I attended a lecture at Origins Game Fair a few years ago, and the most valuable advice I received was a suggestion to buy Characters and Viewpoint by Orson Scott Card (ISBN 0-89879-927-9, 173 pages). I read sections of it shortly after I bought it and found it helpful. I found it in my bookshelf the other day, and I intend to sit down and read the whole thing before continuing with Otheldo. After I finish I'll post a review.
Random scribblings and thoughts about writing, publishing and the entire letters to dollars process. Includes copious notes about politics and everyday life.
Wednesday, February 19, 2014
Tuesday, February 11, 2014
Writing a Bad Review
If you're self-published, you are quite literally one of millions. After you've completed the laborious process of getting your work listed on Amazon and fixing it so it doesn't look too awful bad on a kindle, you've got to somehow get yourself noticed by the multitudes who are going to read your work and want more. One major part of that particular flaming hoop is to get people to give your work a review.
Most of us have friends and family who say that they'll do that right away. Most don't, and there are some that you'd really rather not say anything at all. I'm somewhat borderline. I tend to be overly critical and when I give something a good review, it sounds a little like flattery no matter how sincere it is. I write reviews anyway, and I probably shouldn't.
So my current problem is that I've been asked to review someone's work and tell them how good it is, and it sucks. It's poorly written, formatting is non-existent, the plot is disjointed, the characterization has been skipped because it takes a lot of work and, well, if anyone's reading this they may understand what I'm talking about. It sucks. How do I say all that without taking a soldering iron to their fingertips, figuratively speaking?
I think the person in question is looking for a mutual admiration group. I know these sorts of groups exist, but I've never tried to find one and I wouldn't be interested in joining if I did. Maybe I should encourage the newly hatched author to seek out and join such a group, and eventually run for club president.
Most of us have friends and family who say that they'll do that right away. Most don't, and there are some that you'd really rather not say anything at all. I'm somewhat borderline. I tend to be overly critical and when I give something a good review, it sounds a little like flattery no matter how sincere it is. I write reviews anyway, and I probably shouldn't.
So my current problem is that I've been asked to review someone's work and tell them how good it is, and it sucks. It's poorly written, formatting is non-existent, the plot is disjointed, the characterization has been skipped because it takes a lot of work and, well, if anyone's reading this they may understand what I'm talking about. It sucks. How do I say all that without taking a soldering iron to their fingertips, figuratively speaking?
I think the person in question is looking for a mutual admiration group. I know these sorts of groups exist, but I've never tried to find one and I wouldn't be interested in joining if I did. Maybe I should encourage the newly hatched author to seek out and join such a group, and eventually run for club president.
Monday, February 10, 2014
Back to Life
I'm going to try and bring the blog back to life. My lack of postings is not due to writer's block; it's a combination of misplaced priorities and the unavoidable condition of personal obstructions getting in the way. For instance:
The snow. For all intents and purposes, we are snowed in. Our driveway is about 1000 feet of unpaved road, and even now that it's been plowed getting anything in or out requires either four wheel drive and a very savvy driver or Divine intervention.
In the middle of this I came down with stomach flu. I was so incredibly sick that I wanted someone to come and put me out of everyone's misery. The condition of the driveway prevented any and all good Samaritans from showing up.
Right after I survived, Mom came down with the same flu and, at the same time, came down with a bad case of sciatica. So Mom is in so much pain she can't walk, and because of the flu she can't take any pills. And again, because the ground is frozen to the consistency of iron, I can't shoot her because then what would I do about digging her a grave? You can argue that I could just wrap her up in a tarp and put her out in the barn until Spring, but we all know how that kind of thing goes. And this is Mom we're talking about here, not some pesky neighbor who doesn't really matter anyway.
Well, Mom survived the flue and recovered from sciatica. So that's good.
So I guess I'm back at it. I'm writing another anthology of short stories featuring Otheldo, and the ideas are coming faster than I can adequately get them on paper. There are worse things, I suppose. Like being outside in the snow and ice.
The snow. For all intents and purposes, we are snowed in. Our driveway is about 1000 feet of unpaved road, and even now that it's been plowed getting anything in or out requires either four wheel drive and a very savvy driver or Divine intervention.
In the middle of this I came down with stomach flu. I was so incredibly sick that I wanted someone to come and put me out of everyone's misery. The condition of the driveway prevented any and all good Samaritans from showing up.
Right after I survived, Mom came down with the same flu and, at the same time, came down with a bad case of sciatica. So Mom is in so much pain she can't walk, and because of the flu she can't take any pills. And again, because the ground is frozen to the consistency of iron, I can't shoot her because then what would I do about digging her a grave? You can argue that I could just wrap her up in a tarp and put her out in the barn until Spring, but we all know how that kind of thing goes. And this is Mom we're talking about here, not some pesky neighbor who doesn't really matter anyway.
Well, Mom survived the flue and recovered from sciatica. So that's good.
So I guess I'm back at it. I'm writing another anthology of short stories featuring Otheldo, and the ideas are coming faster than I can adequately get them on paper. There are worse things, I suppose. Like being outside in the snow and ice.
Saturday, November 23, 2013
The Interview
Not the interview for a new job, no. However, a fellow blogger and author gave me an in-depth interview which is published and can be read here: Books Are Magical by Kathryn Loving, AKA Momma Fargo. The questions are well thought out and Kathryn is very generous with her kind words of praise.
You can find Kathryn Loving's work on Amazon. Her first book, entitled The Boogie Man Is My Friend are true stories from her life as a police officer in Casper, Wyoming. Her second book, also on Amazon, is The Boogie Man Is My Friend: The Rookies and describes her experience training new officers.
Kathryn has a third book that's recently published. The Last Song of the Meadowlark is the story of a recently divorced, vulnerable woman who encounters a confidence man - a true sociopath with only one priority.
Kathryn Loving is an excellent writer and her work exemplifies why the Amazon Kindle self-publishing model is working so well.
You can find Kathryn Loving's work on Amazon. Her first book, entitled The Boogie Man Is My Friend are true stories from her life as a police officer in Casper, Wyoming. Her second book, also on Amazon, is The Boogie Man Is My Friend: The Rookies and describes her experience training new officers.
Kathryn has a third book that's recently published. The Last Song of the Meadowlark is the story of a recently divorced, vulnerable woman who encounters a confidence man - a true sociopath with only one priority.
Kathryn Loving is an excellent writer and her work exemplifies why the Amazon Kindle self-publishing model is working so well.
Thursday, November 21, 2013
What's in a Name?
Pretty much everything if you're the famous J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series. Rowling decided to publish The Cuckoo's Calling under a pseudonym just to see what would happen, which wasn't much. Inevitably the news moguls used their brilliant powers of deduction and discovered that Robert Galbraith was actually J.K. Well, aren't we all surprised.
Naturally when this harmless deception was revealed to the general public sales of The Cuckoo went through the roof, proving that brand recognition matters. A lot.
This isn't the first time something like this has happened. Prior to eBooks, every so often an undiscovered author would take a classic work of literature, a best seller or even a recent Pulitzer prize winner and change the names around, then submit it for publication. The work would get rejected, and not because it was plagiarism.
I'm afraid Mark Twain never would have made in today's market.
Naturally when this harmless deception was revealed to the general public sales of The Cuckoo went through the roof, proving that brand recognition matters. A lot.
This isn't the first time something like this has happened. Prior to eBooks, every so often an undiscovered author would take a classic work of literature, a best seller or even a recent Pulitzer prize winner and change the names around, then submit it for publication. The work would get rejected, and not because it was plagiarism.
I'm afraid Mark Twain never would have made in today's market.
Wednesday, November 20, 2013
Publishing and Intolerance
I'm old enough to remember what it's like to use a manual typewriter. For those of you who will never be forced to use one of these machines, let me tell you that it's no fun and you are not missing a thing. The electric typewriter is worlds better, but provides the user with a lot less exercise. That old Royal manual could really provide the typist with some serious cardiovascular exercise.
The main advantage to using a typewriter is that you didn't have to worry about a printer interface or printer problems. If your ribbon was worn out, you reluctantly dragged yourself down to the office supply store and bought another one. Likewise, copies were pretty simple. You used carbon paper; one piece of carbon paper between two pieces of typing paper. And, like the ink ribbon, when the carbon paper got too worn out to use, you dragged yourself down to the office supply store and bought another package.
All this worked real well until you got your wires crossed and hit the 'T' key instead of the 'Y' and ended up with Tou instead of You. This was the typographical error, or typo as it was called back then. When that happened you had to get out your typing eraser, which was a little wheel eraser that looked like a unicycle with a brush on it instead of a tiny seat. You then rotated the platen a couple clicks until you could get at the offending word, they you tried erasing the 'T' in Tou. This generally didn't work well, as the eraser would smear the ink across the paper and then you tried to erase the smears, which sort of worked and sort of didn't. Mostly it didn't. Then you'd give up and brush the eraser remains off the paper with the little brush so they didn't accumulate in the works of the typewriter and eventually jam everything up. Then you tried to realign the paper, which didn't work either because trying to erase the 'T' caused the paper to shift just enough to make the rest of the sentence look funny. If you were using carbon paper you had to go through each sheet and erase the 'T', being careful not to press on the carbon paper because if you did the carbon would leave strange black marks on the page under it and the whole business was shot. People could make a maximum of six copies, but that required typing extra hard on the manual typewriter.
Centering a line meant counting the total number of characters in the line, subtracting that number from the total number of characters on a single line of a page (80), dividing the result in half and tapping the space bar that number of times to get the line centered. An experienced typist could estimate this close enough for government work. Margins were also manually set. You opened the carriage and there were two manual stops inside that you set for the margins. Tabs were set the same way.
Enter the word processor.
Typographical errors were easy to correct, copies were effectively unlimited once you got the printer to interface with the PC, something that Apple has yet to completely come to grips with, and the spell checker fixed your spelling errors. All the typist had to know was English grammar, or in this case the author. Most do know enough to avoid the basic grammatical errors, and we now have a grammar checker that will detect the rest. So it should be pretty easy to produce a novel, right?
Enter the publisher.
A person who wants to center a line will use the space-bar until the line appears to be centered, just like they would on a manual typewriter. If each paragraph should have the first line indented, the author will use the tab key to do so. All sentences are separated by a double space, because that's the way it used to be done back in the bad old days. And, should the spelling and grammar checkers constantly interrupt the next Hemingway, these helpful tools can be turned off and forgotten. All of these things will result in this invaluable contribution to civilization being rejected by the publisher's slush pile editor, an Eastern school graduate who has a bachelor's in English and is developing a drinking problem from looking at the idiocy piled up in her IN box.
Want to get past the first tier? Learn to use your word processor. Leave the spell checker on and pay attention to your spelling. If you have poor grammar skills, take a course or two at the local university and hire a GradAss to tutor you between classes. You don't have to possess outstanding grammatical skills, but your skills have to be adequate.
Meantime, be thankful you aren't using an old Royal portable with a worn out ribbon and an 'e' key that's bent.
The main advantage to using a typewriter is that you didn't have to worry about a printer interface or printer problems. If your ribbon was worn out, you reluctantly dragged yourself down to the office supply store and bought another one. Likewise, copies were pretty simple. You used carbon paper; one piece of carbon paper between two pieces of typing paper. And, like the ink ribbon, when the carbon paper got too worn out to use, you dragged yourself down to the office supply store and bought another package.
All this worked real well until you got your wires crossed and hit the 'T' key instead of the 'Y' and ended up with Tou instead of You. This was the typographical error, or typo as it was called back then. When that happened you had to get out your typing eraser, which was a little wheel eraser that looked like a unicycle with a brush on it instead of a tiny seat. You then rotated the platen a couple clicks until you could get at the offending word, they you tried erasing the 'T' in Tou. This generally didn't work well, as the eraser would smear the ink across the paper and then you tried to erase the smears, which sort of worked and sort of didn't. Mostly it didn't. Then you'd give up and brush the eraser remains off the paper with the little brush so they didn't accumulate in the works of the typewriter and eventually jam everything up. Then you tried to realign the paper, which didn't work either because trying to erase the 'T' caused the paper to shift just enough to make the rest of the sentence look funny. If you were using carbon paper you had to go through each sheet and erase the 'T', being careful not to press on the carbon paper because if you did the carbon would leave strange black marks on the page under it and the whole business was shot. People could make a maximum of six copies, but that required typing extra hard on the manual typewriter.
Centering a line meant counting the total number of characters in the line, subtracting that number from the total number of characters on a single line of a page (80), dividing the result in half and tapping the space bar that number of times to get the line centered. An experienced typist could estimate this close enough for government work. Margins were also manually set. You opened the carriage and there were two manual stops inside that you set for the margins. Tabs were set the same way.
Enter the word processor.
Typographical errors were easy to correct, copies were effectively unlimited once you got the printer to interface with the PC, something that Apple has yet to completely come to grips with, and the spell checker fixed your spelling errors. All the typist had to know was English grammar, or in this case the author. Most do know enough to avoid the basic grammatical errors, and we now have a grammar checker that will detect the rest. So it should be pretty easy to produce a novel, right?
Enter the publisher.
A person who wants to center a line will use the space-bar until the line appears to be centered, just like they would on a manual typewriter. If each paragraph should have the first line indented, the author will use the tab key to do so. All sentences are separated by a double space, because that's the way it used to be done back in the bad old days. And, should the spelling and grammar checkers constantly interrupt the next Hemingway, these helpful tools can be turned off and forgotten. All of these things will result in this invaluable contribution to civilization being rejected by the publisher's slush pile editor, an Eastern school graduate who has a bachelor's in English and is developing a drinking problem from looking at the idiocy piled up in her IN box.
Want to get past the first tier? Learn to use your word processor. Leave the spell checker on and pay attention to your spelling. If you have poor grammar skills, take a course or two at the local university and hire a GradAss to tutor you between classes. You don't have to possess outstanding grammatical skills, but your skills have to be adequate.
Meantime, be thankful you aren't using an old Royal portable with a worn out ribbon and an 'e' key that's bent.
Friday, November 8, 2013
Hot Off the Electronic Press - Murder One
All I can say is that it gets easier the second time around. I'm talking about complying with the inconsistent, poorly written formatting regulations from various electronic publishing and distribution services. Actually, the author publishes, the service distributes.
Anyway, Murder One is finished, edited, formatted and electronically published. You can take a look at it by clicking these links:
Murder One on Amazon
Murder One on Smashwords
It's about a private investigator who is placidly doing his best not to make any waves while taking his turn on the treadmill, then everything blows up.
My other book, Magic for Hire on Amazon, is doing much better than I expected. People are buying it and a few like it so much they've written a review. My thanks to everyone who bought a copy - I really appreciate your business.
My special, heartfelt thanks to everyone who has written a review. Thank you very much for your time and effort.
Anyway, Murder One is finished, edited, formatted and electronically published. You can take a look at it by clicking these links:
Murder One on Amazon
Murder One on Smashwords
It's about a private investigator who is placidly doing his best not to make any waves while taking his turn on the treadmill, then everything blows up.
My other book, Magic for Hire on Amazon, is doing much better than I expected. People are buying it and a few like it so much they've written a review. My thanks to everyone who bought a copy - I really appreciate your business.
My special, heartfelt thanks to everyone who has written a review. Thank you very much for your time and effort.
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