Author: drdoyleeditorial

Cranky Thought for the Day

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Most science fiction and fantasy authors aren’t interested in writing what used to be called (and may still be called, for all I know) “teen problem novels.” It’s okay, apparently, to have a young adult protagonist who is in some way different, provided that the difference is what the book is about. There has to be angst, and discrimination, and Dealing With Issues† — the non-default protagonist is not allowed to have a story that isn’t all about his or her non-default qualities.

Or, to put it a bit more snarkily, the non-default character is not allowed to enjoy his or her life, or go on adventures, or have fun. If science fiction and fantasy are part of the literature of escape, then readers who are in one way or another not default-normal are constantly being told by the gatekeepers of young adult fiction that freedom is for other people, not for them.

Which is — just in case anybody was in any doubt as to my opinion on the matter — bad.

†Like Dancing With Wolves, only not as much fun.

Back Again

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I’m home from a week spent teaching at the Viable Paradise writers’ workshop on Martha’s Vineyard.  As usual, I did as much learning as teaching; a stretch of time spent in the company of other writers is always invigorating.

It’s also exhausting, especially when you have to plunge directly into a couple of editing gigs and a heavy deadline.

But I’ll try to keep y’all posted, as it were.

(Yes, my native dialect is one of the many variants of American Southern, tempered by seven years of grad school in Philadelphia, fifteen years as a camp follower Navy spouse, and a couple of decades’ residence in far northern New England.  What this means, in practice, is that I have access to an actual second-person plural, which is something that a functioning language really ought to have.)

 

Homonym of the Week

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Because I’ve been bumping into this one all over the place lately.

Things that are discreet are quiet, unobtrusive, not-noticed, and don’t draw attention to themselves.  “Smith made discreet inquiries into Jones’s financial history.”

Things that are discrete are separate and distinct from each other.  “Jones set up discrete budgetary categories for his various expenditures.”

Got that?

Good.

 

On the Road Again

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Posts here are likely to be thin on the ground for the next week and a bit, because I’m on Martha’s Vineyard, gearing up to teach at this year’s Viable Paradise workshop.

But I’ll be back, I promise.

 

Metaphor Made Edible

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Let’s start with the recipe.  It’s another one of those Busy Writer Crockpot Specials, this one known formally as Cheesy Kielbasa Potato Soup (“cheesy” in recipe-land, appears to be a code word for “contains Velveeta”.)

Ingredients

1 (30 ounce) bag frozen hash browns
14 ounces kielbasa, cut into bite sized pieces
4 cups chicken broth (for a 32 oz bag of hash browns, make it ~5 cups)
2 onions, diced
8 ounces Velveeta cheese, at room temperature

Directions

In crock pot, combine hash browns, kielbasa, broth, and onions. Stir well and cook on low 6-8 hours.

30 minutes before serving, cut Velveeta into cubes and stir into soup. Cover and cook on high 30 minutes or until cheese is melted.

This recipe can be seasoned further by individual diners with hot sauce, or sour cream, or horseradish, or whatever they want.

What does this have to do with writing?

First, let me tell you about the time I made a much more authentic (i.e., it contained neither frozen hash browns nor Velveeta) potato soup from scratch, including the part where I peeled and diced 8 cups of potatoes.  It turned out as it was supposed to, but the only person in the family who liked it was me — and at that point in time we were six people around the dinner table, so I wasn’t going to put a dish that labor-intensive into permanent rotation when the majority verdict was at best meh.

Some time later, I found this recipe, and because I still liked potato soup, I decided to give it a try.  It wasn’t terribly expensive — the kielbasa was on sale — and it looked dead simple to make.  Kind of low-rent, what with the Velveeta and all, but this time I wasn’t going for Genuine Potato Soup, I was just going for a quick and easy dinner.

The family cleaned their plates and went back for seconds.

“Do this one again!” they all said.

And the way in which my potato soup experience is like unto the writer’s life experience is this:  You can never predict which one of your works, or what part of a work, your readers are going to like based on how much effort you put into it.

It Varies

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The quality of the layout and typography in commercially published e-books, that is.  (So does the quality of non-commercially-published e-books, but those are beyond the scope of this post.)

To a large extent, the quality of an e-book depends upon whether the publisher is working from an electronic version of the manuscript as originally submitted (a lot of publishers these days ask for either electronic-only MSS or a combination of electronic and hardcopy), or whether they’re working from a scanned hardcopy version of the published book.

It used to be mostly pirates who worked from scanned hardcopy. These days, though, a number of legitimate publishers are working on bringing their backlist titles out as e-books, and a number of authors are doing the same thing with their own works for which the rights have reverted. In both cases, if the original book was produced during the typewriter era, or in the early days of word processing, scanning a sacrificed hardcopy may be the only way — short of re-keying the whole thing — to get an electronic text.

A lot also depends on whether or not the publisher bothers to have somebody proofread the e-book before it’s released. Dead-tree books are copyedited, and have the copyedited MS gone over by the author before being set into type, and then the typeset MS is gone over again by both the publishing house and the author before being sent to the printer. Even so, errors will creep in. Sometimes it’s just because no matter how many sets of eyes look at a thing, something’s going to get missed; other times, very bad stuff can happen at the printer’s end and not get noticed until angry book buyers start sending back their copies. Turning hardcopy into e-text, if the publisher is converting something that never had an electronic MS, often involves taking apart a physical copy of the book and scanning it page by page, which not only preserves any existing errors but opens the way for even more.

Some publishing houses clearly take care with the process of turning hardcopy into an e-book; others just as clearly don’t do much more than pour the however-generated e-text into a standard template and don’t bother much with it after that.

Your best bet is probably to write to the publisher about any errors you find. It’s not likely to get you a better version of that particular book, but it might encourage them to take more care with the process in the future.

Some Things Just Don’t Translate

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Written and visual storytelling are two different things, and something that works just fine in one medium may not work at all in the other.  Imagine trying to do the classic music-plus-montage transition sequence beloved of film-makers everywhere with nothing but words on paper, for example.  Writers being the creatures they are, some of them have probably tried it, and it’s possible one or two of them may have succeeded — but it’s bucking the odds.

Over on the written-to-visual adaptation end, you get all sorts of problems with adapting interior action — stuff that’s going on mostly inside the protagonist’s head — into an effective visual form.  The key word there being “visual”; voice-over narration is not usually a good answer.  In my opinion, any director who’s thinking about using voice-over narration should stop and think about it some more before going on with the project. The whole point of a movie is that it tells the story through visuals and action; throw in explicit first-person narration and you might as well have a radio play with illustrations. And that goes double for noir-detective-style first person.  Stuff that reads on the page as moody and atmospheric and full of character-building through voice and tone tends to come off as purple and pretentious when spoken aloud. Especially when spoken aloud with pictures.

Sometimes, granted, Hollywood does make changes in written source material just because it can; but a lot of the time, the changes are made because something interior and/or verbal had to be translated into external action in a visual medium.

 

A Thankless Task and a Helpful Tool

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One of the hardest things to do, in the writing business, is proofreading your own text.  I know that every time I give a story or a novel the final run-through before printing it out or e-mailing it, I worry that I’m going to miss something — an “untied” where there should be a “united”; a sentence that should have a period at the end of it but somehow mysteriously doesn’t (cut and paste is great for revising, but sometimes not everything gets picked up when it should); a “not” that’s gone missing, to the  complete and utter detriment of the intent of an entire paragraph, if not the whole work.

One reason the final proofing is so hard is that by the time you reach that stage of the project, you’ve already read every sentence in it multiple times, and your brain is going to take advantage of that experience to helpfully supply anything that might be missing, and correct anything that might be wrong.  To fight against that, writers do all sorts of things to counteract the familiarity of the text — have a text-to-speech program read it aloud; make a printout if they’ve been working only on-screen; change the page from the standard double-spaced publisher’s-guidelines layout to double columns; and my own favorite, change the font.

For work like this, you don’t want a pretty font.  You want one that’s almost aggressively in-your-face with its distinctive letterforms, one where the errors are going to leap off the page at you and go for the throat.

One such font is Lexia Readable; it’s also good for printing out a text you’re going to be reading aloud from.  Another good proofing font is DPCustomMono2, which was originally developed for proofreading OCR-generated texts.  But any font will do in a pinch, so long as it isn’t the one you’ve been reading the text in all along.

 

 

Go Look Over There

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Or, somebody who isn’t me, saying something useful and interesting.  This time, it’s John Barnes, on the subject of what to do about Mary Sue when she (or he — Barnes also makes a convincing argument for why he, at least, applies the term to characters of both genders) turns up in your story.  Good stuff, and it goes beyond the usual alternatives of “give her a couple of cosmetic flaws” and “terminate her with extreme prejudice.”

Useful Bits of Hard-Earned Knowledge

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…presented here for anyone who might need them:

  •  If the transmission dies on your car, don’t bother with getting it replaced. Instead, take this as a Sign From God that you are meant to trade in that car for a new — and different — model.
  •  If you are a freelancer, credit cards are the work of the devil. Nevertheless, if you are a freelancer, you will almost certainly need to have at least one. None of the ways out of this dilemma are optimal.
  • If you’re a freelancer, pay up front and in cash for whatever you can. There’s never any guarantee that you’ll have the money in your account later.
  • If the thought of having a poor credit rating makes you feel all dirty inside, you’re probably better off not trying for a freelance career in the arts or entertainment industries. Keep your day job and do the art on the side.
  • And if you can’t work a day job and still make time enough somehow to do the art you love, you probably don’t love it enough to do it full-time, either.