Ideas Whose Time You Never Saw Coming

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Like many — most? — people who like to think of themselves as creative, I’ve had my share of disappointments with the success of others‘ ideas:

  • Sometimes I’ve used a plot device, a character type, even a simple phrase in something I hope to have published… only to find it in some other work already published by some other author — who’s become fabulously successful. Argh, I think, why couldn’t that have been ME? Why did I wait so long? As though the gimmick (whatever it is) somehow caused the success.
  • Sometimes somebody uses a plot device, character type, etc…. and the work tanks miserably. Argh, I think, I could have done so much better with that! And been successful, too! As though the (mostly imaginary) mishandling of the gimmick (whatever it is) somehow caused the failure.
  • I once wrote a horror story which, even now, I think is publishable. Except for one thing: After I’d sent it to exactly one publication (where it was rejected — surprise! — because it was too long), a horror movie came out in which the “monster” might have been the one in my story. Argh, I thought, now I’ll have to hold off for a few years to give people time to forget the film. And then, a few years later, came the sequel. Which wallowed at the box office, much to fans’ surprise. So far I’ve been holding off for over ten years.

And then there are ideas which don’t fall into the disappointing category at all. You think to yourself, Why didn’t I think of that myself? or at least, Why didn’t SOMEBODY think of that sooner? (Think Harry Potter here, kiddies.) All you can do is applaud in wonder.

And finally there are the ideas — especially combinations of two or more other ideas — which are so bizarre that you’re surprised anyone at all ever thought to put them together.

I think this falls into that category. I give you the Ukelele Orchestra of Great Britain, performing… the theme from Shaft:

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Book Tech Support

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Going by the number of hits it gets, evidently my most popular post to date was back in June, titled “How Important Is Reading?” Here are some of the search terms which people have used to find this page:

  • how important is reading? (with and without the “?”)
  • is reading important? (ditto)
  • why is reading important (ditto)
  • why reading is important
  • why is reading so [!] important
  • important of reading
  • reading is important
  • how important is reading a book?

I’d probably feel better about the traffic that page has engendered if I’d actually contributed much in the way of content at there; after all, it’s pretty much just a video, with a couple introductory sentences. Still, it’s encouraging that so many people want to know about the subject.

Today’s post — again, with most of the content provided via video — is sort of in the same category. Rather than addressing the question of reading’s importance, though, this one starts with the assumption that reading is indeed important… so important, in fact, that if you don’t know what to do with a book, you simply must call upon a knowledgeable expert.

(The video — subtitled in English for philistines like me — is from the Norwegian TV show “Øystein og jeg,” with Øystein Backe and Rune Gokstad. It’s written by Knut Nærum.)

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!?$%*#@!!

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Sarge curses at Beetle Bailey using odd typographical characters

I’ve always liked punctuation; some would say I like it a little too much. For my junior-college newspaper, I wrote an opinion column called something melodramatic and “clever” like “The Outspeaker.” […checking yearbook… yeah, that was it, all right] I was convinced that the only thing anyone would notice about the column was the eloquence and subtlety with which I wrote. So I was quite surprised and confused, then, when my journalism instructor and newspaper advisor presented me with a bogus certificate, awarding me a prize for “parentheses, colons, and dashes.”

As you may know, tomorrow, 2008-09-24 is National Punctuation Day in the US. It seemed a good day to trot out some typographical trivia.

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Getting It Out of My System (2)

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(Part 1 of this N-part series was here.)

'Skydiving' by amab7 of sxc.hu (click for original)Let’s see, where were we… Oh. Right. I’d just posted excerpts from the Prologue to Crossed Wires, my 1992 mystery, and Chapter 1 from its never-published sequel, Trapdoor. And I said that the differences between those two excerpts sprang from “something” that happened in the roughly one year that elapsed between their two writings — something whose principal result was to relax me.

This isn’t the story of how I came to write Crossed Wires. (A lot of that crosses over into autobiography — not relevant right now.) No, it’s the story of what happened after I wrote it.

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Getting It Out of My System (1)

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[In a post a few days ago, I started to nose around my “issues” with writing mysteries, thrillers, and the like. This is the perfect time do something I really don’t like to do, much — to lay out the story behind one of my formative experiences as a writer: the publication, in 1992, of my first book. In a couple days, in part 2, I’ll cover how it got to print. In this part, I’ll try to purge myself of some second thoughts about the book itself. And maybe, in the process, I’ll get the damned monkey off my back.]

Crossed Wires didn’t get many really good reviews, a fact which stunned and wounded its author. On the other hand, I learned that even when reviewers found some honest-to-God fatal flaw, they were nearly always generous enough to close their reviews on an “up” note.

I’ve got a folder of Crossed Wires reviews sitting on the desk here, right by my hand. But I’m not (for now) going to quote specifics. Instead, I’m going to talk in generalities — categories of things which bothered reviewers. The complaints were of three kinds (not all equally easy to dismiss):

  1. Complaints about the heroine, Finley’s, depiction as a hearing-impaired person. Surprisingly, these complaints came primarily from individual readers and online communities who were themselves hearing-impaired. The problem was never, He shouldn’t be writing about this stuff. Instead, it was Oh, this isn’t what it’s really like to have a problem hearing… That would never happen with a hearing aid. And so on. While it sort of bugged me, this criticism was the easiest of the three types to ignore — because, of course, Finley’s experiences with deafness and hearing aids had been my own.
  2. Complaints about the lack of mystery to this “mystery”: how easily the reader knew in advance who the killer was, how slow on the uptake were the “good guys” (especially Finley). I’ve got no excuses in this department. (On the other hand, as you’ll see in part 2, I had some professional help in mucking up the storytelling.) Unfortunately, the mystery at the heart of any mystery novel, the suspense in any thriller, is its reason for being; even if I’d eliminated complaints of type 1 (above) and type 2 (below), this one alone would have killed the book’s chances for success. And rightly so.
  3. Complaints about the writing style. While these didn’t come from the majority of reviewers, they probably stung the most. Somewhere here on RAMH recently, or maybe it was a comment on a blog somewhere, I mentioned that I think of myself more as a writer than as a storyteller. Every family member (of course), every friend, every teacher and school newspaper/magazine advisor I’d had through college, every editor with whom I’d ever corresponded on story proposals and so on… they all agreed: “John can write.” That someone — professionals at that, who by definition must appreciate good writing — that they didn’t join the chorus, well, it just flabbergasted me.

It’s this third sort of critique which I want to talk about here. And I’m not going to argue the point, either. I’m going to agree with it.

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Upsetting the Apple Cart

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I’m going to go out on a limb here and…

…no, I’m not going to write a post about posts which begin with long-dead metaphors, posts whose authors should really know better. Though I, or somebody, probably should.

What I am going to say is possibly heretical and, well, possibly something I should keep my mouth shut about, since I care about my putative writing career. But it’s been driving me crazy — a real professional and perhaps even personal dilemma.

One of the first pieces of advice you get from agents, published authors, writing workshops, writers’ guides, and so on, is that you must picture where in the bookstore your book will be shelved. This becomes, then, your genre. Fiction’s got mystery, romance, SF/fantasy, young adult (YA), so on and so forth; and then non-fiction too is all over the map — biography, history, true crime, humor (hey, I didn’t make up these categories!), travel, reference…

(Above all else, the advice goes, if you’re serious about your writing career, avoid the dreaded mid-list/mainstream classification.)

Where will your book come to rest? they all want to know. Where do you belong?

Actually, it’s not such questions per se which are problematical. You do need to have some sense of how to explain your work — especially to potential agents, editors, even casual readers — and providing the genre helps accomplish that, even before you’ve offered details.

Where problems do come in is when you select a genre in advance, before a book is even written — despite your own proclivities.

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Publisher Seeking Authors: The New Frontier

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At the Dennis Cass Wants You to Be More Awesome site, in a thread about dispensing with the whole query-an-editor/agent process, member Paul Mikos pointed me to an experiment by publisher HarperCollins UK.

The experiment goes by the name “authonomy” (a cute neologism I’m still trying to make up my mind about). From the authonomy page of Frequently Asked Questions:

authonomy invites unpublished and self published authors to post their manuscripts for visitors to read online. Authors create their own personal page on the site to host their project — and must make at least 10,000 words available for the public to read.

Visitors to authonomy can comment on these submissions — and can personally recommend their favourites to the community. authonomy counts the number of recommendations each book receives, and uses it to rank the books on the site. It also spots which visitors consistently recommend the best books — and uses that info to rank the most influential trend spotters.

We hope the authonomy community will guide publishers straight to the freshest writing talent — and will give passionate and thoughtful readers a real chance to influence what’s on our shelves.

The reason Mikos pointed me to the authonomy site was that I’d earlier commented on the same thread that writers should form online marketplaces to which agents and publishers would come, seeking writing samples.

I suspect I’ll soon be lurking in the authonomy wings for at least a little while, and if so I’ll report back here about the experience.

For now, as I said to Mikos, I’m concerned about the time commitment required to participate fully and fairly. I know about myself that if I posted 10,000 words of my own writing, I couldn’t just sit back and wait to hear reactions to it. I’d want to read at least one to five thousand (or more) words of the contributions of five or more other authors, and I’d want to try maintaining an active involvement in the authonomy forum(s), and, and, and…

But it may also be too tempting to pass up, especially this early in the experiment.

For the record, as I said in an earlier post about blurbs, the whole business of writers trading public responses to one another’s work seems heavy with potential for abuse. I’m still not 100% comfortable with it at authonomy; that the mutual reviewers aren’t compensating one another with cash seems a minor point, since the real coin of an unpublished writer’s career is that of attention. The authonomy FAQ deals with this question, to some extent:

Just like the books market at large, there may be a few flutters and fads at authonomy. And in this day and age, there’s no denying you need to think about actively promoting your book to readers by networking if you want to gather a healthy army of support.

But with thousands of members at the site to impress and some stiff competition, it will take more than schmooze and a winning smile to reach the top. We believe quality of writing and book construction will be the ultimate test to sustained support and success on the site. When your book is assessed by the editorial board or by any visiting agent or publisher, quality of work is by far the most important consideration.

We’ll see!

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Short Fiction: Modem Operandi

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One thing The Missus has always said about my writing: if it amuses no one else, it amuses me. Personally, I think she exaggerates. It doesn’t all “amuse” me. [wounded sniff] But one story, well, I really enjoyed writing it. And it still makes me grin to re-read.

Like many stories I wrote in the ’90s, “Modem Operandi” was born of a writing exercise. This one had a single simple premise: write a story about an online community whose members are dying. That was it. No length restrictions. No gimmicky bits about the opening and closing sentences. No genre specified.

At the time this exercise was presented to me, I’d just finished the first draft of my first book — a mystery which, as it happened, centered around email and electronic bulletin-board systems (BBSes). And I was feeling a little bit burnt out by the requirement to ensure that readers understand the technology. (Remember, this was the early 1990s: no Web, for one thing; online communication itself was via low-speed analog modems whose throughput was in the range of mere hundreds of bits per second. Email had begun making inroads at some companies, true. But by and large this was still very much terra incognita for my presumptive audience.)

So I decided to have fun with the exercise — just write and enjoy it, on the assumption that I wouldn’t have to explain every freaking thing to readers who at least understood the basics.

“Modem Operandi” was the result: a sort of comic-noir first-person story which (although 10K-ish words in length) took me only a couple days to write.

(By the way, the narrator of this story, one Jack Frame, has left a legacy in Merry-Go-Round: his son Kevin plays a minor but significant role.)

It was always too long to appear in print publications of the time, although I did submit it to a couple. Now, some e-zines might accept it… but the technology is woefully out of date, and honestly, I don’t feel a compelling need to re-write it around the Web, Google, even IRC over BBSes.

As always with these longish “short fiction” pieces, I’ll link from here to an opening excerpt. And there’ll be a link at the foot of that page which allows you to download the whole thing as a PDF.

Anyway: here’s “Modem Operandi.” Enjoy!

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Partridge-Built Canoes

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I was scouting around recently looking for information on the word “gnomic.” It seemed apropos for a comment I wanted to make on somebody else’s blog, and I thought I gnew knew what it meant, but wasn’t 100% positive.

One of the more thorough resources I located on this subject was the “Love to Know 1911” site, which is supposedly (who knows?) based on the 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Here’s an abridged version of what it says there about “gnome and gnomic poetry”:

Sententious maxims, put into verse for the better aid of the memory, were known by the Greeks as gnomes, from [the Greek word for] an opinion. A gnome is defined by the Elizabethan critic Henry Peacham (1576?-1643?) as “a saying pertaining to the manners and common practices of men, which declareth, with an apt brevity, what in this our life ought to be done, or not done.” The Gnomic Poets of Greece, who flourished in the 6th century B.C., were those who arranged series of sententious maxims in verse… But the title “gnomic” came to be given to all poetry which dealt in a sententious way with questions of ethics. It was, unquestionably, the source from which moral philosophy was directly developed, and theorists upon life and infinity, such as Pythagoras and Xenophanes, seem to have begun their career as gnomic poets. By the very nature of things, gnomes, in their literary sense, belong exclusively to the dawn of literature; their naivete and their simplicity in moralizing betray it.

Which tends to confirm what Wiktionary tells us about “gnomic” in the informal sense:

(of a saying or aphorism) Mysterious and often incomprehensible yet seemingly wise.

In the event, I didn’t end up using “gnomic” in the comment. It fit, but (per the above) it can be pejorative, and I hate to hurt people’s feelings (or, alternatively, p!ss them off).

And anyway, I’d come across some distractingly interesting examples of Native American gnomic pronouncements. (Who knew?) These are from the eighteen-volume Cambridge History of English and American Literature (Ward & Trent, et al. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1907–21):

Watch him with his neighbour’s children.
Would you choose a councillor,
(Sioux)

Do not stand wishing for the fish in the water,
Go home and make a spear.
(Puget Sound)

And my favorite:

Of an affair which makes a great stir without getting forward the Micmac will say: “It goes like the canoe that the Partridge made.” The point of the comparison is in the fable of the Partridge who, observing that a canoe goes faster when the ends are well rounded, conceived the brilliant idea of a canoe which should be rounded on the sides also. The result was a bowl-shaped structure which went round and round without progress.

Don’t ever let anybody tell you these were primitive people.

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Celebrity Moments (Bogus Edition)

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I love finding new, really well-written blogs. But I don’t like using services like StumbleUpon and Technorati et al. to find them. Many of my favorites I came to almost accidentally; someone comments astutely on someone else’s blog, for example, and I follow up the link from the commenter’s name, and lo, there I find a rich verdant pasture of daily commentary and/or howling snarkery, or whatever.

So it was that I landed on The Misssy M Misssives (yes, those are triple S’s), subtitled “Stories from a Besom and Blether.”

In particular, I landed there on a post from May, entitled “David Bowie sold me a raffle ticket”:

…in my life, it appears that I have met quite a few famous people. I thought I’d list some of them for you for a laugh. They are all true.

True. All right then. That’s interesting. And they are funny. (Likewise all the comments, in which visitors listed their own brushes with the notable.)

(Note, though, that not all these celebrities will be familiar, capital-N Names on this side of the Atlantic — or maybe just on this side of 40-some years of age. Like, Christopher Lee? Sure. Even Roland Gift, whose name gave me a little ego puff because I knew who he was before she said so. But “Wet Wet Wet’s Marty Pellow”? Sheesh.)

I’ve got no “celebrity moments” to report at the moment. But I thought it might be entertaining (well, to one of us, anyhow) to riff on the idea of celebrity encounters which never actually happened…

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