The office is one of the cooler spots in our house, and visiting NESCBWI blogs doesn't require any sweat- inducing activity. So that's what I'm going to do.
Judy Mintz is working on a YA novel. What gives her gravitas as a litblogger, though, is her stint as one of the hosts of a cable show that involved interviewing authors. "Over the course of several years in the mid-90s I interviewed many of my
favorite authors (Joyce Carol Oates, Elmore Leonard and Donald Westlake
to name a few) and many brand new authors who would subsequently
disappear into obscurity (not, of course, due to anything I may have
said)." An interesting point about her blog, Everywhere I Go, is that she describes her posts as short essays. And you know how I like essays.
Hazel Mitchell is an illustrator and one of my Facebook friends. As with many of my FFs, I do not know how that happened. I just enjoy finding that I already "know" people I run into like this. Her blog, Along the Right Lines, covers information about her books and her work travel and also includes illustrations.
Hazel also posts at the group blog, Pixel Shavings.
Laurie Smith Murphy is another FF. This year she's only done a half dozen posts at her blog, Random Acts of Writing, possibly because, according to her June 2 post, she's been working on a revision.
I actually know Mitali Perkins (though, yeah, we're Facebook friends, too). Her blog, Mitali's Fire Escape, is well known in the Kidlitosphere. She's a serious blogger. Read her and learn, people!
Tracy Porosoff is a pre-published writer whose blog A Bissel at a Time deals with incorporating Judaism into family life.
Katherine Rawson blogs at The Parrot's Point of View in the voice of a parrot. (She is the author of If You Were A Parrot.)
Joyce Ray writes for the America's Notable Women Series. Recently she's been doing book reviews at her blog, Musings.
Dreams du Dog is another blog written from the point of view of an animal, this time a Walker Foxhound. The blog doesn't make clear what it's connection is to writing.
Okay. I believe I am well over two-thirds of the way through this project. The end is in sight!
Saturday, June 30, 2012
Friday, June 29, 2012
Long Tail Theory And Saving The Planet & Stuff
I'm actually a few days ahead on a writing project I'd assigned myself for the month of June, so I'm chipping away at the mess that is my desk. This included finishing typing up some notes from a marketing conference I attended several months ago. I was very intrigued to see that I had written "Long Tail Theory--Amazon may be selling more in backlist than up front." I have no idea if that bit about Amazon is true, but I looked up "Long Tail Theory." It actually applies to something I'm planning to do later this year with Saving the Planet & Stuff.
Long Tail refers to a theory first described eight years ago in an article by Chris Anderson, editor of Wired, and later in a book. He describes the theory, complete with a nice graphic that visually explains how it got its name. His graph shows the relationship between popularity and products--that a few products are extremely popular (profitable) and many more are less so.
This relates to publishing in a big way. A very few books are big sellers. They would fall in the "head" of Anderson's chart. These books are stocked in stores because they're likely to sell. However, far more books don't sell a lot. They're in the tail of the chart, and they don't get stocked because they don't generate enough sales to make it possible for booksellers to do so.
However, the tail is long. There are a lot of books in there. Taken together, they could generate a lot of sales, if buyers could buy them.Years ago, books in the long tail would have made up publishers' backlists, and buyers could, indeed, buy them. They could at least order them through booksellers. Backlists aren't very large anymore because of the expense of warehousing and paying tax on stored books. (How Thor Hammered Publishing, O'Donnell, 1993) Thus, between the economic issues for both booksellers and publishers, buyers often can't buy backlist books.
Anderson contends in his theory that if consumers could get many of these books--and with POD publishing and Internet sellers who don't have the same expenses as a traditional bookstore they can--they will purchase out of the long tail.
This brings us to--e-books! They require no storage. No warehouse taxes. No shipping. E-books can become the books in the long tail, available always. They can become an eternal backlist.
Publishers must agree, because their contracts now include e-rights. My publisher has three of my titles available as e-books now--Happy Kid!, A Girl, a Boy, and a Monster Cat, and A Girl, a Boy, and Three Robbers. Yes! I have a backlist!
We hope to expand the list with an e-book for Saving the Planet & Stuff. We have an illustrator working on a new cover for this edition, my computer guy is working on some techie stuff, and I'll be working on marketing over the summer. And now I have this Long Tail Theory business to talk about in relation to the whole project.
Long Tail refers to a theory first described eight years ago in an article by Chris Anderson, editor of Wired, and later in a book. He describes the theory, complete with a nice graphic that visually explains how it got its name. His graph shows the relationship between popularity and products--that a few products are extremely popular (profitable) and many more are less so.
This relates to publishing in a big way. A very few books are big sellers. They would fall in the "head" of Anderson's chart. These books are stocked in stores because they're likely to sell. However, far more books don't sell a lot. They're in the tail of the chart, and they don't get stocked because they don't generate enough sales to make it possible for booksellers to do so.
However, the tail is long. There are a lot of books in there. Taken together, they could generate a lot of sales, if buyers could buy them.Years ago, books in the long tail would have made up publishers' backlists, and buyers could, indeed, buy them. They could at least order them through booksellers. Backlists aren't very large anymore because of the expense of warehousing and paying tax on stored books. (How Thor Hammered Publishing, O'Donnell, 1993) Thus, between the economic issues for both booksellers and publishers, buyers often can't buy backlist books.
Anderson contends in his theory that if consumers could get many of these books--and with POD publishing and Internet sellers who don't have the same expenses as a traditional bookstore they can--they will purchase out of the long tail.
This brings us to--e-books! They require no storage. No warehouse taxes. No shipping. E-books can become the books in the long tail, available always. They can become an eternal backlist.
Publishers must agree, because their contracts now include e-rights. My publisher has three of my titles available as e-books now--Happy Kid!, A Girl, a Boy, and a Monster Cat, and A Girl, a Boy, and Three Robbers. Yes! I have a backlist!
We hope to expand the list with an e-book for Saving the Planet & Stuff. We have an illustrator working on a new cover for this edition, my computer guy is working on some techie stuff, and I'll be working on marketing over the summer. And now I have this Long Tail Theory business to talk about in relation to the whole project.
Educating Gail
A couple of weekends ago I suddenly wondered if I could buy issues of the New York Times Book Review for my Kindle. Lo' and behold, I can! For ninety-nine cents, I can have my own issue on my own Kindle to take with me on the stationary bike and treadmill, to read in front of the TV or in bed. Huzzah!
I was first exposed to the NYT Book Review by an arrogant and pretentious English professor when I was a freshman in college. He made us buy the Sunday NYT as part of some kind of intro writing class. Well, bless his heart. I took to the review section. I started reading it regularly in my twenties. When I didn't have time for the whole Sunday edition, my father-in-law, an engineering professor, who read three newspapers a day, saved me his. My children would get me the Sunday NYT and doughnuts for Mother's Day. For a while, you could purchase just the review section, which I tried doing when my father-in-law grew too frail for that kind of rigorous reading and gave up the NYT. It's been years since I've read it regularly, the book review section being one of the things I've given up because of lack of time.
I may have told this story here before, so forgive me if I'm repeating myself. I am older than mud, which is why I repeat myself. It is also why I didn't major or minor in creative writing as an undergraduate. You didn't find those majors at the undergraduate level then. Now you can't spit without hitting one. MFA writing programs were few and far between then, too. Iowa, Iowa, Iowa (I'm repeating myself) was all you heard back then. Not so much now that the landscape is littered with colleges offering graduate writing degrees. I did take probably four writing classes of one sort or another while I was in college. Quite honestly, I learned next to nothing in them.
My big teacher prepublishing was the NYT Book Review. Good, readable reviews were often analytical, describing what the author of the book under discussion did right and did wrong. I learned "show don't tell" from reading the Book Review. I learned that research shouldn't show from the Book Review. I learned a lot of general info from reading reviews of nonfiction. I also learned that book reviews were not necessarily love fests, and, as a result, I've never expected that of them.
I purchased the June 17th Kindle Book Review. It included reviews that illustrate my point. It also included a couple of children's book reviews in which the reviewers discussed some questions regarding children's publishing that I have considered but haven't seen covered much elsewhere.
Reviewer Bruce Machart has many positive things to say about Boleto by Alyson Hagy, using words like "dazzles" and "another delight." He also says, though, "The novel does falter at times...Hagy puts a lot of stories in play, slowing and cluttering the drama. She slows things further by endlessly modifying her dialogue: if we hear a character barking, "You get out of my godddamn sight," do we really need to be told that her cheeks are "sploted with temper"?" I find a lot there to think about in terms of my own work.
In a review of food books for children, that included Minette's Feast by Susannah Reich and Bon Appetit by Jessie Hartland, reviewer Ann Hodgman is very positive about both titles. But she raises this point: "Picture books are arguably the best medium for a life as colorful as Child’s, but the kids I know gravitate to biographies mainly when they’re assigned a school report — and they tend to choose obvious heroes like Rosa Parks and Paul Revere. What’s Julia’s actual Q quotient among elementary-school children? An increasing number of them are cooking these days, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that they’ll be attracted to a woman with big shoes and a whoopy voice who whacked fish with a cleaver on black-and-white TV 50 years ago" While I, myself, believe Minette's Feast has potential as a story and not just as a mini-bio, I think Hodgman raises a good question that could pertain to many of the beautiful picture book biographies we're seeing published.Who will read them? Again, here's something writers ought to be thinking about.
I don't see that kind of question addressed often at the blogs I've frequented over the years. Nor can I recall seeing much of the kind of detailed analysis/criticism illustrated in the Boleto review quoted above. Blog reviews, which often are presented more as recommendations of books bloggers liked and are promoting, are fantastic in terms of fan culture. They're good at spreading the word to fans of specific authors and specific genres. Fan culture is great for readers and supports writers and their books. It's all good.
But what the traditional, so-called professional review does is also educate. At least, they educate me.
I was first exposed to the NYT Book Review by an arrogant and pretentious English professor when I was a freshman in college. He made us buy the Sunday NYT as part of some kind of intro writing class. Well, bless his heart. I took to the review section. I started reading it regularly in my twenties. When I didn't have time for the whole Sunday edition, my father-in-law, an engineering professor, who read three newspapers a day, saved me his. My children would get me the Sunday NYT and doughnuts for Mother's Day. For a while, you could purchase just the review section, which I tried doing when my father-in-law grew too frail for that kind of rigorous reading and gave up the NYT. It's been years since I've read it regularly, the book review section being one of the things I've given up because of lack of time.
I may have told this story here before, so forgive me if I'm repeating myself. I am older than mud, which is why I repeat myself. It is also why I didn't major or minor in creative writing as an undergraduate. You didn't find those majors at the undergraduate level then. Now you can't spit without hitting one. MFA writing programs were few and far between then, too. Iowa, Iowa, Iowa (I'm repeating myself) was all you heard back then. Not so much now that the landscape is littered with colleges offering graduate writing degrees. I did take probably four writing classes of one sort or another while I was in college. Quite honestly, I learned next to nothing in them.
My big teacher prepublishing was the NYT Book Review. Good, readable reviews were often analytical, describing what the author of the book under discussion did right and did wrong. I learned "show don't tell" from reading the Book Review. I learned that research shouldn't show from the Book Review. I learned a lot of general info from reading reviews of nonfiction. I also learned that book reviews were not necessarily love fests, and, as a result, I've never expected that of them.
I purchased the June 17th Kindle Book Review. It included reviews that illustrate my point. It also included a couple of children's book reviews in which the reviewers discussed some questions regarding children's publishing that I have considered but haven't seen covered much elsewhere.
Reviewer Bruce Machart has many positive things to say about Boleto by Alyson Hagy, using words like "dazzles" and "another delight." He also says, though, "The novel does falter at times...Hagy puts a lot of stories in play, slowing and cluttering the drama. She slows things further by endlessly modifying her dialogue: if we hear a character barking, "You get out of my godddamn sight," do we really need to be told that her cheeks are "sploted with temper"?" I find a lot there to think about in terms of my own work.
In a review of food books for children, that included Minette's Feast by Susannah Reich and Bon Appetit by Jessie Hartland, reviewer Ann Hodgman is very positive about both titles. But she raises this point: "Picture books are arguably the best medium for a life as colorful as Child’s, but the kids I know gravitate to biographies mainly when they’re assigned a school report — and they tend to choose obvious heroes like Rosa Parks and Paul Revere. What’s Julia’s actual Q quotient among elementary-school children? An increasing number of them are cooking these days, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that they’ll be attracted to a woman with big shoes and a whoopy voice who whacked fish with a cleaver on black-and-white TV 50 years ago" While I, myself, believe Minette's Feast has potential as a story and not just as a mini-bio, I think Hodgman raises a good question that could pertain to many of the beautiful picture book biographies we're seeing published.Who will read them? Again, here's something writers ought to be thinking about.
I don't see that kind of question addressed often at the blogs I've frequented over the years. Nor can I recall seeing much of the kind of detailed analysis/criticism illustrated in the Boleto review quoted above. Blog reviews, which often are presented more as recommendations of books bloggers liked and are promoting, are fantastic in terms of fan culture. They're good at spreading the word to fans of specific authors and specific genres. Fan culture is great for readers and supports writers and their books. It's all good.
But what the traditional, so-called professional review does is also educate. At least, they educate me.
Thursday, June 28, 2012
I Totally Missed One Of Those Media Freakouts About YA Literature. Too Bad About That.
Evidently, there was a blogosphere and media freakout earlier this month over a study on the number of "swears," as my kids used to call them, in 40 YA books. Profanity in YA: Research, Assumption, and Feminism at Stacked is a very readable and interesting analysis of the study, "A Helluva Read": Profanity in Adolescent Literature. It covers what the study did and didn't do and the erroneous assumptions traditional and on-line media jumped to regarding it.
In reading some of the comments to the two posts I linked to, I noticed people writing that when profanity appears in teen books it reflects the reality of teen culture. I would agree with that. But I would also like to argue that the main reason to use profanity is to define character. Personally, I'm more interested in expressing something about the characters I'm creating than I am in making a general statement about any particular culture.
I'm a writer, Jim, not a sociologist!
In reading some of the comments to the two posts I linked to, I noticed people writing that when profanity appears in teen books it reflects the reality of teen culture. I would agree with that. But I would also like to argue that the main reason to use profanity is to define character. Personally, I'm more interested in expressing something about the characters I'm creating than I am in making a general statement about any particular culture.
I'm a writer, Jim, not a sociologist!
Wednesday, June 27, 2012
Nora Ephron, Essayist
I learned this morning that Nora Ephron died yesterday. She became well known over the last couple of decades for her screenplays, but her big impact on me was with her early essays.
I discovered Ephron while I was in college, working at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in the summers. The Conference administrators littered the Barn's lounge with magazines. This was probably to impress upon the writers attending the conference that they should be reading the things in order to research markets for their own work. That was lost on me at the time. (Perhaps because I was working in the kitchen and not actually attending the Conference?) I was just happy to suck up free magazines, the stand-out in my memory being Esquire. Nora Ephron wrote a column for Esquire in those days, and I was so taken with it that I somehow swung a subscription for the magazine so I could continue reading her work after I got back to school. In my twenties I bought her books Crazy Salad and Wallflower at the Orgy. I lost touch with her writing after that, only reading writing about her. But early Ephron is why I started reading essays. She's why I've tried to write them over the years. She's why the only graduate course I took was on writing essays.
This Ephron appreciation concluded with the thought that if you're a woman, Ephron "should remind you of what you can hope to be." She certainly has always reminded me of what I hoped to be professionally when I was young. I'm not even going to touch the fact that everyone says she was incredibly nice personally, too.
I discovered Ephron while I was in college, working at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in the summers. The Conference administrators littered the Barn's lounge with magazines. This was probably to impress upon the writers attending the conference that they should be reading the things in order to research markets for their own work. That was lost on me at the time. (Perhaps because I was working in the kitchen and not actually attending the Conference?) I was just happy to suck up free magazines, the stand-out in my memory being Esquire. Nora Ephron wrote a column for Esquire in those days, and I was so taken with it that I somehow swung a subscription for the magazine so I could continue reading her work after I got back to school. In my twenties I bought her books Crazy Salad and Wallflower at the Orgy. I lost touch with her writing after that, only reading writing about her. But early Ephron is why I started reading essays. She's why I've tried to write them over the years. She's why the only graduate course I took was on writing essays.
This Ephron appreciation concluded with the thought that if you're a woman, Ephron "should remind you of what you can hope to be." She certainly has always reminded me of what I hoped to be professionally when I was young. I'm not even going to touch the fact that everyone says she was incredibly nice personally, too.
Tuesday, June 26, 2012
Time Management Tuesday: Situational Time Management
Long ago, but not long enough, I worked for a management consulting/personnel management group that conducted training programs and consulting projects for municipal and state governments and agencies. Wait! Wait! Don't nod off. One of the people I worked for did programs on situational leadership. Situational leadership, as she described it, involved managers changing their leadership style depending upon whom they were dealing with. There was a chart. She used to use the movie Twelve O'Clock High as a case study. Evidently, she was not alone in doing this. This was back before video. I cannot tell you what a pain in the butt renting this movie was, which, no doubt, is why I remember situational leadership.
A couple of months ago, I was listening to a call-in show on friendship on my local NPR station. (My excuse? It was a weekend, and I was working in the kitchen.) So, this woman called in and started talking about what she called situational friendship. By this she meant friendships made while in particular situations. Thus, you have your PTO mom friends, your church friends, your writers' group friends, your walking group friends, your Boy Scout parent friends, etc. These are all friends unique to the situations in which you find yourself. When the situations no longer exist, neither do the friendships.
Last week, these different experiences from my distant and very recent past came together while I was thinking about the beginnings and endings of units of time--the different impacts those situations have upon us and how we use the time available during them. In terms of the ends of units of time, for instance, I've noticed that those hours, even days if the unit of time is a month, say, are often wasted if I've become discouraged with how I've managed my time up to that point. Just as a dieter will figure he might as well eat whatever for the rest of the day because he was unable to stick with the program around 3:30, I would believe a day was ruined because I didn't stay on task in the morning. I might as well blow off the rest of the day, too. To deal with that situation, I decided to have work tasks lined up that I could switch to if I found myself giving up on the planned/scheduled work. Doing anything, even if it's not the planned task, is better than wandering off to look for LOL cats.
This led me to think that what we sometimes do with time is create a management plan/schedule for ourselves and expect to adhere to it no matter what our situation is. When we don't, we're...out of luck, shall we say? How about instead applying a variation of the situational leadership/friendships model to time? With that model, we would expect to change the plan depending on our situation instead of believing the plan had broken down because our situation couldn't adhere to it.
I'm talking about more than a time plan for a big chunk of life, as in a plan for the years I'm in law school, a plan for the years when I am raising children, a plan for the years when I'm running a legal practice and raising children. I'm talking about constantly switching time management plans as situations change because situations change constantly.
For instance, this month I was able to commit to revising a book length manuscript. (May Days helped me think in terms of a month-long unit of time committed to one thing.) I should be done with it tomorrow, even though I've been down to working only three days a week again because of family commitments. (No crisis. The family member who was helping with elder care visits hasn't been able to get away from work.)
Now, next month I may be down to working only two days a week because of another family commitment. However, I've been able to plan for that situation. So next month whatever work time I have will go toward researching and planning marketing for the Saving the Planet & Stuff e-book I expect to publish later this year. Those kinds of work tasks shouldn't require the kind of continuity that writing a draft or revising a lengthy manuscript do, so they are better suited for working only two days a week. Thus, I have planned my time around my situation.
By September my situation should have changed again, maybe sooner. I will switch my time management plan again then.
Can someone do this kind of situational time management during, say, a lengthy family crisis? It depends, of course, on how soul-sucking the situation is. But maybe recognizing that you can plan your time around your situation could keep a management plan from breaking down altogether because the situation you find yourself in won't work with it.
A couple of months ago, I was listening to a call-in show on friendship on my local NPR station. (My excuse? It was a weekend, and I was working in the kitchen.) So, this woman called in and started talking about what she called situational friendship. By this she meant friendships made while in particular situations. Thus, you have your PTO mom friends, your church friends, your writers' group friends, your walking group friends, your Boy Scout parent friends, etc. These are all friends unique to the situations in which you find yourself. When the situations no longer exist, neither do the friendships.
Last week, these different experiences from my distant and very recent past came together while I was thinking about the beginnings and endings of units of time--the different impacts those situations have upon us and how we use the time available during them. In terms of the ends of units of time, for instance, I've noticed that those hours, even days if the unit of time is a month, say, are often wasted if I've become discouraged with how I've managed my time up to that point. Just as a dieter will figure he might as well eat whatever for the rest of the day because he was unable to stick with the program around 3:30, I would believe a day was ruined because I didn't stay on task in the morning. I might as well blow off the rest of the day, too. To deal with that situation, I decided to have work tasks lined up that I could switch to if I found myself giving up on the planned/scheduled work. Doing anything, even if it's not the planned task, is better than wandering off to look for LOL cats.
This led me to think that what we sometimes do with time is create a management plan/schedule for ourselves and expect to adhere to it no matter what our situation is. When we don't, we're...out of luck, shall we say? How about instead applying a variation of the situational leadership/friendships model to time? With that model, we would expect to change the plan depending on our situation instead of believing the plan had broken down because our situation couldn't adhere to it.
I'm talking about more than a time plan for a big chunk of life, as in a plan for the years I'm in law school, a plan for the years when I am raising children, a plan for the years when I'm running a legal practice and raising children. I'm talking about constantly switching time management plans as situations change because situations change constantly.
For instance, this month I was able to commit to revising a book length manuscript. (May Days helped me think in terms of a month-long unit of time committed to one thing.) I should be done with it tomorrow, even though I've been down to working only three days a week again because of family commitments. (No crisis. The family member who was helping with elder care visits hasn't been able to get away from work.)
Now, next month I may be down to working only two days a week because of another family commitment. However, I've been able to plan for that situation. So next month whatever work time I have will go toward researching and planning marketing for the Saving the Planet & Stuff e-book I expect to publish later this year. Those kinds of work tasks shouldn't require the kind of continuity that writing a draft or revising a lengthy manuscript do, so they are better suited for working only two days a week. Thus, I have planned my time around my situation.
By September my situation should have changed again, maybe sooner. I will switch my time management plan again then.
Can someone do this kind of situational time management during, say, a lengthy family crisis? It depends, of course, on how soul-sucking the situation is. But maybe recognizing that you can plan your time around your situation could keep a management plan from breaking down altogether because the situation you find yourself in won't work with it.
Sunday, June 24, 2012
Your Weekend Blog Visits
Ah, weekends. I actually have less time on them than I do on weekdays. For instance, I'd like to do a big post regarding last week's New York Times Book Review. However, it's only 8:30 AM, and I already know that's not going to happen.
Thank goodness I have that NESCBWI Blog Tour going and have developed just enough self-discipline (or habit or mental muscle memory) to keep plugging away at it. And who knows if I'll be able to get today's stops done in one pop?
Okay! Ann Haywood Leal. Her blog is The Backstory where recently she's been writing about getting around for work, to the New York SCBWI conference, for instance. She's also written about family and people she's met.
John Lechner's blog, The Untended Garden, is lavishly illustrated often with photographs or examples of other artist's work embedded within posts in which he writes about them. If I had time, I would try following this blog for a while. But... John has a second blog more closely related to his own work.
It's 8:44. As I foresaw, I have to stop for a while.
Six-thirty-four PM. I'm baaack.
Okay. Random Noodling has a terrific header illustration. It's Diane Mayr's blog and deals with "poetry, information to share, books to recommend--or not..." Diane is interested in haiku, and she does something called Happy Haiga Day posts. I've no idea what that is. In addition to her books, Diane has published magazine articles. She's also one of The Write Sisters. I've seen that named floating around the Internet, maybe on Facebook.
Why look! The Write Sisters is Diane's second blog. The Write Sisters also have a website, though it just won't open for me tonight. They are seven writers who started out as a critique group, have published more than 100 books among them, and now offer workshops.
Laura Williams McCaffrey's blog, Here There Be Dragons, hasn't been updated since last year. She was doing a lot of writing prompts back then. She has some material at her website relating to plotting. Yeah. You all know how I am about plotting.
Dawn Metcalf's first book Luminous was published last year. Her blog, Officially Twisted, appears to be a mix of posts about her writing, specifically, and writing in general.
Enough for this weekend.
Thank goodness I have that NESCBWI Blog Tour going and have developed just enough self-discipline (or habit or mental muscle memory) to keep plugging away at it. And who knows if I'll be able to get today's stops done in one pop?
Okay! Ann Haywood Leal. Her blog is The Backstory where recently she's been writing about getting around for work, to the New York SCBWI conference, for instance. She's also written about family and people she's met.
John Lechner's blog, The Untended Garden, is lavishly illustrated often with photographs or examples of other artist's work embedded within posts in which he writes about them. If I had time, I would try following this blog for a while. But... John has a second blog more closely related to his own work.
It's 8:44. As I foresaw, I have to stop for a while.
Six-thirty-four PM. I'm baaack.
Okay. Random Noodling has a terrific header illustration. It's Diane Mayr's blog and deals with "poetry, information to share, books to recommend--or not..." Diane is interested in haiku, and she does something called Happy Haiga Day posts. I've no idea what that is. In addition to her books, Diane has published magazine articles. She's also one of The Write Sisters. I've seen that named floating around the Internet, maybe on Facebook.
Why look! The Write Sisters is Diane's second blog. The Write Sisters also have a website, though it just won't open for me tonight. They are seven writers who started out as a critique group, have published more than 100 books among them, and now offer workshops.
Laura Williams McCaffrey's blog, Here There Be Dragons, hasn't been updated since last year. She was doing a lot of writing prompts back then. She has some material at her website relating to plotting. Yeah. You all know how I am about plotting.
Dawn Metcalf's first book Luminous was published last year. Her blog, Officially Twisted, appears to be a mix of posts about her writing, specifically, and writing in general.
Enough for this weekend.
Thursday, June 21, 2012
Maintaining The Mind Of A Beginner About The Third Person
I am always a little taken aback when I see newly published writers offering workshops on writing. To me, a person who has published only one book is inexperienced and probably doesn't have a lot of knowledge to impart to others. This attitude on my part is why I have been such a satisfied martial arts student for the past decade. The "maintain the mind of a beginner" business, in which you assume you don't know much so that you're always open to new knowledge, is popular in martial arts training. I embraced it eagerly.
After I wrote and published my first book, I certainly didn't know much. It's a very good thing that I accepted that because when my editor, Kathy, pointed out that my use of a third-person narrator in my second book left something to be desired, my mind was open to the possibility that she was right. I have obsessed on the third person for the last fifteen years or so, and wrote only one book with that kind of narrator. And Saving the Planet & Stuff used a point-of-view character, which is like a first-person narrator but different.
Recently I happened to read several books written in the third person, books that did not use a point-of-view character but shifted points of view among several characters. Here are a couple of problems I saw with the situation:
1. First and foremost, it's difficult to maintain narrative drive if the author keeps stopping the action to allow still another character to dwell on what's happening or even tell a story that doesn't appear to have much to do with anything. Some writers can switch point of view and have the new character drive the action of the story along. Some can't. Or maybe they don't know they're supposed to.
2. It's hard to commit to a protagonist if other characters are given too much face time. Or maybe it just seems that they're getting too much face time if those other characters aren't carrying the story along in terms of plot or interacting with the protagonist enough.
3. Martin Millar can create a whole universe of characters who are entertaining enough that readers will want to stay up late to read portions of a story from their various points of view. It seems that not every writer can do that. I can't believe that I'm the only reader who goes, "Oh, shoot. Him again" when confronted once more with the thoughts of a particularly dull secondary character.
None of the books I'm talking about were dreadful. They were just strikingly off because the third-person narrator was so awkward. Would I have recognized that fifteen years ago when I was still an inexperienced writer? Would I have recognized it now if I hadn't continued to study point of view ever since?
After I wrote and published my first book, I certainly didn't know much. It's a very good thing that I accepted that because when my editor, Kathy, pointed out that my use of a third-person narrator in my second book left something to be desired, my mind was open to the possibility that she was right. I have obsessed on the third person for the last fifteen years or so, and wrote only one book with that kind of narrator. And Saving the Planet & Stuff used a point-of-view character, which is like a first-person narrator but different.
Recently I happened to read several books written in the third person, books that did not use a point-of-view character but shifted points of view among several characters. Here are a couple of problems I saw with the situation:
1. First and foremost, it's difficult to maintain narrative drive if the author keeps stopping the action to allow still another character to dwell on what's happening or even tell a story that doesn't appear to have much to do with anything. Some writers can switch point of view and have the new character drive the action of the story along. Some can't. Or maybe they don't know they're supposed to.
2. It's hard to commit to a protagonist if other characters are given too much face time. Or maybe it just seems that they're getting too much face time if those other characters aren't carrying the story along in terms of plot or interacting with the protagonist enough.
3. Martin Millar can create a whole universe of characters who are entertaining enough that readers will want to stay up late to read portions of a story from their various points of view. It seems that not every writer can do that. I can't believe that I'm the only reader who goes, "Oh, shoot. Him again" when confronted once more with the thoughts of a particularly dull secondary character.
None of the books I'm talking about were dreadful. They were just strikingly off because the third-person narrator was so awkward. Would I have recognized that fifteen years ago when I was still an inexperienced writer? Would I have recognized it now if I hadn't continued to study point of view ever since?
Wednesday, June 20, 2012
Save Me
I happened to start reading One for the Murphys as I was finishing up one of those mysteries set in the nineteenth century with a clever upper class female lead and an outsider male (who is still a gentleman, of sorts, of course) counterpart who are clearly attracted to one another but always taking one step toward a relationship and then experiencing misunderstandings that keep them apart. (Yeah. I read those, but I'm not bragging.) As a result, I saw parallels in One for the Murphys. It appears to me to be what I'll call a "family romance," a story in which an outsider child does the one-step-forward-bump-into-misunderstandings dance with a truly good family that has the potential to save her/him if child and family can only get together.
All the time I was reading about Carley in Murphys, I was thinking about Dan in Little Men.When I was a child, Little Men was the Alcott book as far as I was concerned, not Little Women, which I liked well enough but even then probably found a little holier than thou. Carley is so much like Dan, craving mother Julia Murphy as Dan craves mother Jo Bhaer. There is an actual love interest in these stories, a mother/child love interest between real mothers and children they have no biological connection to. Both child characters in the relationships have redemptive scenes with their mother figures' biological children. It's clear that Carley's personal story will continue past the end of One for the Murphys. Dan's personal story continues in another actual book, Jo's Boys.
One for the Murphys will be a good read for adults who hope they could save a child if they had to and for children who hope there is an adult out there who could save them if they needed it.
I have met many other writers, but I don't think I've known one as long as I've known Lynda or known one before she started publishing. Reading the early chapters of this book was a bizarre experience because I could often hear Lynda's voice speaking Carley's dialogue and visualize her facial expressions and body language.
Oops. I almost forgot to mention that I purchased my copy of the book. It was not a gift from the author or an arc.
Ah, Minette.
Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast has a post today on the preliminary artwork for Minette's Feast.
By the way, Minette received a lovely review in the NYTimes Book Review this past weekend.
By the way, Minette received a lovely review in the NYTimes Book Review this past weekend.
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