Be careful what you wish for

I blew off writing Trials today--this is typical for me, I always take a little time to actually start. Instead I finished reading The Passive Voice archives (I told you I was addicted--now, the withdrawal will have to begin).

There were two good entries about blowing off work, so you know, at least it's all thematically connected. The first provides an actual scientific-sounding name for why I have a blog: The Hawthorne Effect. Basically it's the strategy of forcing yourself to tell people that you're slacking off, in the theory that the humiliation will make you slack off less.

Proof that the Hawthorne Effect doesn't always work? A different post about the Internet controversy over George R.R. Martin's work habits. God help me, I find the whole thing hilarious. My feeling about ANY Internet controversy is that 99% of the people flaming away have absolutely no skin in the game and are just doing it for the fun of it. (For the record, I haven't read Martin, either. These kinds of sprawling fantasy epics are so popular that a lot of writers just churn out 600-page books that are 550 pages of boring filler, followed by a 50-page cliffhanger designed to make you buy the next book, so I'm very skeptical of them.)

But to take that impulse to just force a writer to write seriously for a moment: There's actually a real problem with making writers work on a series or book that they don't want to do anymore. And that happens all the time--when a series gets popular, publishers want only books in that series. Had another idea that excites you? Too damned bad! The only thing you can get paid to do is to crank out volume 230 in the Will This DIE Already? series.

That's the reason most series degenerate over time. To use a television example: I'm a huge Joss Whedon fan, and I think season 7 of Buffy should not have happened, because he was clearly done with it before it ended. As it was airing, I was at a party with a bunch of other Buffy fans, and they were all complaining about how awful that season was turning out to be. Yet, they all categorically refused to watch Whedon's new-and-very-good show Firefly, because it was going to be Buffy or it was going to be nothing, and damn that Whedon fellow to hell if he was trying to do something that actually interested him! I was amazed, because they seemed to have no comprehension that there was a person behind all this, and that person might get a little tired of writing the same story for seven freaking years.

But the worst is definitely what happened to P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster books. The early books are great: Bertie Wooster is a young, upper-class British man who, although not unintelligent, always manages to get himself "in the soup" thanks to a certain obtuseness. (For example, he believes that if a woman erroneously believes that you have proposed marriage to her, the gentlemanly thing to do is to marry her, even if you really, really don't want to. Otherwise you might hurt her feelings.) Jeeves saves the day eventually, but it's not easy for him.

The later books are horrible--Wodehouse had clearly come to hate his characters (and I'm sure, his readers) with a fiery passion. Bertie is now simply a moron--barely intelligent enough to breathe. Jeeves disappears for most of the book, only to appear at the end having magically resolved every last little problem. The contempt and resentment are palpable.

I really wish the creative process worked differently. I'm not proud of taking forever to edit Trust: I have a strong work ethic, and it annoys the piss out of me when I can't get going on something. But it's not like making widgets, or even like cranking out X many earnings briefs per day. You just have to respect it, because the results when you don't are never pretty.

Unpleasant characters

(I think I'll start in on Trials tomorrow--I have a couple of left-over production tasks on Trang, but I'm really getting bored with that sort of thing, so it's time to mix it up. In the meantime, I'm going to ramble on about writing and literature!)

I've read books that I've hated, but the character I felt the most violently opposed to, the character I (in all seriousness) wanted to see run over and killed by a garbage truck? That character was Rabbit, from John Updike's Rabbit, Run--the last Updike book I will ever read.

Why did I hate--and I hated this character with a passion--Rabbit so much? Well, part of it was that the book is set in the late 1950s, which was back when it really was a Man's World. Rabbit, being male, has certain prerogatives. For example, he dumps his preganant wife and takes up with a girlfriend. And when he tires of the girlfriend, it's an easy matter for him to get back with his wife, who is expected to be all sweetness and light about everything. Why? Because getting divorced--even when it's not her fault--is going to hurt her far worse than it hurts him, so she'd better toe the line and give him whatever he wants if she knows what's good for her. He knocks up his girlfriend because he refuses to wear a condom--of course she has to go along with that, because the only prospect of respectability she has is to get him to marry her.

Does he feel guilty about occupying such a position of privilege? My stars, why would he? It's a Man's World! Why should he care about what happens to all those silly little gashes around him? It gets worse--there's a silly little gash, his baby daughter, who DIES because Rabbit is such a jackass. How does he feel about that? Guilty? Devastated? Oh, hell no--she's just a girl! Who gives a fuck about some baby gash? He feels...wait for it...sorry for himself. Boo-hoo. Poor Rabbit.

And I cannot emphasize this enough, but there is nothing in the book to suggest that the reader should feel anything but sorry for Rabbit. Poor, poor Rabbit, ruining the lives and KILLING the women around him. I think that, instead of writing more Rabbit novels, Updike should have written the heart-wrenching tale of a poor, poor slave owner whose slaves are always so difficult and give him so much trouble. It's awful, the poor guy sprains his shoulder beating them to death--don't you feel sorry for him? Or maybe a serial killer who kills children--and people act like they can judge him, and the kids are so uncooperative about it all, and life is really difficult for him. Your heart bleeds.

OK, deep breath. (God, I hated that book!) Now, some years later, I read Michael Chabon's The Wonder Boys. The protagonist of that novel is not so different from Rabbit--an annoying and overprivileged male Baby Boomer with a wife who has left him (for good reason) but who might come back, and a pregnant girlfriend, plus a juicy co-ed.

But--and this makes all the difference in the world--the main character knows he's a dick. I cannot tell you what a difference that makes. It's not like he's devoid of self-pity, or that he's above taking advantage of his position (oh my God, yes on both counts). He is, however, vaguely aware of other people--he knows that they exist, that they have rights, and that his actions may have an effect on them that is maybe not so positive. It's a tiny bit of self-awareness and self-criticism, but it's just enough for the reader to feel some sort of sympathy toward this guy.

Letting characters basically take the fall for their personalities is key, I think. No one is flawless--everyone has their limitations, even if they're not necessarily horrible people. If you let them own that--let them know that they always do X in a situation when they should probably do Y--and allow them to feel frustrated or disappointed with themselves, that's something that anyone who doesn't suffer from narcissistic personality disorder can relate to.

It also saves you from scapegoating, which is simply not that interesting to read. To trot out another famously misogynistic writer, Kingsley Amis has a terrible, terrible attitude toward women--they're all crazy and evil, except for the one designated Madonna. And yet, Lucky Jim is enjoyed by many people (including myself) who think the rest of his books are not worth the time (not so much because they are offensive as that they are very, very predictable). That's because the central problem for Jim is not that all women (except the designated Madonna) are horrible people, the problem is that he will not stand up to the horrible people in his life. The problem is within. And that's something I think anyone with a little life experience can relate to--there's no way to completely avoid bad people or bad things, the only thing you can control is your response to them.

Bad! Scary! Bad!

I've mentioned my tragic addiction to The Passive Voice blog, and my discovery of The Business Rusch. Passive Guy is a lawyer, and Kris Rusch used to be a reporter, and between the two of them they have complied the most hair-raising accounts of what you find in agency and publishing contracts nowadays! It's bad stuff--and the most disturbing thing is that these aren't the dirtbag "agents" or vanity presses, which you can assume are out to rip you off. It's the respectable people doing it nowadays. 

Seriously, read these guys if you are thinking of signing with an agency or a publisher. With Rusch, I would start here at the bottom of the page and work my way up to the more-recent posts. With The Passive Voice, look at the "contracts" section (he's a bit of a tougher read because, you know, lawyer, but soldier on).

They made me pull out and read over my old agency agreement. Yes, I fired them, but with some of these contracts, that doesn't matter. I don't see anything too frightening there--I did read before I signed it, but events have proven that I was too trusting back then, so no harm in double-checking.

I had read that the agent I fired was doing things that I thought were a little sleazy, but I kind of chalked it up to the fact that he clearly was the sort to cruise on reputation, so what would you expect? But apparently that's just par for the course nowadays--the distinction between reputable and disreputable is becoming very thin. It makes me worried for the people I know who are seeking agency representation and hoping to get a contract with a commercial publisher....

What does professional even mean nowadays?

When someone talks about a persion doing a professional job, typically they mean that 1. the person is experienced, and 2. the person is familiar with and works according to the standards and practices in the industry.

Of course, all "professional" really means is, the person got paid.

How are the professionals doing with e-book formatting? Well, according to this (note PDF, non-PDF excerpt here), the answer is pretty badly! The gory details:

In recent days, Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs was removed from the iBookstore and replaced with a new version because of formatting errors. One iBookstore reviewer wrote: “I want my money back. The formatting errors in the iBooks version are appalling. At first, a caption is missing or just a word, but it soon becomes illegible. The publisher should be ashamed.”

Similarly, the Amazon Kindle release of Neal Stephenson’s eBook Reamde recently made headlines because line breaks, missing passages, and hyphens preceding words such as “people” and “couple” were scattered throughout the eBook. One Amazon reviewer wrote: “…the reading experience is fatally tainted,” and demanded a full refund of the $16.99 price.

 

Think about that the next time someone tells you it's worth it to pay them $3,000 to format an e-book, because they are going to take good care of you--you can't even trust the large publishing houses (charging $17 a copy!) to do a decent job.

No matter if you hire someone (and you can do that for much, much less than three grand) or do it yourself, you need to read over the e-book before you publish it. And you can do that pretty easily even if you don't own an e-reader, just download Mobipocket reader to your computer to read a Kindle file, or Adobe Digital Editions to read a Nook file.

I know I've made this analogy before, but it is really just like dealing with a car mechanic or a home contractor: If you have no idea what the person is doing and no intention of checking the work, you will have no way of judging whether the fee charged is fair or if the work was done well. In other words, you will get screwed.

Book lengths

I'm doing a little housekeeping today--getting rid of inches and feet and the like. I ran a word count on Trust--it's about as long as Trang, a little under 110,000 words.

It's funny because with all the reading I've been doing lately, I've noticed that an awful lot of these books come in at, oh, about 30,000 words. Science fiction tends to clock in with six-figure word counts anyway, so I don't worry about mine (I have no idea how you'd keep a sci-fi book to 30,000 words, unless you were writing something like a Star Trek or Star Wars novel where you don't have to bother with all that pesky world-building).

Nonetheless, on a purely practical and commercial level, there's good reason for you to keep your books short, even if I don't: They take a lot less time to write, so you can crank out a lot of titles.

The problem with longer works is that they take an exponentially longer amount of time to write. I used to be a business reporter, so I will give you an example of a short literary form that I am very well acquainted with: The earnings brief.

These clock in at less than 100 words and go something like this:

GinormoMegaCorp reported sharply lower profits on increased revenues yesterday. Profits for the last quarter, ending October 31, were $5 gazillion, down from $6 gazillion the same quarter the previous year. Revenues, in contrast, were $85 bazillion, up from $70 bazillion in the quarter ending October 31, 2010. Company executives attributed the lower earnings to additional expenses stemming from the merger of Ginormo Corp. and Mega Corp. two years before. Shares in GinormoMegaCorp closed at $15.65 on the New York Stock exchange yesterday, a drop of 4 percent.

 

So, that's 88 words, and it took me four minutes to write. If I was writing an 880-word imaginary feature on GinormoMegaCorp (which is a longish feature, a little more than 20 inches of newsprint), it would take me considerably longer than 40 minutes to write, even if I were to make it all up.

That's because a feature ten times longer than an earning brief is far more complex. With the brief, I can just plug the numbers in and add a one- or two-sentence explanation of why a company is making more or less money. A feature requires an actual story line--I'd need to figure out what I'm going to say about the troubled merger between Ginormo and Mega. Structurally, I'd need a good lede, a paragraph summing up whether people think GinormoMegaCorp is going to succeed or fail, another paragraph noting that it might do the opposite, and then lots and lots of detail (in this case, a lot about what the hopes for the merger were and why it's not happening yet), ending with a nice concluding paragraph that sums up everything beautifully and will be cut for space.

It's the same thing going from a 30,000-word novel to a 100,000-word novel--in all likelihood, it is going to take more than three times as long to produce the latter. You've simply got more to keep track of (and if you feel like you don't, you seriously need to take a hatchet to that mother).

Seasonal buying patterns for e-books?

I'm writing blog posts instead of writing or polishing off some production chores--bad I know. But I'm taking a break. Everyone gets all excited about flow, but I'm realizing that I missed some routine-yet-important tasks while I was caught up editing, so I need to reconnect with real life for a little bit.

Anyway, something happened last year that people are assuming is going to happen again this year (remember, self-publishing has been viable for all of two years, so there's not a lot of data to extrapolate from)--there was a big surge in e-book sales after Christmas. The assumption is that many people received e-readers for Christmas and then went looking for e-books to fill them.

Reading through the archives of The Passive Voice (which I am now shamelessly addicted to), I found a link to this article charting self-published best-sellers on Amazon for the first half of 2011, which finds that self-pubbed books did really well in February and considerably less well by June. Now, Selena Kitt makes the case over on Joe Konrath's blog that 99-cent e-books aren't going to sell more than higher-priced (by which she means $2.99-$4.99, not $12.99) e-books, because Kindle readers have tried the really cheap books and decided that most of them weren't very good.

Trying to see a pattern here, it seems that the people who receive e-readers go through an initial period of scooping up everything that's really cheap, and then after a little while, become more selective, and start looking only at the pricier titles. Soooo...how should you play that? Put the book on sale in, say, February, and then crank the price back up a month later?

(My own experience is that dropping the price to 99 cents in April didn't do squat for sales, but of course I'm being a prima donna and not really marketing, so you can safely ignore me.)

The half of a balance sheet that you can control

This article appeared in the Wall Street Journal yesterday noting that, yes, different self-published authors have wildly different levels of sales. (This will shock you, but apparently it helps to already have a fan base.)

I'll stop mocking Captain Obvious and will note that I agree that, if you are unknown, your sales are completely unpredictable (this is why agents and traditional publishers generally don't like new writers). You might not sell any books, you might sell a ton, you might sell almost nothing for months or years and then suddenly sell a bunch. Who knows? The world is a crazy place.

That makes life difficult if you hope to turn a profit: You can't control your revenues. This is true for basically all entrepreneurs--you might have a hit, or you might have a flop. Marketing can help, but there are no guarantees that you will be making X amount of dollars.

But there's something you can control: Your expenses. The less money you spend, the less revenue you have to bring in to turn a profit. If you spend an excessive amount, then you've backed yourself into a corner where you absolutely must generate huge revenues--which is bad, because you can't control revenues.

In the article, there is a woman featured who paid $3,000 to a so-called digital publisher. As far as I can tell, that money went to 1. format the e-book and 2. distribute it on Amazon, Smashwords, and Barnes & Noble. She seems to have done all her own marketing, so they're not doing that.

I'm going to take a deep breath here. I'm going to stay calm. And then I will simply point you to the post where I outlined my book expenses. What number appears under "Spent on creating e-books"? Oh, yes, a zero.

I am the first to admit that formatting e-books is kind of a pain. But seriously, it was two days of work. Do you get $3,000 for two days of work? Would you pay someone $3,000 for two days of work? It's not like they formatted her e-book, put it up, and gave her a pony--she paid $3,000 for what I'm going to guess was more like two hours of work, because these guys presumably weren't doing it for the first time.

I understand that some people are afraid of technology, but there is a lot of help out there, and much of it is free. At the very least please, please, please try to get an idea of what is involved in doing it yourself before you cough up some huge wad of cash. You cannot control revenues: You may never see that money back. You can control costs: If you don't spend it, you'll be that much closer to turning a profit.

No-no NaNoWriMo

Yes, November is upon us again, and everyone's all "Whee! NaNoWriMo! Whee!" And they invite me to do it, and they expect me to do it. At this point NaNoWriMo has been pounded into people's heads so hard that even when I am working on a novel at some totally other time of year, folks will ask me if I am writing it for NaNoWriMo, or they will tell me that I surely must have written it for NaNoWriMo, because it's impossible to write novels except during NaNoWriMo, which is why no novels were ever written before it was invented.

With any luck, I will start writing Trials sometime this month, and I fully expect to be asked if I am doing it as part of NaNoWriMo at least a dozen times. So: NO. I do not participate in NaNoWriMo. I never thought it sounded like a good idea, and the more experience I have with the people who do it, the less I like it. If it has benefited you, that is wonderful, but to my mind something like NaNoWriMo generally leads not only to bad writing, but to bad attitudes about writing. Cranking out 2,000 words a day, day after day, is (to paraphrase Truman Capote) not writing; it's word processing. Honestly I think National Story Outlining Month would be a hell of a lot more useful.

I wrote about this earlier, and I'm going to quote myself, because I am just that egocentric: "Once you've written something, it's easy to get attached to it, especially if you made this huge push and didn't sleep or socialize for the entire month of November in order to meet your 50,000-word quota. No one wants to hear, 'Sorry, dude, back to the drawing board!' after that--it's like going on a huge diet and being very good and losing 80 pounds, and then having the doctor tell you that, no, you did it the wrong way, you need to gain back 70 pounds and then lose it again. But good job on those 10 pounds! The doctor really liked those, and he thinks you show great promise."

Giving Goodreads a spin

So, I've decided join Goodreads. I've sort of gone back and forth on it, mainly because that person who gave it a two-star review on Amazon gave it a one-star review on Goodreads, and it seemed really stupid to try to promote a book on a site that has one, one-star review of it. Even worse, there didn't seem to be an easy way to link the book to the New Podler review.

But The Passive Voice featured a good post about using Goodreads, and it mentioned that you can set it up so that your blog posts automatically post there as well. That does run into my discomfort with the whole idea of marketing yourself in order to market your writing, but on the other hand, it would be some kind of counter-propaganda to that one-star review. So I went back and looked, and hey! That awesome reviewer from Book Rooster was waaay ahead of me, and had already posted her five-star review! Thank you so much, AGAIN, awesome Book Rooster reviewer person!!!

And of course as I set up the Goodreads account and apply for their author program, I start going, hmmm...this site is beginning to appeal to me for its own sake. You know, given how much I read and how opinionated I am about it all, I probably should have joined Goodreads a long time ago....

Done! Done! Done!

Whoo-hoo! I improved the doggerel, and I am finished--with this editing pass anyway. Yay! Now it can go beta readers, and I can take a rest from it for a while.

Although I do want to work on the book description and jacket copy now, rather than waiting and doing a big push on production all at once. Doing the cover was a lot more enjoyable when I wasn't all burnt out on production, so I'm assuming the same will be true of doing the description and jacket copy.

I'm going to take a break (hopefully just a short one) and then get going on Trials!

Progress report

I input the edits through the end of the book and dealt with the notes (as suspected, most at this point were not helpful). Now it's just the poetry left--yeah, that's gonna be fun.

I actually didn't get a great amount of sleep last night (a combination of going to bed late and the cats being so excitable that one had to be sprayed with water), but I had tea instead of coffee this morning, and that seems to have made all the difference. I don't know what it is about caffeine and my ability to concentrate--maybe it makes me so irritable that I go "I'm tired--screw this!" instead of mellowly plugging along.

Oh, and I was going through Trang in order to check on something (continuity is important!), and I realized that, even though everyone is supposed to be on the metric system in that book (metric is the future! at least it is if you're Canadian), I still have Philippe make references to feet. I'll be fixing that when I get the proofreader's copy back.

Learning from things you don't like

I had a birthday recently, and a dear relative gave me a considerate gift: a memoir by a famous film critic. I was really excited about reading it, I read it, and I really didn't like it.

Whenever I don't like something, I find it useful to figure out precisely why I don't like it. In part, that's something I just do, but I also hope it helps me to not write something like that myself. (And nothing makes a criticism of my work resonate more to me than seeing someone else do the exact same thing.) Call it mindful reading--I think it's valuable to writers to not simply experience something, but to figure out why they experienced it as they did.

I think the first part of the problem with this book is that the film critic is famous. I can't really think of a truly interesting celebrity memior (with the exception of Candice Bergman's, but she wrote mostly about being the child of a celebrity--now those kinds of memoirs have some meat to them). This book even starts with the standard, "Oh, now, you--I don't think my life is worthy of a memoir! But if you insist...." No celebrity ever seems to harken to that little voice saying, This just isn't that interesting.

The lessons: 1. Listen to that little voice: If you're bored, the reader is really bored. 2. Try not to assume that the reader is automatically going to find your main character interesting just because they are the main character. 3. A striving character (even if they're just striving to be normal) is a lot more interesting than a character who has made it and now sits around, contentedly counting their money, reflecting on how swimmingly it all went and how totally excellent they are.

Another issue is that the book lacks any kind of meaningful organization or theme. There is no main story, and stories even get repeated because the book is basically a wad of stand-alone pieces. This guy writes short pieces well, but this is long, and he's hopeless. You see this a lot with writers: Most have one length that they write well. I would argue that Flannery O'Connor should have stuck with short stories, Carolyn Hax should stick with mini-essays, Neil Gaiman should stick with novels, and Gloria Naylor should do the same thing as Gaiman. In some cases, a writer might not write badly at another length, but they don't write as well as they do at their prime length. In other cases (such as this memoir), they're not just out of their length--they're out of their depth as well.

The lesson: Stay with the length you're good at. I should warn you that from a commercial perspective, this is terrible, terrible advice: No one will publish novellas, and one standard way to get a novel published is to first publish a bunch of short stories in periodicals. Contemporary self-publishing has led to novellas suddenly being much more commercially viable, so maybe it will allow more writers to do what they do best. Fingers crossed!

The final issue was a low signal-to-noise ratio: Not much interesting was going on with the story, so he threw in a bunch of crap to make it interesting! Never works--never ever. When he was a 20-something, he had sex! And then had it some more! And he drank a lot! (Wow, that's original.) He knew a lot of crazy people! People who smoked pot! He traveled places! And he met movie stars! Who generally weren't that interesting, and he mostly didn't know them very well! But they're in there!

The sad thing is, he's got the makings of an interesting story with the drinking--he eventually went into AA. But despite the fact that he mentions the drinking a lot, he doesn't develop it: He doesn't really examine why he drank, he doesn't get much into how the drinking affected his life, and he doesn't tell you why he decided to stop.

The lesson: Pick a story. Tell that story. Everything else goes in the trash.

Interwebs

Yesterday while the kid was napping I read through more of the Passive Voice, which eventually got me to the Business Rusch. That's an interesting read if only because she started it a year ago, and things have shifted even in that amount of time. But I felt heartened because it turns out that she and her husband, Dean Wesley Smith, don't really market either. I mean, granted, they also have frickin' 200 titles available, which I don't. (But I'm OK with that!)

But it made me happy to read that other indie authors do weird things, too. For example, this author has decided against doing her books in paper, not because (as some other decide) paper takes a long time to lay out and doesn't sell as much as cheaper e-books, but rather to save trees. My own particular quixotic endeavor is doing a large-print edition: No one has bought it (yet!), but I'm still going to do large-print editions because (cue pretentious music) ACCESSIBILITY! IS!! IMPORTANT!!! Also, it really doesn't take long to lay out.

Although I do feel a need to object when people prattle on about publishing houses having "fancy Manhattan offices." Oh, my. Clearly, they have never, ever been inside those offices. Yes, the rent is more expensive than other places, but people in Manhattan pay five times the rent you do to live in a tiny shithole with the tub in the kitchen--the fact that a space is expensive doesn't mean that it is fancy. Publishing houses don't locate in Manhattan to be fancy; they locate there because the industry and therefore the skilled workers are there.

Progress report

Not too much progress to report, I'm afraid--I started inputting edits, but I didn't get quite enough sleep last night and drank too much coffee to compensate. Plus the kid was sick yesterday, and when you spend all the day wiping their nose, you spend all the next day wiping yours. The result is a mix of fatigue and distractability that just kills my writing. It wouldn't matter if the edits were just along the lines of remove this comma, insert that semi-colon; unfortunately there are some parts where I want to really smooth it or rework it, and I'm just not able to do that right now.

And the cats keep trying to eat my papers. God.

Progress report

OK, I've written down edits for the whole book--huzzah! I have child-care tomorrow, and then I'll input these edits, and then I need to fix the poetry and ponder the random notes I made for myself. When I'm not getting much done, I tend to make lots of random notes about what should be in the book--sometimes they're really useful and resolve serious problems, but I think most of these fall into the category of extraneous things that would just get cut out again on the next read. We'll see...

Progress report

OK, I am back in the saddle! I input the edits through Chapter 23, so at this rate I should have it all done by [REDACTED BY THE DEPARTMENT OF JINX PREVENTION]. I'm feeling so [REDACTED] by how [REDACTED] things are going--I'm really looking forward to [REDACTED], [REDACTED], and finally getting to [REDACTED]!

Some of these edits were interesting, because I basically screwed up on voice. Ideally, each character has their own distinct voice, and I guess I'm getting there with Trust, because in one section I had taken dialog that originally belonged to three characters and compressed it into one. And reading it this time around, I was like, Huh? That doesn't sound like Character A, that sounds like A, B, and C! So I split it back out again (I didn't think the gain from compressing it was significant, or I would have tried to make it all sound like Character A). In another section, I just voiced it wrong--it's told from the point of view of one character, and it sounds like it's from someone else's. In that case, reassigning the material wouldn't work, so that section took a lot of tweaking.

Never underestimate the power of a jinx

Yeah, I shouldn't have said anything. Last night some large and extremely noisy rodent decided to try moving into the crawl space under the house. (Why? The only things down there are spiders and rat poison.) So I spent the night banging on the walls like some crazy person, and then lying awake in bed wondering if the creature was going to give us all fleas or was going to crawl up into the house through the toilet.

As a result, I got no sleep. Today I sprayed animal repellent and bought some shirts. Whoo-hoo.

Progress report

I marked up another four chapters--whoo! I'm up to Chapter 23. At the current rate, I should be done in a few days, unless I've just jinxed the whole thing by saying that.

Oh, and I really liked this article on how easy it is to mistake being busy for being productive. I fall prey to the "My to-do list is 90% done!" fallacy--I'll cross everything except one thing off my to-do list and feel very productive, until I realize that the one thing I didn't do was the one thing I really should have done. The author is also a big proponent of the value of downtime, and I definitely need work on accepting my own need for fallow periods. (Although in all honesty, I hope that when I die I am not primarily known for drinking whisky. I was pretty famous for that in college and don't need to go through it again.)

Progress report

I input the edits through Chapter 19. I fixed one of the poetry bits (literally woke up in the middle of the night with a fix--that's always nice), but I think the rest is going to take more time. And much gnashing of teeth.

Man, I've been so gosh-darned productive lately I think my back is going to go out. This is the problem with being Monomaniacal Focus Lady--everything else (like exercise or cleaning the house) winds up on the way back burner. To an extent, that's normal, but I feel that, especially when I am writing and editing, I take it to an extreme.

No froufrou

For some odd reason, I've been having a number of conversations about text froufrou lately. One of the posts that recently appeared on The Passive Voice is a screed about how ugly some self-published books are. The original post reads in part, "Like a lot of self-publishers, having control of lots of neat things like tinted boxes, type run-arounds, drop caps and automatic bullets apparently makes people think you need to use them all. On almost every page."

Of course he thinks you should hire a book designer--like him! Yeah, it's this guy. But (as I was discussing in a random conversation today) the problem with a lot of designers, even those who deal with text, is that they are art people and not text people, so they don't always read what they are laying out. Ever see an ad that reads something like, "THE finest automobile IN NORTH America, THE EL Carro tops quality SURVEYS" and wonder why in God's name those particular words have been emphasized? That's a hard-core art hedgehog at work. (No, editors aren't any better! The average editor heaps scorn on anyone who hasn't read Ezra Pound or is confused about the semicolon, yet can't balance their checkbook, understand why men are more likely to be color-blind than women, or set up a wireless Internet connection.)

I of course sagely advised using plain fonts for text in my guide to DIY publishing. And then I used a really obscure font in that guide that nobody else had on their computer. So close....

The issue of text froufrou also came up in that draft novel I was reading. In this case, it wasn't a design problem, it was an issue of emphasis. Like, there was a lot of emphasis in the dialog that didn't need to be there.

Am I guilty of this myself? Of course I am! When people speak, they emphasize certain words, and when you're trying hard to make your dialog sound realistic, I think it's very natural (and perhaps even beneficial in early drafts) to replicate that emphasis using italics.

But once the dialog is in place and the rhythms are locked down, you can do away with the indicators. In one of my final edits of Trang, I pulled out probably 90% of the italics--I realized that they were just getting in the way. That doesn't mean I don't still use them too much--in fact, I was able to recycle some advice I had received about Trust to the writer of the draft novel.

That advice was: Good dialog doesn't need italics.

Here's a little example to make my point:

Mrs. Bickerson: We're happy about it.

Mr. Bickerson: Some of us are happy about it.

You got that, right? You understand that Mr. Bickerson is not happy about it, and is annoyed with Mrs. Bickerson? I didn't need to write, "Some of us are happy about it" or "Some of us are happy about it" or even "-->SOME [Get it? Oh, snap! Someone's sleeping on the couch tonight!]<-- of us are happy about it." The contrast has done the trick.

Don't get me started on the "academics" who "decide" to "put" "quotation marks" "around" "every" "word," in order to "distance" "themselves" from the "concepts." (My favorite line from a book review? "This is 'annoying.'") I feel like if you can't embrace the concept, you shouldn't use the word--get yourself a thesaurus and find another one. I think the overuse of quotation marks is such a sign of lazy writing that I make a point of using the phrase "so-called" instead of putting quotes around a word that is being used ironically--I might resort to quotes eventually, but at least in an early draft I want to be aware of just how often I am using terminology that I can't stand behind. "Say what you mean and mean what you say" is a good rule of thumb on many levels.

And I had the above paragraph in parentheses, but man, those get over-used too.