Month: November 2012

How to be a Patron of the Arts on the Cheap

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We can’t all be Lorenzo de’ Medici.  But even without a family banking fortune and the resources of Renaissance Florence to draw on, there are things an average Joe or Jane can do.  For example:

Buy your favorite authors’ books. This will not only earn them royalties, it will help keep them in good odor with their publishers.

If your favorite authors are self-publishing their backlist, or their beloved but quirky projects that never caught the eye of a regular publisher, buy those, too.

If you run into one of your favorite authors in the sort of social venue where such things occur, offer to buy him or her a drink.  (Some of us learned to drink good scotch back when normal human beings could afford to purchase it.  Now that a bottle of Laphroaig  costs $55 and up even before the taxes kick in, we’re not likely to buy some unless we’ve got an advance check burning a hole in our pocket.)

In a similar vein — many authors attend conventions and related gatherings, either for the sake of furthering their careers or for the sake of getting away from their keyboards and having some much-needed social interaction.  Often (the writing life being what it is) they’ll be doing it on a shoestring.  In which case, you can earn your Patron of the Arts badge by saying, “Can I take you to dinner?”  If they’ve already promised elsewhere, they’ll say so; if they’re flushed with funds or burdened by pride they may decline; but the odds are very good they’ll be delighted, and tell you so, because even writers who are flush with funds today are keenly aware that the same may not hold true tomorrow.

You can be political.  Programs like art in the schools, or library funding, or state grants to artists and writers, are always in danger of being defunded, and most of them contribute to the income stream of working artists.†  Fight to keep them going.  And continue to push for better health-care options for self-employed people — since the passing of Obamacare, it’s no longer quite as easy as it used to be to depress a room full of writers just by whispering the words, “health insurance,” but things could still be better.

†Your average working artist has a mixed income stream very similar in most respects to the income stream of small farmers — a bit of this and a bit of that and a little of something else on the side. Or, as  a sign on Route 3 once said: “Fresh Eggs. Aromatherapy. Tarot Card Readings. Chain Saws Sharpened.”

Civic Duty Accomplished.

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I have voted.

If your polls are still open, and you haven’t yet voted — what are you waiting for?

Go!  Shoo!  Vote!

(Somehow, I doubt that I’m going to get much else accomplished this evening.)

Another Item from the Department of Nifty Stuff

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More research gold — the Metropolitan Museum of Art has put a bunch of its publications up on the ‘net for on-line reading, PDF download, or print-on-demand.

All sorts of books are available: titles like The Armored Horse in Europe, 1480–1620 or Cochineal Red: The Art History of a Color or History of Russian Costume from the Eleventh to the Twentieth Century, to name just a few.

Man, I love the internet.  Time was, you’d have to go hit a major research library (if not travel all the way to New York) to get some of this stuff.

Uphill.  In the snow.  Both ways.

Peeve of the Day

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“What’s today’s peeve, Dr. Doyle?” asks the Useful Sockpuppet.

“Proper dialogue punctuation,” I reply.  “You will have noted, I presume, that your line just now ended in a question mark, followed by a quotation mark, followed by the verb — in this case, ‘asks’ — in lower case?”

“Um . . . yeah,” says the Useful Sockpuppet.

“And you will have further noticed that your next line of dialogue does not end with a period, but with a comma?”

“I guess so.”

“Sockpuppet, you have eyes — I sewed the buttons on myself.  It ends with a comma, followed by a quotation mark, followed by the verb in lower case.  Capisce?”

“Yes, ma’am,” says the Useful Sockpuppet.

“Then for the love of literacy, Sockpuppet — next time, get it right.“

Why Movie Novelizations Tend to Suck

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Not all of them do, of course; nevertheless, when it comes to novelizations, suckitude is the way to bet.  Most of the time, though, it isn’t really (or at least, not entirely) the writer’s fault.

Reason number one:  The writer probably didn’t have that much time to work in.  The publisher wants the book to come out at the same time as the movie, and the studio doesn’t make the book deal until fairly late in the game (because in the grand Hollywood scheme of things, the novel tie-in is roughly as important as the Halloween costume and lunchbox rights.  Or maybe less.)  This leaves the writer facing the directive, “We don’t want it good.  We want it Tuesday.”

Reason number two:  The writer probably didn’t get a copy of the actual movie to watch before writing the novelization.  The studio doesn’t give those out to just anybody, and novelists aren’t even anybody.  The writer would have gotten a copy of the screenplay for the movie; if the writer was lucky, it would even have been the version of the screenplay that actually got filmed, and not some earlier — and superseded — version.

Reason number three:  The novelizer has to please not only his or her editor at the publishing house, but also the person at the movie studio who’s in charge of maintaining consistency and creative control.  This effectively prevents the writer from doing anything innovative or unusual with the material.

Reason number four:  A screenplay is a bare bone to make a good soup with.  It’ll run, typically, about 120 pages, of which a lot is white space.  A knock-down brawl or an epic swashbuckling chandelier-swinging duel may be set down on the page as just “They fight” — presumably on the grounds that the second unit director is going to be handling that sequence and will have his own ideas.  (The novelizers will count themselves lucky if the chandelier bit gets a mention, because viewers of the movie are going to remember it, and will complain if it doesn’t turn up in the novel.)  In any case, the fictional form that matches most closely a film in length isn’t the novel, it’s the short story or novella; but you don’t see novella-length tie-ins crowding the bookstores.  If an author has been charged with making an 80K or even 120K novel out of a standard-weight screenplay, and if he or she isn’t going to be allowed to make up additional story material to fill things out, then the only alternative left is going to be shameless padding.

So the next time you’re reading a novelization that isn’t one of the rare handful of actually pretty good ones, pause a moment and spare a kindly thought for the writer who strove to give the publisher and the movie studio the very best novel that they could get by Tuesday.

Local Option

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The big difference between grammar and syntax, on the one hand, and punctuation and spelling, on the other, is that grammar and syntax are part of the essential nature of language in the same way that bone and muscle are part of the human body, but punctuation and spelling are human-made, artificial, and arbitrary.

The spoken language is first, and primary.  The written language is a secondary construct, a device for pinning down and freezing in time the transient and ephemeral spoken word.  Spelling and punctuation are imposed upon the language from the outside, in the interest of reducing confusion and supplying at least a few of the non-verbal language components that are lost during the spoken-to-written changeover.  It’s not surprising, therefore, that some these externally-imposed cues can vary from region to region, or even among native speakers in the same region.

A couple of cases in point:

Grey vs. gray.  According to the dictionaries and the handbooks of usage, gray is the “preferred” American spelling and grey is the British one; but “preferred” is not the same as “required,” and a number of American writers use the grey variant.  (Full disclosure:  I’m one of them.  If I’m making up a style sheet for a copy-editor who’ll be working on one of my books, that’s one of the things I’m going to tell him or her.)

The serial comma.  (Also known as the Oxford comma, or the Harvard comma.)  This is the comma that comes before the “and” in a list of items in a series:  “three cheers for the red, white, and blue”; “send lawyers, guns, and money”; “every Tom, Dick, and Harry.”  Some writers believe in the serial comma with an almost religious fervor; others don’t like it at all and never use it.  This one really is a personal choice; just be consistent, and let your copy-editor know.

Deadline Brain

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From a fragment of conversation heard this evening in the office:

Me:  Is it Saturday that they want the cake for the church bake sale, or did I completely space out on things and it was today?

My husband and co-author:  Relax.  So long as they have it by 10:30 Saturday morning, you’re good.

In honor of that moment, and in lieu of something more substantive about writing (other than, my goodness writers do get spacey when they’re on a deadline), the cake recipe in question:

Marvelous Mississippi Mud Cake

5   ounces (5 1-ounce squares) unsweetened chocolate
2   Cups sifted all-purpose flour
1   tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 cup powdered instant coffee or instant espresso
2   Tbsp boiling water
1   cup plus 2 Tbsp cold water
1/2 cup bourbon, or rum, or amaretto, or cognac
1   cup unsalted butter at room temperature
1   tsp vanilla extract
2   cups powdered sugar
3   large eggs plus 1 large extra yolk
1/4 cup sour cream or buttermilk
cocoa or confectioners sugar optional

Generously grease  a nine inch Bundt pan – 10 cup capacity.  Position rack in center of oven and heat oven to 325 deg. F.

Melt chocolate in the top pan of a double boiler over hot, not boiling, water.  (Or, these days,melt the  chocolate in your microwave.) Remove chocolate before it is completely melted and stiruntil smooth.  Set aside.

Sift together the flour, salt and baking soda and set aside.  In a two cup glass measure dissolve the instant coffee in the boiling water, stir in the cold water, and bourbon or other flavoring and set aside.

Beat the butter with vanilla and sugar in the large bowl of an electric mixer fitted with a paddle beater until  well blended and smooth. (Or use a handheld electric mixer if that’s what you’ve got.)  Beat in the eggs one at a time, beating after each addition.  Beat in the extra yolk and sour cream.  Scrape down the bowl and beater.  Add the melted and slightly cooled chocolate and beat until the batter is smooth.

Remove the bowl from the stand.  By hand using a spoon or rubber spatula stir in small amounts of the flour mixture and the coffee-bourbon liquid.  Beat until the batter is smooth;  it will be quite thin.  Don’t worry if the batter looks slightly curdled.

Pour into the prepared pan.  Bake until the cake top is springy to the touch and slightly cracked looking and a cake tester inserted in the center of the cake comes out clean — about 65 to 70 minutes.  Do not over cook.

Cool the cake on a wire rack for 15 minutes.  Top with another rack or plate and invert.  Lift off pan,  Cool completely.

Top with light sifting of confectioners sugar or cocoa.  Serve with bourbon-laced slightly sweetened whipped cream or vanilla ice cream.

 
I got this recipe from my father; I have no idea where he got it from.  It’s clearly been around for a while, though; you can tell that much from the fact that the original version called for melting the chocolate in a double boiler.