can see it from any angle) to ask in my best French if there was something special to do to log in here. I was surprised (it was a day of surprises) to find that he spoke perfect, American-accented English. He assured me logging onto the network was the same as I had experienced in Canada. While he admired the iPad2, he could not find out the problem.

Later, I returned to my hotel room in Lausanne. The Hotel la Paix is wonderful, and they upgraded me to a suite. But while they offered free WiFi, I could only connect to it in parts of the lobby, and in one small part of the hotel suite! It did not work in the sitting area or on the bed; I had to move a chair to near the front door to connect.

Lesson learned? I’m not sure, except that connecting to a wireless transmission is still as much about the physical location as the best digital algorithms.

The reality of currency exchange, or just tourist inflation?

2011-08-18T12:55:00.000-05:00

I found the answer to my question in Luzerne a couple of days ago.

In my last post, I wondered how much more an Apple connecting adapter, which would connect my digital camera to my iPad2, would cost in Switzerland. It's $35 in Canada from the Apple Store.

I went into an Apple Authorized Reseller in the Luzerne's Altstadt (Old Town) a couple of days ago to check it out: 39 Swiss Francs---at current exchange rates, $48.45!

The clerk told me that Switzerland was historically very inexpensive when it came to Apple products. I told him the cost in Canada. He responded that the difference must be due to changes in the exchange rate. In his words, "The franc has really gone up."

For that to be true, the franc would have had to appreciate by nearly 40 percent between the time that the store received and priced the adapter and the day I walked in their door. And that may be the case: according to x-rates.com, which can graph the relative performance of almost any pair of currencies, the franc has gone from $CDN 1.02 in March to a high of $1.36 at the beginning of August. Not quite 40 percent, but close to it.

Still, perhaps it's time for the Swiss retailers to do some recalculation?

Another factoid for those traveling with the iPad2. Lesson: buy all your accessories before you go.

Look in the obvious places first

2011-08-13T01:40:00.000-05:00

Well, I am a little chagrined. I mentioned earlier that I did not know how to move digital photos from my digital camera to my iPad2. I even Tweeted a request.

Now, it turns out that Apple has an adapter to allow you to connect your digital camera to your iPad through USB. Well, whatever they call that wide port on the bottom that goes out to USB. And it's available right on the Apple Store website.

Still, there is the problem that Safari on the iPad does not see the photos in the Camera Roll. And I wonder where the photos will go from the camera—probably to the Photos app.

Next question: should I shop for the connector here in Switzerland? How much more will the shops in Lucerne or Lausanne (my next stops) charge than Apple does in Canada ($29)?

Stay tuned to the same Bat-channel!

Okay, I've figured out posting pics from the iPad2 onto Blogger

2011-08-12T18:27:00.000-05:00

Here I am at the top of the Austrian Alps—that is, almost as high as you can get by car on the Grossglockner Hauptalpenstrasse, or Grossglockner High Alpine Road.

I took this picture using the back-facing camera of my iPad2. Then I opened the Camera Roll in thte Camera app and used the setting to send it to my blogger account using the Mail-to-blogger option. Then I edited the resulting post.

If you do this, remember to select the Save s Draft option in the Blogger Settings tab.

Why do I have to do this? Because the Blogger system within Safari cannot see the stored pictures in the iPad2's "Camera Roll." In fact, Safari cannot see it, for some reason. Neither can Mail for the iPad. Major shortcoming there, Apple.

You can email photos taken with your iPad2, but you have to choose the Mail function within the Camera app (just tap the top of the picture when you view it).

I hope Apple fixes this in the next iteration of iOS.

Apps for iPad2 that suck

2011-08-10T17:54:00.001-05:00

There's an app for that. But the problem is, apps don't translate seamlessly between computer platforms.

Facebook, Tweetdeck, FlightDeck, even Google Places are just four apps now available for the iPad that do nothing to take advantage of the iPad format. All the developer did was make sure the iPhone App can play on an iPad. Probably, they did not do anything other than add the word "iPad2" to their product description.

As a result, the app on the 10-inch iPad screen looks terrible. All that makes it bigger is scaling up, so you see low-resolution images, icon and text. It's annoying, depressing, discouraging and disgusting. Come on, Facebook, are you trying to save money or something? Maybe you really are running scared!

And there is just no excuse for Google to have such a poor looking iPad app for Google Place.

It seemed for a litle while that the move to mobile was leading to a seamless world of information, where it did not matter which device you used—everything would work together.

Alas, it seems like we're back to the bad old days of "I'm a Mac, and you're an android." Or even earlier, when software developers created applications for one desktop (Windows) and then ported it to Mac and, just maybe, Linux as an afterthought.

Can we not move past this, so that people can buy the IT products they peter, and let maters like OS or Internet protocol go to the techies. Yes, that will mean more investment in R&D than before, but it will really improve the situation for all Internet users.

On hotels and Wi-Fi

2011-08-10T03:21:00.000-05:00

Free Wi-Fi access is becoming a staple of most hotels, it seems, especially modern chains. I have noticed this in North America, as WiFi is the standard Internet access and ports to plug in an Ethernet cable are becoming extinct.

This is a big improvement over just a few years ago, when you had to pay by the minute for Internet access. I think in some countries, like Greece, you still have to pay. "Internet access in Greece is very expensive" was a chorus I heard just four years ago, when I was there. Somehow, given the news out of Greece lately, I don't think that situation has changed much.

So, it is gratifying to find free WiFi access in hotels while I am here in Austria. Now, having just the WiFi version of the iPad2, I can't connect constantly like I could with a cellphone. But it is nice to have at least intermittent access. And I found a lot of WiFi spots throughout Vienna for instant, open access.

The big question, though, is why do some hotels still put password protection on their free access? Are they so cheap as to hoard bandwidth, giving it only if you're paying the room rate? For instance, the hotel I was at two nights ago, the Trumer Stube in Salzburg, has two separate WiFi networks for different parts of the tiny hotel, each with a different and difficult password. (Don't stay at the Trumer Stube--I do not recommend it. And don't try to drive in Salzburg, especially during the music festival. Park somewhere else, like in St. Wolfgang.) Yet, the Hotel Schloss Prielau, where I am sitting in the breakfast room now (beautiful, if a little weird) has free and open, unprotected access. Yes, you could walk in, sit down in the lounge and connect! I did last night! But please, don't take advantage of this knowledge. Everyone in Austria is so polite, proper and nice. Yes, nice.

Come on, hoteliers of the world-passwords are so inconvenient and so unnecessary! Open up the networks!

And cities: Let's get going on open Internet WiFi access throughout downtown areas!

Salzburg Music Festival

2011-08-09T02:13:00.000-05:00

We arrived in Salzburg yesterday afternoon, into the middle of the Salburg Music Festival. What a zoo! This is the most crowded city I have ever seen. Traffic was worse than Montreal, Rome, and Venice combined!

It's an odd crowd for a classical music and opera festival, mostly young parrents with toddlers, babies and youung children. The narrow streets of the Altstadt and the narrow platzes are jammed with strollers. Babies scream and complain in the Mozart museums and cathedrals.

We attended a chamber concert in the spectacular, if kitschy Mirabell Palace (Schloss Mirabell). It's a very grand, high baroque palace built by a Prince-Archbishop in the 1700s, and there are pink marble cherubs all over the place.

In fact, cherubs are a favourite motif throughout this part of Austria. Maybe that's why there are so many young families with babies here.

The Electronic Report
I'm getting closer to being able to add pictures from my iPad2 to this blog; I have found, I think, some apps from Google. The trouble is, when I go to the page, the location service Google or Apple or someone so thoughtfully provides, gives me the page in German. I don't see an "English" button on the page. I'll keep hunting, though.

The other option is a USB cable from my digital camera to the iPad2. Have one of those, anyone?

Using the iPad2 on location

2011-08-08T18:05:00.000-05:00

A real life-saver for depending on the iPad2 as the prime mobile device is this accessory keyboard I bought at the same time. It's from Kensington, and comes integrated into a leather cover for the iPad2. This way, it not only protect the tablet, it really provides a solution to typing.

The iPad2's on-screen keyboard leaves a lot to be desired. The main shortcoming is that the numbers and the symbols are on completely separate keyboards. The keyboard opens up online, and it's suited mostly to two-finger typing. To get to the numbers, you have to press the "123" key; the whole keyboard changes to numbers and symbols.

However, many of the symbols we use commonly, such as the # for Twitter, are on a third keyboard st. That really slows you down.

As far as using the iPad2, I'm getting used to the camera. It's unwieldy, to be sure, but the pix are quite good. And you can access them for posting within apps - for example, the TripAdvisor app. However, nothing in this Blogger site seems to have the ability to find my pix on the iPad2. I have not found a "Blogger" app, but if anyone out there knows of one, can you send me a link?

That's all for now. Talk at'cha again soon.

Travel writing with the iPad2

2011-08-05T17:26:00.000-05:00

This is my first blog post written solely on the iPad2. For the next two weeks, I will be traveling and using this as my sole tool for writing and communicating. Any pictures you see on the blog or elsewhere,posted by me, will also be taken using the iPad2.

I am writing this post while waiting for my bill at the Cafe museum in Vienna. I think I should start a different blog for travel, because Vienna is a terrific place to visit. There are free wifi locations all over the place, like at this cafe and the Schloss Schonbrunn. Why can't Ottawa do that?

I have used the iPad2 to take some pictures, and they look great--it's so nice to use a 10-inch (or whatever it is) screen as a viewfinder. So far, I think the pictures taken outside at least in natural light are quite good.

Unfortunately, this Blogger software does not seem able to find the folder on my iPad2 with the pictures, so I'll have to upload them later when I have more time.

So, there is one disadvantage, at least till I find out the workaround.

The other disadvantage is the built-in keyboard. You have to switch keyboards for numbers and the @ sign, so that slows you down. Also, the on-screen keyboard is made for two- or maybe three-finger typing, not what I like to do. And you also have to switch keyboards (by hitting a special key) twice to get to numbers, then to symbols for the # hashtag for twitter.

More on using the iPad2 as a camera tomorrow!

How to read the warnings of tragedies like Norway's

2011-07-25T14:34:00.000-05:00

A 1,500-page manifesto? Definitely a sign of madness.

Let’s face it, anyone who can write 1,500 pages on any subject has a compulsion of some sort. While freedom of expression is necessary to the overall freedom and democracy that we in the West enjoy, and that everyone deserves, I would like to suggest that anyone who writes more than a thousand pages about any single subject should receive a publicly funded psychological assessment.

Maybe there would be nothing to the work more dangerous than another Harry Potter sequel. But maybe that kind of screening would have found someone like Anders Behring Breivik before he started his killing spree.

I’m not advocating thought police or censorship, not by any measure. However, his “manifesto” was, according to the reports I’ve read, posted on the Internet. All that would be necessary in my suggested scenario would be something that flags the volume of content, not the actual content, itself. I have not read it, so I will not make a comment on the content.

But 1,500 pages is, as I said, obviously indicative of obsession. Flagging something that long and, in a caring, non-judgemental way, assessing the author, might solve problems before they become tragedies.

Next book review: Night Runner

2011-07-16T08:34:00.000-05:00

I thought I'd post this review of a book by an author who lives in my city. He's Max Turner, a high school teacher turned writer. I found his first book when I asked my local bookstore for local writers.

I have posted this review on Goodreads and Shelfari—I'm trying hard to get on top of this social media stuff, but there's so much!

Overall, I liked the book. It's a good, easy read, just right for younger readers. But I'll let the computer do my repeating myself for me:

Night Runner by Max Turner

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This story added something new to the vampire genre: a vampire who does not know he is one. Zack Thompson is a teenage boy who has been living in a mental ward for years and wakes only at night, and eats only special strawberry smoothies. He's happy and has a friend who works around his schedule to visit him.
Everything changes when a strange man crashes a motorcycle into the mental hospital's lobby, and soon after that, Zack's long-lost uncle arrives.
There are lots of plot twists, but no plot holes. The pacing is fast, the style clean and the characters believable——except perhaps for Uncle Max. He's a bit of a stock character.
I recommend this story for middle-school and high school readers.

View all my reviews

You should read this book review

2011-07-08T13:22:00.000-05:00

When it comes to social networking, I far prefer LinkedIn to Facebook. I find LinkedIn's interface far more intuitive—actually, whenever I try to use Facebook or add something to my own page, I feel like I'm lost and blindfolded, trying to find my way around by feel.

Amanda Rooker's review of a novel by Richard Sanders shows the intersection and mutual reinforcement of LinkedIn and the e-book phenomenon. She describes how she found out about the book not through Amazon or any book promotion vehicle, but through other links that she found interesting on LinkedIn.

On its own merits, Amanda's review is one of the best book reviews I have ever read. Without revealing much of the plot, I really got an understanding of her reaction to the story. I am also intrigued enough to actually buy the book.

And that says a lot about how the e-book publishing phenomenon is working. Read it over. And Amanda, if you're reading this, please add to your blog with more reviews!

Getting closer to publishing

2011-07-03T10:20:00.000-05:00

I've been receiving some excellent feedback from professional writers, editors and publishers who have looked at my manuscript, The Bones of the Earth. It's very encouraging.

I thought that my book was good, but it's heartening to hear that comment from others.

I have to admit, I did get discouraged earlier this year when I sent sample chapters to agents and publishers. I got turned down flat—not an uncommon experience for new authors. (Although I have been published many times over the last two decades, as a journalist, though, not an author of fiction.)

But it seemed that publishers and agents turned down the manuscript without even looking at it. Maybe I undersold it, or mis-sold it, or just failed in the description. And the book is not like others on the shelves today. Maybe the concept is just too difficult for most publishers today.

I actually had one publisher balk at the names of the characters—he just did not like the sound of them! The names are all historical, by the way. People had those names, and today, there are still people with names like "Hrech" and "Vorona."

All that to say, I'm getting closer to just biting the bullet and publishing this book as an independent writer. Watch this space for updates.

Does this drive you crazy?

2011-06-03T11:02:00.000-05:00

Adam Mansbach’s newest book has reached number four on Amazon’s bestseller list even before it’s published, according to a report in last weekend's newspaper.

How did he achieve this? With a lot of f-bombs. It’s a book for adults, but written satirically as a children’s book, called Go the Fuck to Sleep. The verse is accompanied by illustrations by Ricardo Cortés. It evokes earlier children’s “go to sleep” books like Goodnight Moon.

Mansbach is an author of several books, the latest entitled The End of the Jews. He has been acclaimed through his writing career, winning a number of awards, at least according to his own website.

What bothers me about this is that this is an established writer. He began as an editor of Elementary, a journal about hip-hop, and has parlayed that exposure into a book career. One of his novels, Angry Black White Boy, was performed as a play for three months in San Francisco. Mansbach was also 2009-2010 New Voices Professor of Fiction at Rutgers University.

In other words, he is established and successful. So what does he do? He uses “fuck” juxtaposed with children to sell a lot of books.

It’s cheap, cheaper than Cee Lo Green’s “Fuck You” song, which gets airplay as “Forget You” only because we all know that’s just the radio, prime-time version, and what he really means.

Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but I always think that cussing is a cheap shot, an easy way out. While there are definitely places for swearing, particularly in dialogue, a good writer shouldn’t have to resort to this to get his or her point across.

Mansbach has been published by Doubleday and Bloomsbury, as well as a lot of very small presses.

What drives me crazy about this is that, cheap and easy and low as it is, it works. Maybe I should add some cussing to my books. Or just write a book of nothing but cussing.

My first e-book review: Anabar's Run by Will Grainger

2011-05-31T12:44:00.000-05:00

Anabar’s Run by Will Grainger

This is my first review of an e-book. I was guided to it by the author, whom I met on LinkedIn. That points to the need for independent writers to promote their work.

I liked Anabar’s Run: it has a simple, very clear style well suited to younger readers, particularly boys. It evokes the style of grade-school readers: simple words, mostly short sentences and a straightforwardness that paints vivid pictures.

This rite-of-passage story is a metaphor for the journey every boy has to make into manhood. That in itself is refreshing—the majority of new commercial fiction seems to be aimed solely at preteen girls. Is the publishing industry now so sexist that it believes young men do not read?

What I liked:
Anabar’s Run opens like a fairy tale, with a description of Anabar’s home: a beautiful, fertile valley, isolated and therefore protected from the rest of the world. It’s simultaneously familiar and foreign—character names like Tom and Ralph make it seem homey, while the fantasy element is brought in with names like Pompor and the names of the two countries on whose border the valley is set: Semdela and Ricamerath. The time is pre-industrial: weapons are swords and knives, travel is done on horse.

Anabar is sixteen, on the brink of manhood, an orphan raised by his two neighbours, the pompous Pompor and the simple Tom. These two are deftly drawn. With little description, the author has created believable characters.

Anabar begins to explore beyond the boundaries of his world, but on his first foray outside the valley, he meets two dangerous men and barely escapes—again, something that every man can identify with. He returns home with a few injuries, but the outside world in the form of a mysterious scout named Omalof has noticed him. Omalof follows Anabar home and presents him an opportunity: become a Scout like him. However, it will require tough training and several tests.

The plot proceeds quickly with increasingly difficult challenges. Anabar meets more people and enters a town for the first him in his life. His reactions and inner dialogue are very clear and believable, and he shows himself to be an admirable person.

Drawbacks:
It’s really only half a story. The author explains that he wrote a long novel and decided to break it at a logical point into two shortish novels. This makes each book seem less daunting, but it feels like there should be more. Yes, it’s smart for a writer to make the reader want the sequel, but it feels a little like I’ve been short-changed.

The only other problem is that it needs a good, independent copy-edit and proofread. There are a number of typos, missing words and punctuation—nothing that interferes with reading the story, but it does show that every writer needs an editor. (On May 25, author Will Grainger posted on his blog that he is correcting the novel as much as he can.)

So, I’m giving this story 4 out of 5, and I’m going to read the sequel, Anabar Rises.

Keeping up with the Web

2011-05-26T12:56:00.002-05:00

I’ve been exploring the world of e-book publishing sites, and while there is a lot of interesting information, one question keeps coming to me: where do these people find the time to write?

There are people who participate regularly in online authors’ forums and discussions on networking sites like LinkedIn and Facebook. They also write blogs, and update their own Facebook, Twitter and Web pages. They also review books and interview the authors.

Apparently, if you want to be a successful writer, self-published or published by a major company, you need to do all this to promote awareness and sales of your work.

At the same time, they manage to write and publish their work. So, where do they find the time for all this?

An interesting word: Fuliginous

2011-05-19T16:38:00.002-05:00

Yesterday, a client used a word that I had never seen before—and that does not happen often: “fuliginous.”

She was using the word to describe a successful conference, as in “a raging success.”

To be fair, English was not the author’s first language, although she speaks fluently. And it was a challenging assignment: she was trying to write a wrap-up press release for an even that hasn’t happened, yet. As a Scouting leader, I cannot fault her for trying to be prepared.

In case your dictionary is beyond your fingertips right now, the Canadian Oxford defines “fuliginous” as “sooty, dusky,” derived from the Latin word for soot, “fuligo.”

How did the client get from “raging” to “sooty”? It turns out she was using an online translation tool. She wanted to describe something as “a raging success,” and the software gave her “fuliginous.”

There’s really no automating the editor, is there?

Royal, shmoyal—there are other things going on

2011-04-29T11:24:00.000-05:00

It's not a new thing. But for crying out loud, does EVERY media outlet in the world have to let itself be dominated by the Royal Wedding?

Record-breaking storms across North America, elections around the world, the Arab Spring, Apple tracking its users, Apple actually not providing tracking information to third parties, the erosion of Canadian democracy and the way we consumers continue to be ripped off by oil companies. These are just a few of the stories that are more important than two obscenely rich young people getting married.

Sure, they're beautiful. And it's nice when young people in love get married. Hooray.

But enough on the royal wedding. Royalty is an evil that has long outlived its usefulness.

Kudos to Gian Gomeshi for trying to ban royal wedding information from today's Q.

And for the republican who let the Royal Wedding change his political ideology—wake up, man! It's two young people getting married! It happens every single day! It does not change the world, nor make anyone's life better, except for the privileged contractors who supplied the event.

Let me know what you think.

On negativity

2011-04-26T07:59:00.000-05:00

The Liberal Party’s message in this Canadian federal election has become very negative. It started last week, with their aborted, misquoted attack against Stephen Harper. Now, they’re attacking the NDP.

There are many things wrong with this approach. First, it shows desperation. The Liberals began with one message, and then with two weeks left in the campaign, changed it. A week later, they changed focus again. They know they’re losing and are trying everything to change their fortunes.

Second, it shows they don’t know what their strategy should be. They began fighting against the former government, the leader in the polls and therefore the biggest target. Now, they’re targeting the party that was in third place going into the campaign. So, what is the Liberals’ goal: to become the government or the official opposition?

Finally, I don’t like negative messages in any competitive situation. Don’t tell me what’s wrong with the other guy. Tell me what’s good about you. The Conservatives have had a completely negative campaign, which really has put me off. The overall impression I get from Harper’s ads and speeches is that all will be right with the universe, or at least Canada, if Stephen Harper is Prime Minister, and therefore we voters will be in the wrong if we do not ensure his party wins a majority of seats in the House of Commons. I react against the admonishing tone.

Likewise, the Liberals’ attack ads are not convincing me. I can think of many messages they could have said that I do not hear from them.

Yes, the other parties and leaders should point out their opponents’ shortcomings and misspeakings. But the loudest, strongest message should be what they themselves are good at and what their plans are.

I know that negative ads have worked in the past, but I have never liked them. US elections are full of negative ads, and to me, they’re a weakness of their political culture. Now, I see them used increasingly in Canada. It’s a development I do not like.

What do you think?

Independent writers deserve respect

2011-04-25T09:46:00.000-05:00

I've been having a lot of conversations in person and online lately about independent writers—also known as "self-publishers." The field is growing quickly. Last year, Amazon sold more e-books than paper books. And Joe Konrath and Barry Eisler, two established writers, reportedly both turned down six-figure advances from conventional publishers in favour of self-publishing.

But I keep reading the ideas that the editors at the major "New York publishers"—the Big Six publishing conglomerates—provide a level of professional editing and quality control that is missing in self-published books.

I admit, there are a lot of poor self-published books out there. But there are a lot of poor books from the major publishers, too. And as for books that really need editing, just look at Stieg Larsson's Millenium Trilogy.

The Big Six have no monopoly on the English language, or on the ability to edit.

Commercial publishing is getting increasingly risk-averse. And it's a business. Writing, however, is a craft and an art, as well as a commercial venture, and most writers do not write just to make money.

We need to start talking about independent writers, those who control the publishing function themselves, in the same we we do about independent filmmakers and independent musicians. "Indie" group Arcade Fire, after all, won a Grammy.

Which means that book reviewers need to stop excluding independent publishers from their in boxes and review those works.

No matter how much the conventional, established publishing industry resists, independent publishing is growing fast and strong. It has already changed the publishing industry and will continue to do so.

Spoken words reveal unspoken ideas

2011-04-20T16:43:00.000-05:00

“The other parties 'are saying that even if we receive a mandate from the people they will defeat us on our budget if they can. They will get together and form another alternative, of some other kind of government'” said Stephen Harper, according to the Globe and Mail.

Let's deconstruct this statement. First, the “mandate from the people.” Harper implies here that an election that results in more seats for the Conservatives than for any other party equals a mandate.

This is not so in the Canadian parliamentary system. Calling a plurality vote a “mandate” is invoking the kind of electoral system in the U.S., or other countries (the U.S. Electoral college system is actually more complex than that).
In the Canadian system, we vote for local members of parliament. The government is formed at the confidence of Parliament.

In so many of his statements, Harper implies that he has some kind of right to govern the country, and any method anyone else uses to form a different government is somehow illegitimate.

Canadians will not fall for this argument. We decide who has the right to form a government. And let's remember, we decide. The government works for us, not the other way around.

Leaking words

2011-04-12T09:33:00.000-05:00

Sheila Fraser, Canada's Auditor General, found some things worth questioning about the federal government's (the Harper Government, as it likes to call itself) spending on the G-20 and G-8 conferences, and it is reasonable to conclude (I'm not the only one) that Tony Clement and his cronies had a lot of say in what was spent around Muskoka last year—and it did not always meet government criteria for appropriate spending. Millions to refurbish a very high-end resort? And the guy who decides whether, and how much federal government money goes to that project is the resort owner, and a long-time Conservative?

There is a lot to complain about.

The Conservatives find a quote by the AG that praises the government's spending—but they had to did down through 10 years or more of quotes to find one positive statement, and it turns out that it was about a previous government.

Then Stockwell Day tries to say it was an error.

Written words, recorded words, spoken words. We know when they're believable, and when they're not.

What’s getting printed?

2011-04-08T11:52:00.000-05:00

I’ve been looking into the growing e-book phenomenon. And obviously, I’m not the first, so I’ve got some catching up to do.

There have been several reports published on paper and all over the Web about how e-books are outselling print books, staring last year. In July 2010, Wired reported that Amazon’s e-books outsold print books. And the margin is accelerating.

And there are many more sources than Amazon for an e-book: Chapters/Indigo in Canada sells books for the Kobo e-reader that it sells; Barnes & Noble sells its new Nook, now available with some colour, and sells e-books formatted for it.

And don’t forget that the Borders bookstore chain has filed for bankruptcy and closed a lot of stores.

Print will never die completely. TV didn’t wipe out radio, right? US print shipments are up 4.4 percent in February 2011 compared to February 2010. Granted, 2010 was a tough year in printing, so this is regaining ground that was lost, but there is still a lot of printing going on. KBA, the second-largest manufacturer of printing presses in the world, reports a “printing boom” in the developing markets of China, Brazil, India and Turkey, and strong growth in the Middle East and Latin America.

So, what’s getting printed? I think it’s probably flyers. The volume on my doorstep keeps getting bigger.

And then there are books by celebrities—anyone who’s done anything flamboyantly egregious gets a book out there pretty quickly.

Whatever’s getting printed, it ain’t literature.