The Bad Sex Award

His mouth lathered with her sap, he turned around and embraced her face with all the passion of his own lips and face, ready at last to grind into her with the Hound, drive it into her piety.

These words won Norman Mailer the prize for the most crude and tasteless depiction of a sexual act in a literary work. The Bad Sex Award, given by the UK's Literary Review, is possibly my favorite of all literary awards because it's the one that allows me to look at works for which people have been paid enormous sums of money and say, with great confidence, "I can do better than that."

The award comes at a particularly interesting time for me this year as I am at the point where I have to write a sex scene for the romantic suspense novel I'm working on, which is proving to be the challenge I knew it would be.

But even at my worst, I don't imagine I even come close to any of the short-listed passages, all of which you can find on the Manchester Guardian's site. If you haven't read the short-listed passages in previous years (the Literary Review has been doing this for fourteen years), be prepared: before clicking the link, do not sip anything you don't wish to choke on, spew, or snort through your nose.

eBook Schizophrenia

I have very mixed feelings about the world moving toward eBooks. I know it’s going to happen. I’ve known it for years―ever since Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation carried around what was probably the device that gave the inventor of the PDA his revolutionary idea.

As a pleasure reader of novels, I think eBooks are great. Not having to lug around a clunky paper book would be wonderful. I used to buy hardcover books exclusively, even when I started commuting. At first it wasn’t a problem. I had a large pocketbook and I just stuffed the book inside. But then pocketbooks got smaller, and the means of my commute changed from my car to a Long Island Rail Road train and two subways, and I switched to paperbacks. Paperbacks are smaller, but they’re also flimsier. In addition, as a publishing professional, I felt tremendously guilty over not properly supporting the authors whose books I enjoyed so much.

Paper books also necessitate picking out just one book to take along. I carry around a decent-sized pocketbook once again, thanks both to fashion and to my reaching an age where I don’t slavishly follow Vogue anymore. But even with a larger bag, it’s difficult to dig out my wallet or cell phone when it's buried under a book. If I had to struggle with two or more books, I’d probably just skip hitting Starbucks when away from home and resign myself to being yelled at by my family for not answering their phone calls.

With an eBook reader, you can carry around a number of books and read whatever strikes your fancy at the moment. The unit is solid, not composed of pages that can part and gobble up the other contents of your bag. And it’s smaller than even a paperback, so takes up less space. This allows you to hear and answer your cell phone, buy lunch when hungry, and run through Penn Station without ending up all black-and-blue from your heavy pocketbook or carryall banging against your hip or thigh.

But that’s not all. Think of all the trees that fall victim to the publishing industry today. All the landfills that run out of room much quicker than they need to. All the chemicals that are dumped into the air and water as byproducts of the manufacture of paper, ink, and glue. Of course, the flip side is that many of the people who work in these support industries would lose their jobs. And libraries would become obsolete, with many torn down, displacing untold numbers of innocent pigeon and seagull families.

As a writer and editor, the thought of going to eBooks and away from paper books saddens me. There’s something about sitting at my desk surrounded by stacks of books that helps me to work. I use the Internet, too, but when it comes to dictionaries and style guides and reference books on the various subjects touched on in the manuscripts I edit or the book I’m writing, nothing beats being able to flip through a paper book, moving slowly toward my destination, skimming the pages leading up to it, savoring the nuggets of new or forgotten facts that lure my eyes. There’s also something about spatial memory. Looking at a reference book from the side, I so often remember exactly where to open the book. With an eBook, I usually end up scrolling and scrolling, passing what I need because it flies by in a blur. I also can’t imagine working in a room that doesn’t have bookcases filled to the brim with all types of books.

And what if a book ignites strong feelings? If we hate it, we can’t throw the eBook reader against the wall. It’ll break into a million little plastic pieces and computer chips and wires, and we’ll have to shell out some serious bucks to replace it. If a book inspires us, we can’t hug it against our heart (at least, not in the same way), display it on the coffee table, or buy a gift-quality copy, top it with a bow, and lovingly present it to our children. Yes, we can buy another copy of the download and forward the link, but it’s just not the same thing.

And where will we scribble notes? What will students underline and highlight? And the authors. Think of the authors! What will they sign? The printed-out download confirmation? Somehow, a download confirmation signing just isn’t what I’ve been picturing doing all these years when my first novel is finally published.

Making - and Breaking - a Reader

Clare and Laura recently wrote terrific posts on the future of publishing (see Delivering a Strike for Futurism and Means of Production).

Depending on your point of view, the probable demise of paper publishing is either tragic or a happy inevitability. Me? I'm more worried about the future of books, period...paper or digital.

The New York Times' Week in Review includes a commentary by Motoko Rich on Alan Bennett's novella, "The Uncommon Reader," about an adult non-reader who, on the strength of one beloved novel, becomes a voracious reader late in life.

M. Rich is skeptical. In A Good Mystery: Why We Read, she ponders how and why people get turned on to reading. She suggests they get hooked when they discover, in a character, a reflection of themselves. Given the current competition from MySpace and television, that worries her.

"The question of whether reading, or reading books in particular, is essential is complicated by the fact that part of what draws people to books can now be found elsewhere — and there is only so much time to consume it all.

Readers who want to know they are not alone are finding reflections of themselves in the confessional blogs sprouting across the Internet. And television shows like 'The Sopranos' or 'Lost' can satisfy the hunger for narrative and richly textured characters in a way that only books could in a previous age."

Is she right to wonder whether kids will ever become book lovers, given the alternatives? Do even great readers read fewer books?

I was raised by a dad who banned tv - back when movie theaters played the same double feature for weeks - so I had little choice but to fall in love with books. The authors who turned me into an avid reader evoked a world rich enough to lift me out of my own.

These days, my attention span is on the skids. My reading time's shrinking. I've begun to toss books aside when they don't satisfy. Netflix, the internet, and occasionally great television (rented sans-commercials on DVD) increasingly steal what little free time I have.

Only...it takes a novel to consume me enough to let a take-out meal turn rock hard in the microwave. Why is it the good ones are so hard to find?

I still crave transport to a fictional world, and I don't believe I'm all that demanding. I don't require characters who are just like me...I want them to challenge and change me. I don't need immediate action and a dead body in chapter one...I want a good story. The crime fiction I love tends to be on the dark side, but given a terrific caper, I'm equally happy.

What is it the best have in common? I think it's delicious language and a theme that rings true. It's nuance. And irony. But hey, tastes differ.

I'm still buying and borrowing books, attempting to read four or five at a time. But the sheer volume is daunting, and my eyes sometimes sting. Maybe if there weren't so many satisfying cyber spots and DVDs, the next great read wouldn't languish unopened in toppling stacks.

Reality check: I've learned how hard it is to write a novel. I don't fool myself into thinking my first is one of the very greats. Great, yes of course...but I've a hunch it'll take a couple more to make me a star :-)

Is dissatisfaction - mine and others' - due to a fever pitch of distraction these days? Whatever it is, as a consumer, I grieve that compelling books seem so few and far between. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one discovering the occasionally attractive alternatives....

Beware the competition. A few loving readers are losing steam.

(Image from www.turningpointbooks.com)

- Lois

Do You Whistle While You Write?

Over the weekend, my husband and I went to see the Disney film, Enchanted. We were originally thinking more along the lines of American Gangster, but the review of Enchanted in the Wall Street Journal won us over (and the fact it stars Amy Adams, who was incredible in Junebug). It borrows from Snow White and Cinderella, and includes the usual quirky cast; a silly prince, an evil queen, and a talking chipmunk. The protagonist, Giselle, lives a pretty decent life in her cottage with a menagerie of forest creatures. They help her clean, make clothing, and sing back-up…until she’s banished to New York City. For us city dwellers, the funniest scene comes when she enlists the help of animals from her new urban environs - rats, mice, cockroaches - to help clean her pal’s place on Riverside Drive. The film’s overarching theme is that Giselle is delighted by simple pleasures, so she sings while she works or when the mood strikes.

This film reminded me of when I knew that I liked writing. Really liked it. I started humming while I wrote. Every so often, I would even break into dance (not breakdancing, per se, but a few pirouettes and leaps). This never happened to me before. Prior to writing my first book, I toiled in various offices and television stations. But whistling while I worked did not come naturally to me. At that time, I could never relate to a Disney character or, for that matter, even my own father, who is an artist. As a child, I used to hear my father’s singing emanate from his downstairs studio and echo throughout our house. I knew he was feeling especially pleased with a painting when he’d sing even louder. “Dad, how could you?” I used to ask, thinking it was a foolish thing to do. He’d just shoot me his knowing Cheshire grin. Twenty-five years later, now that I’ve found what makes me happy, I realize the better question would be “how could you not sing?” or perhaps, I wouldn’t have to say anything at all.

A Different Kind of NaNo Win

This year’s NaNoWriMo is almost over and I haven’t yet written the first word of my 50,000. Pretty much the same thing happened last year and the year before. Two years ago, I got sick just days into November and was down for the count for two very long weeks. Last year, during the final week of October, I agreed to take on a rush editing job that had me working long hours on a daily basis well into November.

This year? My computer crashed. I was late getting started as it was, still working on my character sketches and outline during the first week, when the unthinkable happened: my C drive became corrupted. After ten days of waiting for my trusty little laptop to come home from the shop and then four days of reinstalling all my software, settings, and documents, I found my newly reloaded email program bringing me messages from my fellow NaNoWriMos about how great it felt to have made it to the halfway point. The halfway point! Oh well.

It took a few days, but it slowly dawned on me that I didn’t fail this year. Last year I did, and the year before, too. But this year I definitely succeeded.

How can I say that? For one thing, I’ve got a great new book almost totally planned out and ready to be written. For a second, I figured out what’s been bothering me about another book.

The other book I started several years ago. I completed the first draft, didn’t get to the second draft right away because a new job got in the way, and then didn’t rewrite when I did have the time because something was bothering me about the story but I didn’t know what. I loved the basic premise and the characters, however, so I hung on to that first draft, refusing to banish it to The Cabinet. When this year’s NaNo was approaching, I decided I would take that original premise and characters, and write a new story. And that’s when I realized that the new book was book one of the series and the original book was really book two. So I’ve actually come out of this year’s NaNo with two books! That’s a win, I’d say.

Another reason this year is a success is that I’ve reconnected with my local NaNo group. I joined the Long Island NaNo group, called LinoTypo (a whimsical name—YahooGroups said all the logical ones had been taken), two years ago. After NaNo was over that year, the group continued to meet sporadically and I sometimes attended. Now the group has decided to become a more formal writing group, meeting monthly to outline goals and report on accomplishments, help each other with writing problems and editing, and enjoy dinner out with like-minded people. If I hadn’t decided to get myself in gear for this year’s NaNo, I probably wouldn’t have attended the October meeting, and I’d be missing out on a whole lot of valuable face-to-face help, moral support, and encouragement.

A final reason is the Women of Mystery. After Laura was kind enough to get this blog up and running back in April, I posted five times and then drifted away. But the WOM are so wonderful, they never gave up on me. They continued to include me on their roster and in their email exchanges, wrote to me privately to make sure I was OK, and told me numerous times that when I was ready to blog again to just go ahead and do it. So here I am, back again. And to once again be an active member of this friendly, skilled, creative, and very accomplished group is definitely a win!

Kindle-ing

Recently, I got my hands on one of Amazon's new Kindles, so I thought I'd take the opportunity to review it here.

First let me address the primary complaint I see whenever I see it reviewed, on Amazon or elsewhere:

It's expensive.

Yeah, it is. No two ways about it. At $400, no one is ever going to make their money back saving by buying eBooks rather than printed ones. But it's right in line with the rest of the higher end eBook readers out there, so that's a non-starter as a complaint. (There's a well-maintained Mobile Reader Wiki on Wikipedia if you want to see what's out there, what it does, and what it costs.)

The only other eBook reader I've ever considered is Bookeen's Cybook. Why? Because I need a reader that uses "eInk" technology since I can't read with backlighting, and I want a reader I can hook up to my Mac. And the Cybook, while it won't autosync, can at least be used as a drive so I can download eBooks to my Mac and drag them over. The Cybook comes in at $350. Not a whole lot of price difference.

I've not used a Cybook reader yet, so I can't compare them. (I hope to try one out in person on 12/2--I'll post here if I do.) What I can do is tell you that I'd make up the $50 difference quickly if I read new release hardcovers. Because the Cybook uses MobiPocket as reading software, and a brief comparison shows that MobiPocket (a technology Amazon actually owns) eBooks run about $17-$18 for a new release hardcover, while the Kindle versions of the same books are $9.99.

In fact, Mobipocket books cost as much as their paper equivalents, which makes no sense whatsoever. And if you buy your books discounted, using coupons or whatever the way I always do, Mobipocket books cost more, because you're not getting those discounts.

But I said before that people who buy eBook readers aren't doing so to save money, and if I stick to that assertion, I can ignore the ridiculous pricing of Mobipocket books. (Why would someone want an eBook rather than a printed book? That's a whole post unto itself. For myself, the appeal is primarily in the idea of not having to take a whole separate carry-on bag on vacation with me just for my books since I read one a day on vacation, plus at least one, if not more, on each plane.)

The other major complaint about the Kindle is that it's ugly. But you knew that, right? You looked at the picture before you bought the product, so why whine now?

I am always going to have less sexy technology because I prefer hardware buttons to software ones. I don't want an iPhone, sexy and gorgeous as it is, because I want to push actual buttons on my phone rather than using a virtual keyboard. The same is true of the Kindle. It has a keyboard--an actual keyboard--for making notes and searching the Kindle store. And so far the keys work great. The little scroll wheel on the right allows you to click into whatever you're reading to make notes or bookmark. It's a solid feeling wheel, with a satisfying "click."

Would I have preferred it in black? Yeah, I would. Call me shallow. Would that stop me from using it, though? Nope.

The pages turn quickly, which is one complaint I have heard from people about other readers. It's easy to change the text size, which is one of the big advantages of eBooks. Tired? Increase the text size. Skimming? Decrease it.

The Kindle is set up to access Amazon's store using Sprint's cell network, which means it can only download remotely inside the US. You can download to your computer over the web and transfer to your Kindle if necessary, but for most people--me included, the US-only limitation isn't too much of a problem.

But the Kindle, functional as it is, is going back to Amazon next week.

It's not just that it's not a book. I knew it wouldn't be. I expected to have to make some adjustments.

What I didn't expect, the thing that's driven me crazy every time I put the thing down and pick it back up, is that the buttons for flipping pages are too freaking hard to avoid. So far, I've not once been able to turn the machine off or on or pick it up or put it down without accidentally changing pages. The Kindle comes with a cover, but you can't power it on or off with the cover on, and if the Kindle is on and you close the cover, and then pick it up, squeezing the cover, you click the flywheel.

Alas, the Kindle's design was not well thought out. (How hard would it have been to put the on/off switch on the front, where you could access it while it was still in the cover? Or put in a lock switch that would allow readers to prevent the pages from turning when they don't want them to?)

But I don't take vacation until March. Maybe by then someone will have come out with something I can take with me instead of a whole carry-on full of books.

Giving and Getting

So you've already read Murder, New York Style, but you haven't had enough murder and mayhem for the holidays yet. And yet, you feel a trifle guilty spending money on yourself now that the holiday shopping season has arrived. Do I have a suggestion for you! Carols and Crimes, Gifts and Grifters is the second annual mystery anthology from Wolfmont Publishing with proceeds benefitting Toys for Tots. You can get it at Amazon or Barnes and Noble, of course, but to contribute the maximum amount to charity, buy it directly from Wolfmont.

Name Game Wednesday: Gobble, Gobble Edition

As we all look forward to the friendly family feasting (or even fistfighting) to come, I'm reams behind in NaNo progress. So, here's a diverting and pithy look at that place in a book where the fewest words can create the most trouble: the title.

Would Joseph Heller's book have read the same as Catch-18? Read how his plans were foiled by fate, and other interesting tales from Gary Dexter who has the the stories behind the titles. Bonus shocker: the utterly prosaic original title of The Postman Always Rings Twice.

In cases of less-celebrated books, is it the titles that doomed them, or simply that the same judgment used in selecting the title is evident throughout the whole? I present for your condiseration the tragically unappetizing choice in the image above, today declared a winner among losers. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution's Phil Kloer has more entries.

Good eating, everyone!

P.S. I'm thankful for all of you.

Six Days Without Take-out

As a writer, there’s nothing I like more than a well-stocked refrigerator. And come Thursday, I’m guaranteed to have one. Yep, just thinking about it makes me happy. You see, I don’t really enjoy cooking. Sure, I’ll whip up simple meals, but I’m not a master in the kitchen. Unless my husband, Johan, goes shopping, our fridge remains relatively empty. So, after finishing a difficult chapter, I reach for the coffee carafe and a take-out menu. But after Thanksgiving, my writing desk won’t be littered with tiny plastic forks and pathetic paper cartons. No limp sesame noodles for me. Instead, my desk will be stacked with overflowing bowls of spiced pumpkin soup and chipotle whipped sweet potatoes. Plates (real ones) will be piled high with turkey sandwiches, cranberry bread, and wild rice stuffing. And I think my writing will be better because of it.

Thanksgiving is Johan’s favorite holiday to pull out all the stops. He may have been born in Stockholm and raised in London, but this European knows how to make one hearty American feast. For the seven of us, Johan will make goat cheese crostini (drizzled with honey), the aforementioned pumpkin soup, five side dishes, and a twenty-pound bird (pomegranate glazed). Clearly, a ridiculous amount of food. Yet somehow, year after year, we manage to eat it all. Much of it consumed on the day itself and the rest…gone by Tuesday. How is this possible? Well, since I started writing, I’ve adopted the philosophy of my dog, Milo. If tasty, fresh food is within reach, go for it. And be as fast as possible. You never know where your next meal may be coming from.

Means of Production

[update: for those of you--unlike me--who can read text on screens for long periods, Amazon introduces the Kindle]

If you've been following the posts and comments, you've seen the various prognostications on the future of publishing. A person could go on forever on the topic...so I will.



In the world of mystery writing, there are both fan organizations and conferences and writer organizations and conferences. [image via Malice Domestic.]

Recently, one of the largest fan conferences, Malice Domestic, changed the rules regarding participation in its panels, insisting that panelists be "traditionally published." This, along with a new list of approved publishers from the Mystery Writers of America (being published by an approved publisher is necessary for "active" status in MWA), has created quite a to-do in the mystery writing world, bringing to light as it does questions of the relative validity of various routes to publication.

Before I talk about the finished product, that lovely book we tuck into our bags, keep on the nightstand, flip through in the tub, before I ruminate on how it appears, and how we get it into our hot little hands, I want to back up a few steps.

Back when I was in college, I had a typewriter. It was the old kind, the kind with the long "legs" beneath the numbers, which would get stuck if you typed too fast. My mother had the fancy version, the IBM Selectric with the rolling ball that could "remember" a whole paragraph of text. (I was never sure what you were supposed to do with that paragraph of text it remembered, but I wasn't very technically inclined at the time.) I wrote everything by hand. I would cut papers into bits and reorganize them, pasting them into the appropriate order before typing them, or, if I were running particularly late, pasting them together once they had already been typed, then photocopying the finished product.

And although I wrote my 119,000 word fantasy novel by hand, I would never have considered attempting such at thing before 1986, when I got my first computer. Just the knowledge that I can edit the text once it's in there is incredibly freeing.

The switch from typewriter to computer is a change in the means of production. The product still looks the same -- black print on 8.5" x 11" paper, with one inch margins, etc--but the route is different. And the new route has made the end product much more accessible. Just ask your average editor or agent. Back in the late 80's, when I sent my fantasy novel to a couple places, you could expect to hear back from the agent or publisher (no, you didn't need an agent, not even for the bigger houses) in a reasonable length of time.

So the slushpiles grew. [image via Sean Lindsay's writing demotivators.]

Getting words onto paper became easier. Manuscripts proliferated. Submissions increased geometrically, and publishers began insisting authors get agents. Because while the quantity of submissions they got increased daily, the quality did not. People became more prolific, but not more talented, and people who would never have considered attempting to get a novel published suddenly had dreams of fame and fortune.

You see, once upon a time the act of writing the novel proved, in and of itself, that the writer was dedicated. The very thought of writing, typing, correcting, re-typing...the process was so daunting that no sane person would undertake it.

Nowadays, producing the manuscript is the easy part. So much so, in fact, that a woman I know said in the course of an instant message conversation yesterday: "My brother just finished writing a novel. Now he doesn't know what to do with it." Only the fact that I had to leave the room prevented me from telling her that now he'd done the easy part. Because when it's the first book, writing it is the easy part. At least that was my experience, and the experience of most of the people I know, which is why all of us have one--if not more--manuscripts in boxes under the bed that will never see the light of day.

Later on, it gets harder. There are deadlines and expectations you don't even think about when you first set out to get that first story on paper.

But let's say you do get that first story down, or the second, or the third, and you finally get it to the point where you think you want to get it published. What's next?

I'd say you want to see it in print, but that's not the only route to publication nowadays. For lots of people, particularly in particular genres, eBooks are a major means of publication.

Some possible ways to get published:

• Self-publishing. And by this I mean the most literal form; you take responsibility for everything from printing through distribution.
• Vanity Presses/Subsidy Presses. This is pay to play. You don't have to do the work, you just pay someone else to do it for you. Once upon a time, you still had to do all the distribution and promotion for yourself, but the biggies in the vanity press game these days do that for you.
  
• eBooks. Here I mean publishing through eBook houses, as opposed to the eBooks put out by "traditional" publishing houses as part of print contracts.
• Small Press publishing. Small presses range from those with sterling reps to those run by scam artists. It doesn't always take a lot of research to figure out which end of the spectrum a possible press falls into, but a lot of them fall somewhere in the middle, and you have to be careful with those. It can be just as hard to get a contract with a reputable small press as it is with a big house, but you often have a different relationship with the publishing house.
• Big Publishing Houses. (Some people refer to these as "New York Publishers.")

I'm sure I am leaving something out, but those are the ones that come to mind right now. I've tried to put these in order of some combination of the following factors: how likely you are to make any money at all, how much of the work of publication you'll have to do yourself, and how likely you are to see your book in a bookstore.

Obviously, if you publish via eBook, you're not going to find your book in a bookstore. You may, however, make a fair amount of money, particularly if you are in one of the genres popular with eBook readers, like erotica. And, occasionally, an eBook publisher makes the jump to print, as did Ellora's Cave.

What a lot of people don't realize, however, is that most of the other options listed above also won't get you onto bookstore shelves. Mass market paperbacks, put out by major publishing houses, almost certainly will, though there's no guarantee your book will stay on those shelves very long. Some small presses get their books into chain stores, but most do not. (Please note: there's a big difference between a small press, and a minor imprint of a big publishing house.)

And now we're back to the means of production question.

The vast majority of books produced by anything other than the "big" publishing houses (Random House, HarperCollins, Penguin Putnam, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, etc) are published via Print On Demand technology. That is, they are printed when ordered, not warehoused someplace. (Please note: POD is a technology. Vanity publishers use it, true, but so do legitimate, traditional publishing houses. POD is not synonymous with subsidy publishing.)

Pretty soon, I think POD is the way everything will be published. And every consumer will know it, because they'll go online and order their book (in their choice of format--mass market pb, trade pb, large print, hardcover...) and it will be ready at a kiosk somewhere ten minutes later. Frankly, that's the only method of producing books that makes sense, and the technology is basically available already.

Does that mean people won't be scrambling over one another for contracts with the "biggies" in publishing? Nope. I've talked to enough aspiring authors to know that lots of people believe the level of competition will go down, but I have to disagree.

Let me just grab Clare's futurist cap and put it on over my psychic cap so I can explain.

Under the 90% rule, which states that 90% of everything is crap, most manuscripts never deserve to see the light of day. Given what I've read on agent and editor blogs over the past several years, I'd have to say that formulation is generous. So somehow there has to be a way for the average consumer to decide between the selections in the bookstore kiosk. Do they go with choice A2002 or B1097? Perhaps X53?

Certainly, the availability of excerpts will help. But I think the power of brand loyalty cannot be discounted. I'm already there, though primarily in a negative sense. I don't care how tempting a plotline sounds, I will not buy a book published by certain publishers because they publish nothing but garbage. Does that mean that something put out by, say, Berkley Prime Crime is guaranteed to be good? Nope. But it sure has a better chance of being good than something by...well, I won't name names.

So the more things change in this new future of publishing, the more things will stay the same, at least as I see it.

(When I get my head out of NaNoWriMo, I'll post a bibliography for anyone who likes reading about this kind of stuff and has more time than they need.)

Will Word for Food

Words! Words! Words!
I'm so sick of words!
I get words all day through;
First from him, now from you!
Is that all you blighters can do?

“Show Me” sung by Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady

In the above question, if you change the word blighters to writers, the answer would be a resounding “yes.” Writers love words. We love to know them and we love to use them. We manipulate words on paper and in conversation. They are always spinning in the back of our minds. We've been known to spend hours rummaging around for the one word that has a more explicit meaning that the original word that popped into mind. Words are the building blocks of our trade. No words = no stories.

Here's another valuable use for words. The Free Rice website is combating global hunger through the use of a vocabulary game. Words = food for the poor. I saw this on the news the other night. A teacher was explaining that although her school originally used Free Rice for the upper grades, some of her third and fourth graders have taken a liking to it. The premise is simple; there is a word at the top of the screen and four potential meanings listed below. Just guess the right definition. For each correct answer, ten grains of rice is put in the communal bowl and paid for by a corporate sponsor.

Many of the words on Free Rice don't seem to be grammar school vocabulary. If you have occasionally failed at being Smarter Than A Fifth Grader, you may stumble along the vocabulary path at Free Rice. Click here to try it.

This Thursday we Americans express our gratitude for all the abundance that has been bestowed upon us. Why not spend a few minutes testing your vocabulary and filling the bowl with rice for someone who is not going to sit at a table piled high with turkey, vegetables and pumpkin pie?

Thanksgiving, as celebrated on the fourth Thursday of November, is an American holiday. We are pleased that this blog is blessed with a number of readers from other nations, who celebrate Thanksgiving at a different time or do not have a similar national holiday. We want you to know that we are thankful for your presence, for your comments and for your friendship.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Terrie

Friday, Already?

This roadside ruin is no longer capable of inspiring the writers of tomorrow who will waste their best years looking for a dealer in uts.

So, it's time for our still-probationary Friday feature where we bullet point what we've done for our writerly selves. The definition is expansive, and feel warmly invited to contribute your own.

As I'm sure is clear by now (and if you're bored with the mentions, we're halfway through), a few of us WOM are participating in NaNoWriMo this year. For me, as in my previous 3 years of attempts, it's been challenging to generate the daily word count without draining of ideas faster than a leaky bucket. I'm somewhat behind the pace, but Week 2 is always the worst. It's known for that, in case you yourself noticed it's been sucking donkey danglers. The beginning enthusiasm dims, replaced by the reality of the long haul ahead, and your story may not yet have the momentum to carry you along. Not even enough momentum to carry a banana peel across greased tile. I've discovered that 1000 (un-good) words a day is a cinch for me, and at 2000, I'm a blubbering void.

Then, I got Sara Gruen's pep talk for next week. First of all, she's already been participating for years. Yet another representative proof that it's not just unserious dilettantes who find the exercise worthwhile. And like many of us, real-life awfulness slugged her in the word count:

Then life got in the way... [infected horse, Sara breaks her foot, dog diagnosed with late-stage cancer- you know, a Tuesday]...But as soon as we'd spent the requisite fortune to prove to her that we love her, she miraculously recovered (all our pets have taken up this method of proving our continued devotion). Meanwhile, my word count was slipping a little further every day. (You're probably wondering where the pep part of this pep talk comes in, aren't you?)

It was a bonus to learn that pets are the same all over. With incredible timing, mine also require shocking fiduciary testaments of affection every so often. But, most importantly, I learned that we were almost the same amount of words behind, and felt incredibly edified in my slackitude.

In the wee hours of last night, when I was trying to figure out how I could possibly give advice to people about their word counts when mine is so abysmal, I realized my problem. I've been ignoring my own advice, and everyone else's too. You know, the "no editing" rule, and the "it's okay to write a really bad first draft" rule, and the "move around the story as much as you want" rule. I was dutifully handing that advice out to my nano'ing friends, but I wasn't taking it myself and I was (and am) 5,640 words behind where I should be according to my little spreadsheet. But today, I am going to jump around and write only the fun bits! I’m going to write about food fights, and disastrous sex, and escaping in-laws, and apes with unlimited credit! I'm going to write about roach-infested motel rooms with strippers upstairs and ways of using Jefferson Starship's "We Built This City" as revenge! (Sorry Grace, I love you, but...)

And whenever one of those scenes starts winding down, I am going to ditch it without so much as a sayonara and look for the NEXT fun scene. The transitions can wait...

I've begun with a new character's POV, and (Hooray!) he's got a lot to say. The words and ideas are loosening up, and I'm heartily thankful for it a week earlier than gratitude's official due date. Jeeves had his fish diet, but I'm here to testify that Entenmann's mini chocolate donuts really are the WD40 for rusted brains. And I'll need at least another box if I hope to join everyone else in the NaNo winner's circle by month's end.

However, simply surviving Week 2 without quitting or entirely dooming myself feels pretty freaking sweet, I think to myself, as I watch the incandescent leaves raining onto the lawn outside the window. So, what've you been up to?

Crime Bake Spice

Lee Child was the Crime Bake guest of honor this past weekend, and it wasn't only his charm that won us. Although thriller-writers didn’t exactly dominate the crowd, his advice transcended genre, and he was generous with it.

The post-banquet mock trial of Jack Reacher was hilarious. In case thrillers don’t constitute the bulk of your reading, Reacher is Lee’s outside-the-mainstream Knight Errant character. We well-fed banqueters tried him for the heinous villain’s murder in Persuaded. Defended by Julia Spencer-Fleming, Lee looked vulnerable at her side. Michele Martinez played the brilliant prosecuting attorney. Nineteen out of twenty-one tables deliberated and confessed to hung juries. It won’t surprise you to learn that the only table that unanimously willed Reacher to hang was the one filled with agents and editors! (All in fun, of course.)

As always, Crime Bake offered opportunities for agent pitches and manuscript critiques. Here’s just a taste of the workshops:

ON SEX SCENES (Elizabeth Benedict)

• Make your sex scenes work like any other.
• Sex should either reveal character or advance the plot.

ON BEGININGS (Hallie Ephron, Joseph Finder, Chuck Hogan, Roberta Isleib)

• Open as late as possible in the story, at the point something grabs the reader.
• Open with normalcy, give us the hero’s voice. Establish what the protagonist needs and depends on...then rip her world apart.
• Win the reader’s alliance with the hero immediately.

ON WRITING BAD GUYS Catherine Cairns, James Benn, David Daniel, Michele Martinez)

• Know the villain’s backstory, but give readers just a taste. Paint her in more than one shade. Give her some redeeming quality.
• Put villains to work; they'll make your hero shine.
• Readers enjoy learning what separates them from villains. Villains commit evil deeds without remorse. Heroes, who may commit similar deeds, feel remorse.

ON CONSTRUCTING CHARACTER (Sarah Weinman, Sarah Graves, John Katzenbach, Julia Spencer-Fleming)

• Know and flesh out your bad guy in the planning stage; start with a hero who has something at stake.
• Make use of quiet moments between action scenes to build character.
• Occasionally use other characters' reactions to reveal a character's attributes.

ON ACTION & SUSPENSE (Jim Fusilli, Mark Arsenault, Lee Child, William Landay, Taylor Smith)

• Build suspense by implying a question and deferring its answer.
• Don’t shy away from melodrama.
• Obscure important clues by including several of equal weight.

ON BLOGGING (Sarah Weinman of “Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind”)

• Think twice before you post; are you sure you want to say this, and say it this way? Avoid airing gossip.
  
• Avoid rigidity – your goals can change direction.
• Post at least five times a week, and invite guest bloggers when you can't. Guests offer a breath of fresh air, come in jazzed and excited.
  

ON ENDINGS (Hallie Ephron, Joseph Finder, Chuck Hogan, Roberta Isleib)

• Don’t prolong the story, end as early as possible.
• Endings must both surprise readers and feel inevitable. Go for the reader’s “ahhh....” response.
• Justice needn’t always be served, and endings can be bittersweet, as long as the hero’s goal is reached.
• Before you roll over and fall asleep, make sure they’re satisfied!
  

- Lois

A Writer Immune from Criticism?

After the Backspace seminar wrapped, I joined Terrie Farley Moran and her friend, Deb Lacy, at the MWA Lee Child dinner at the National Arts Club in Gramercy Park. Walking into that building is like stepping into Miss Havisham’s house…fun and transformative. It gets you in just the right mood for a writerly evening. But I digress. I mention this dinner because of something Lee said – that he never wanted to be a writer and only decided to become one when he lost his job as a television director. Therefore, he never believed a lot was riding on it – only a paycheck. Oh, and an audience to buy his book. He said he didn’t really need the praise – still doesn’t. As long as his books sell, he’s doing OK. So, was he being entirely honest? Yes and no, perhaps. Like most writers, he’s probably a perfectionist and he obviously took great pains to craft his famous Jack Reacher character. He spent long hours, thinking about what would be interesting to readers. And he invested himself in his writing. If one does all that, is a writer ever completely immune from criticism?

Lee’s point was that only those who have always dreamed of being writers are the ones stung by harsh words. But if Lee spent that time and effort – even if it was never his life’s dream – is he above it all and doesn’t care? Does that happen when what you’re pursuing is not what you wanted to do in the first place? Or, does that happen after writing twelve, commercially successful, books? I would argue that it never happens. Lee puts too much of himself into his writing not to care what people ultimately think of his ability. I would argue that’s what makes him keep writing. Striving to write the perfect book is what all writers do in the end. It may not have been their dream, but it haunts them nonetheless.

Delivering a Strike for Futurism

I got the image here. No idea of the original source.

I've got big to-dos yet to accomplish today, but squirmy thoughts have birthed in my fevered brain during the current WGA strike. I can't help drawing comparisons to the traders in tree-meat, aka the traditional book publishing industry. See what you think. [...snips and editorial asides mine]:

1) Marc Andreeson writes about Rebuilding Hollywood in Silicon Valley's Image.

...I think the TV and movie industry is at a turning point where things could go either way -- they could repeat the critical error of the music industry and permanently alienate their customer base; or they could get it together and create viable models for the future that make consumers happy and make money...

The classic Hollywood economic model is built around the existence of a few very large companies -- studios -- that dominate production, marketing, and distribution...Historically, marketing and distribution of entertainment properties [like the once-significant costs of printing books] has been extremely expensive...Because of that, those few very large companies -- studios [publishers]-- have been bottlenecks. If you are talent -- writers, actors, directors -- you have to deal with the studios because otherwise you can never bring anything to market...As a consequence, talent gets paid like hired guns, not owners. [Most book authors do have the promise of royalties, but ask them about the Byzantine, even Iron-Age accounting, and how much that glacier-speed harvesting yields for those other than bestsellers.]

2) From Andreeson's post Suicide by Strike.

...You're faced with a massive, once-in-a-lifetime shift in mainstream consumer behavior from traditional mass media, including film and television, to new activities that you do not control: the Internet, social networking, user-generated content, mobile services, video games. It's been snowballing since the mid 90's, for like 12 years -- 12 years of denial and obfuscation -- but it's really rolling fast now....

...And the consumers you rely upon for revenue are so frustrated with your company's inability to supply them with what they want, when they want it, that digital piracy of your content has become mainstream and socially acceptable behavior practically overnight...And your company's culture is not prepared to deal with the shift.

Your company was founded 50 or 80 or 100 or 150 years ago by different people in a different time, and the overwhelming majority of your people now -- smart and well-meaning managers and bureaucrats, but still managers and bureaucrats -- have to be retrained and reoriented toward entrepreneurial thinking in a viciously dynamic and startlingly fast-changing world not of your, or their, creation....

3) Rob Long, who I've referenced here before, has a post called Rebuild or Disrupt (which tipped me to Andreeson's, tx!) where he breaks down the expense of even participating in television enough to earn failure, a 98% probability. [a percentage as bad as earning out your advance. ]

These are a few among the many relevant analogs to today's book publishing as I understand it.

Traditional publishing has high overheads, low margins, and some self-destructive practices. Despite its collective experience and the seductively august legacy conveyed to most of us by the brands, it's not consistently able to identify what readers will enjoy enough to buy. Instead, it spends ever more time acquiring reprint rights to sales-tested content, sometimes from smaller, more focused and entrepreneurial houses. Having lost faith in its own judgment, steering decisions become activities in consensus, making it less likely to decide in favor of the innovative and what might become black swan megasellers. It is on the trailing (if not the kicking-and-screaming) edge of technology and actively resists new venues. It's poised for someone to eat its expensed lunch while it grouses about the illegitimacy of the upstarts. And now's when I plug in my crystal ball, because I'm optimistic about the opportunities inherent in such chaos.

I love books. LOVE 'EM! That said, I think it likely that the hardcover market as we know it will continue to diminish. However, exquisitely-crafted hardbacks will blossom as specialties, collaborations between authors and illustrators and bookbinding artists. Hardcovers will become ever more precious, limited-edition items with extensive extras (like DVDs offer), made for appreciators of the objects and memorabilia as much as the prose.

Cheap, robust, good-looking paperbacks with some form of rapid-delivery will continue to proliferate on the strength of their content and the easy durability of the form factor. Big publishing controls a lot of content, so it would have made sense that they'd develop some decently-designed electronic reader paving new avenues of profit to their backlists. Well, no. They haven't gotten in front of this challenge any better than the recording industry anticipated the pesky Napster, itself several years behind the popular rips and downloads on usenet boards. Someone-- my bet's on the tech-savvy, entrepreneurial sci-fi crowd or a marketing/self-help guru-- will develop the killer app to connect readers directly to their instant (or almost instant) content that's simple, intuitive, and fun to browse. One might argue that Amazon is this already, and I like the review feature, but it's still a product middleman. With new attacks on the affiliate relationships through taxation, like in blissfully confiscatory New York, it doesn't provide a much better shake for authors' profit-sharing.

With a friendly, solid, trustworthy direct interface, some other nimble entity will partner-up or hit up a venture capitalist to finally make the electronic reader/digital medium that works harmoniously and makes us all go, "Duh! No wonder they never took off before. Of course, that's the best way to design it! I must have one!" Bookstores will continue to exist, I believe and thank heavens for them, but will operate especially in rarities, niche specialties, and/or as friendly, non-bar gathering places and event venues. (One chain location I knew could've colored its P&L black just by charging carpet-rent for its 'after-school program.' See other examples here.)

Writers can become again the proprietors of their own cottage industries. Sure, it's scarier than just passing off your manuscript to someone who's supposed to know better than you and then cut you a check. However, tools and forums will develop as we help each other through it, and I do believe more fiction writers will be able to profit more amply from their work by selling directly to and expanding their unique readerships.

Now, my head hurts. Besides, it's your turn to point out where I'm full of bilgewater.

How Do You Write?

Normally, I write everything in the order it happens. I need a character to get on a plane and get home before the next major scene, I sit there and hack away at that aspect until I figure out how to get her home in a reasonable time, whether I want to follow her onto the plane and see what she thinks about, whether that plane ride is important, etc.

But it's NaNoWriMo, and the writing rules are suspended. Today, I skipped a chunk that will probably end up being between 1500 and 2000 words. I know what has to happen there--one character has to get back to NYC from St. Martin and deal with the fact that someone has broken into her house. Back in St. Martin, another character has to find out that the dead woman the gendarmes fished out of the sea is, indeed, his wife.

But I am not sure how those are going to happen, so I skipped them. This is a--forgive the pun--novel experience for me. I have a friend who writes the pivotal, emotionally wrenching scenes of her books first, then goes back and fills in the rest of the stuff. No way could I do that. I've read her work and you cannot tell at all, but I know if I tried to write that way all the "fill in" parts would drag horribly.

I also know people who outline extensively, which I can't do. I heard an author at the Edgars last year say he'd tried it and found that once the outline was written, he didn't care enough to go back and write the book. The exciting part was over.

So I am a bit nervous about those 2000 words. What if once I am done with NaNo and go back to make that bit work, I can't get my characters to do what I need them to without losing the reader's interest?

Do you have a plan when you write? Are there things you skip intentionally with the intention of going back to them later? Do you outline a lot? A little? At all?

Backspace Agent-Author Seminar

So, in my last post I told you that I was going to spend a few days at the Backspace Agent- Author Seminar billed as All Agents All Day. Click here My good friend Deb Lacy flew in from California and fortune smiled on us when, at the last minute, another New York Sister in Crime, Tama Ryder decided to join us. Click here to meet Tama.

I read in the blogosphere that Patti Abbott Click here would be at Backspace and I made it one of my primary missions to find her and say hello. I am happy to say that I did and happier still to report that Patti has just received word that her short story “A Saving Grace” has been selected for inclusion in THE YEAR'S FINEST CRIME AND MYSTERY STORIES edited by Ed Gorman and Martin H. Greenberg. "A Saving Grace" originally appeared in The Thrilling Detective. You can read it here

This was my first venture into the realm of writers who don't write mystery. I mingled with the non-fiction people, the memoir people, the literary people and the sci-fi people. Who knew we would have so much in common? A writer is a writer is a writer, regardless of what they write. Every panel was packed with attendees taking notes and asking questions. And the panels covered topics that only a writer could love: First Contact: Queries That Work; The WOW Premise-What it Is -How to Articulate It; The Dreaded Synopsis to name a few.

Backspace provided authors to be with a great opportunity to understand the kinds of books agents are seeking. Besides the panel discussions, we attended “Two Minutes, Two Pages” workshops where writers were given a rare chance to see and hear two agents react to the first few pages of their manuscripts. This was a no holds barred approach and for the most part, it worked. At worst, an agent explained why she or he would not keep reading the manuscript, and at best, why they would. A writer who received positive feedback could then follow-up with that agent.

Our major recommendation for Backspace would be to add more of these workshops at the next conference. Our minor recommendation—do something to shorten the lunch line. A final note – a key component of this conference was meeting other writers. At the end of two long days, an encouraging word from a fellow writer can be all it takes to make a conference worth your while.

SPECIAL NOTE: Tama Ryder contributed heavily to this blog post and (Oh, I am so full of happy announcements today) has graciously decided to add her voice to Women of Mystery. Watch this space, Tama will be appearing here soon.

Terrie

NaNo and the New Friday Feature?

I know I've mentioned this in the comments, but I'm pledged to NaNoWriMo this month for what I hope will be my own 50,000 words in November. This year, something like 90,000 folks signed up for the free, bragging-rights challenge. Today, our cumulative, self-reported word count is now up to 295 million!

Some people wonder about the quality of work generated by such an exercise. I understand, but quality's not the primary goal here, though flashes of brilliance always occur. The goal is to get involved, excited, and committed to this unique act of creation. If nothing else, the multitudes involved become more passionate readers, and that helps us all. And because I despise my first drafts, churning through them with a cheery scrum at my back is preferable to solitary misery. The MS my agent is trying to sell now is one whose first draft I finished during my first NaNo, and I hope to repeat the feat. NaNo demands that writers loosen up enough to be willing to generate garbage, but, outrunning your headlights and speeding across the chasms allows for unexpected wonders to happen, too. One feature this year is a weekly pep talk from a pro to our inbox. Here's the first:

When you sit down to begin that novel of yours, the first thing you might want to do is toss a handful of powdered napalm over both shoulders---so as to dispense with any and all of your old writing teachers, the ones whose ghosts surely will be hovering there, saying such things as, "Adverbs should never be...", or "A novel is supposed to convey...", et cetera. Enough! Ye literary bureaucrats, vamoose!

Rules such as "Write what you know," and "Show, don't tell," while doubtlessly grounded in good sense, can be ignored with impunity by any novelist nimble enough to get away with it. There is, in fact, only one rule in writing fiction: Whatever works, works. Ah, but how can you know if it's working? The truth is, you can't always know (I nearly burned my first novel a dozen times, and it's still in print after 35 years), you just have to sense it, feel it, trust it. It's intuitive, and that peculiar brand of intuition is a gift from the gods. Obviously, most people have received a different package altogether, but until you undo the ribbons you can never be sure.

As the great Nelson Algren once said, “Any writer who knows what he's doing isn't doing very much.” Most really good fiction is compelled into being. It comes from a kind of uncalculated innocence. You need not have your ending in mind before you commence. Indeed, you need not be certain of exactly what's going to transpire on page 2. If you know the whole story in advance, your novel is probably dead before you begin it. Give it some room to breathe, to change direction, to surprise you. Writing a novel is not so much a project as a journey, a voyage, an adventure.

A topic is necessary, of course; a theme, a general sense of the nexus of effects you'd like your narrative to ultimately produce. Beyond that, you simply pack your imagination, your sense of humor, a character or two, and your personal world view into a little canoe, push it out onto the vast dark river, and see where the currents take you. And should you ever think you hear the sound of dangerous rapids around the next bend, hey, hang on, tighten your focus, and keep paddling---because now you're really writing, baby! This is the best part.

It's a bit like being out of control and totally in charge, simultaneously. If that seems tricky, well, it's a tricky business. Try it. It'll drive you crazy. And you'll love it.

Tom Robbins

Shall we declare Fridays a day when we can all post updates about what we've been doing in the comments? That might include very-official things like actually writing works-in-progress or activities related to publishing. And Great! But, as far as I'm concerned, it might also be: mulling over an idea that's still percolating; reading or watching something inspiring (or envy-inducing); researching; keeping a personal journal or blogging; perhaps taking the necessary time and space to clear the cobwebs between efforts; even handling the peskiness of "real-life", so you can clear the decks for writing later. For so many of us, writing demands much but probably doesn't pay the mortgage (yet- stay hopeful). Feel free to stretch the definitions, and tell us what you've done for your writerly self this week.

For What It's Worth...

...which may not be much, I post a link to this contest.

America's Next Top Novel - A Nationwie [sic] Novel Contest

Unlike some contest sponsors, these guys have actually been in business a while, and the prize isn't something outrageous like a contract. The post says that "the grand prize winner will win a complete manuscript evaluation and line-editing package...." At $25, the entry fee doesn't seem ridiculous, though it goes against the grain to pay to enter a contest at all. (For your $25, you get free copies of their e-book series, which retails from their website for $17.95, so if those are something that interests you, the contest becomes more worthwhile.)

There are a couple things about this contest that amuse me, though. First, there are the typos/grammatical errors in a post from an editing company. Of course, that's just a data-entry thing that was done by some poor shlub, but it's still funny. The second thing is that to win this contest you have to have a manuscript that is, presumably, in need of very little editing. After all, if you really needed their services, you wouldn't have a better book than everyone else who enters, right?

But there it is. If anyone does decide to enter, drop a line and let us know how it goes!