Publetariat

This post, by Robin A. Burrows, originally appeared on her site on 1/22/13.

A writer-friend recently got a smart phone and wanted app recommendations. I decided that would be a good idea for a blog, and my Social Media Tutorial blog series came to be.

The first installment will be apps for writers and other creative people. I plan to post a new tutorial once or twice a month.

I use a Windows-based PC and apple products for my mobile devices, so that is what I will be talking about. However, most apps have an equivalent Android app.

Dropbox

By far, this is the most useful app I’ve found as a writer. It’s basically an online storage account that you can sync between devices. For example, you can install the app on your phone, your computer, and your ipad/tablet. Any documents you place in the Dropbox folders will be available in all three places. If you are away from home and think of the best story idea ever, you can write a note and place it in the Dropbox folder on your phone. Then when you get home and log into your computer, the note will also be available in the Dropbox folder on your computer.

People also use Dropbox an off-site backup of those important manuscripts. If your house burns down and you lose your computer, hard drives, and paper manuscripts, your documents will still be available on Dropbox.

Accounts are private, but Dropbox has the option to share individual folders with your friends on Dropbox. This is handy for collaborating on projects. One note, I wouldn’t save any financial documents to Dropbox because anything online has the possibility of being hacked.

There are a number of competing services which do the same thing as Dropbox. I tried out the Google Drive since I have a lot of google accounts, but Google Drive kept converting my documents into Google Docs format which I couldn’t open using my office software anymore. There are ways to work around that (primarily being always open files in the editing software and never directly from the Google Drive), but if you accidently open something important, you might not be able to “un-convert” it. So I decided to go with Dropbox instead of Google Drive since Dropbox didn’t have that issue.

The Dropbox app is free. You start out with 2 gigabytes of space, but you can get up to 16GB by promoting the app and inviting friends to join. There are also several paid packages if you need more space. You can download Dropbox free here.

QuickOffice Pro / QuickOffice Pro HD

Every writer needs a word processing app. I tried dozens of apps, but QuickOffice is the only one I found that does everything I need it to do, and it has built-in Dropbox compatibility. I can create Office documents on my computer and save them to DropBox. Then I can open those Office documents in QuickOffice on my mobile devices, make edits, add text, add comments, etc. Or I can create documents on my mobile devices and open them later in Office on my computer.

My favorite thing about QuickOffice is that it retains formatting. This is especially important for writers in the editing process. Many people provide feedback to documents using the “comment” ability in Office. If you open that document in most mobile word processing software, those comments are either invisible or erased. So you’ve lost those comments when you reopen the document on a computer. All of that beautiful formatting that took hours to do also disappears in other apps, but Quick Office retains formatting. That is so incredibly wonderful for writers.

QuickOffice lets you create and edit Word, Excel, and Powerpoint documents and their equivelants. (I haven’t actually tried a PowerPoint document yet, but the others work beautifully! There is an iPhone version (QuickOffice Pro) and an iPad version (QuickOffice Pro HD).

This app is not free. The price varies depending on sales, but it typically costs less than the amount you would spend for two people to eat out. You can run some iPhone apps on your iPad, but they run at the same size as the iPhone unless you use the 2X button to double the size. This doubles the screen size, but still uses the iPhone resolution, so things are blurry. I highly recommend buying the specific version of this software for the specific device.

You can find QuickOffice Pro and Quick Office Pro HD in the iTunes app store. I think it is also available in the Android app store. If you use a Mac as your primary desktop computer, and wants a mobile app that works well with that, Pages works well from what I’ve heard.

Read the rest of the post on Robin A. Burrows’ site.

This article, by Italo Calvino, originally appeared in the New York Review of Books in October of 1986.

Let us begin with a few suggested definitions.

1) The classics are the books of which we usually hear people say: “I am rereading…” and never “I am reading….”

This at least happens among those who consider themselves “very well read.” It does not hold good for young people at the age when they first encounter the world, and the classics as a part of that world.

The reiterative prefix before the verb “read” may be a small hypocrisy on the part of people ashamed to admit they have not read a famous book. To reassure them, we need only observe that, however vast any person’s basic reading may be, there still remain an enormous number of fundamental works that he has not read.

Hands up, anyone who has read the whole of Herodotus and the whole of Thucydides! And Saint-Simon? And Cardinal de Retz? But even the great nineteenth-century cycles of novels are more often talked about than read. In France they begin to read Balzac in school, and judging by the number of copies in circulation, one may suppose that they go on reading him even after that, but if a Gallup poll were taken in Italy, I’m afraid that Balzac would come in practically last. Dickens fans in Italy form a tiny elite; as soon as its members meet, they begin to chatter about characters and episodes as if they were discussing people and things of their own acquaintance. Years ago, while teaching in America, Michel Butor got fed up with being asked about Emile Zola, whom he had never read, so he made up his mind to read the entire Rougon-Macquart cycle. He found it was completely different from what he had thought: a fabulous mythological and cosmogonical family tree, which he went on to describe in a wonderful essay.

In other words, to read a great book for the first time in one’s maturity is an extraordinary pleasure, different from (though one cannot say greater or lesser than) the pleasure of having read it in one’s youth. Youth brings to reading, as to any other experience, a particular flavor and a particular sense of importance, whereas in maturity one appreciates (or ought to appreciate) many more details and levels and meanings. We may therefore attempt the next definition:

2) We use the word “classics” for those books that are treasured by those who have read and loved them; but they are treasured no less by those who have the luck to read them for the first time in the best conditions to enjoy them.

In fact, reading in youth can be rather unfruitful, owing to impatience, distraction, inexperience with the product’s “instructions for use,” and inexperience in life itself. Books read then can be (possibly at one and the same time) formative, in the sense that they give a form to future experiences, providing models, terms of comparison, schemes for classification, scales of value, exemplars of beauty—all things that continue to operate even if the book read in one’s youth is almost or totally forgotten. If we reread the book at a mature age we are likely to rediscover these constants, which by this time are part of our inner mechanisms, but whose origins we have long forgotten. A literary work can succeed in making us forget it as such, but it leaves its seed in us. The definition we can give is therefore this:

3) The classics are books that exert a peculiar influence, both when they refuse to be eradicated from the mind and when they conceal themselves in the folds of memory, camouflaging themselves as the collective or individual unconscious.

Read the rest of the article on The New York Review of Books archive.

We’re glad to be able to share this excellent infographic from Open Site, which has generously released it under Creative Commons licensing.

The graphic shows some very interesting statistics about library usage, demographics and how technology is being used in libraries. It should be of interest to authors and publishers everywhere.

If text in the image below is difficult to read, click here to view the infographic in a larger format on Open Site.

One of the things I like most about writing is the research it leads me to. I think of a story idea and start developing it, then discover I need to know more about something that’s relevant to the story. When I was writing MageSign, for example, I needed to have a good working knowledge of cults and their methods of indoctrination. I could have just made it all up, but it’s important to me to know that I’m getting things right. And I owe it to my readers to deliver something as factually correct and consistent as possible. There’s an authenticity to well-researched fiction. Equally, poorly researched fiction stands out as being pretty rubbish, even if a reader can’t quite put their finger on why. That’s the basis for my Write The Fight Right workshops, after all.

Publetariat Editor’s note: strong language after the jump

With the cults thing I was lucky in that my mother-in-law is a psychiatrist. She’s been exposed to all kinds of stuff in her line of work and was able to direct me to good quality resources on the subject. I read a lot, educated myself and hopefully wrote an engaging and authentic book that resonated with readers. Along the way, I greatly enjoyed the process, because I learned new things. Education is good, mm-kay.

Why am I bringing this up now? Well, I had a really good read partly spoiled by poor research. I’ve just read a novel by Tim Lebbon called Fallen. It’s a great read – a dark fantasy set in the world of Noreela. It’s a bold idea, got great characters, excellent writing and some really cool stuff happens (although I was really disappointed with the ending, which was a shame). I won’t give much away, except to say that the story follows two Voyagers, Ramus and Nomi, and their band of bodyguards. Ramus and Nomi travel and learn for the sake of expanding the knowledge of their nation. To the far south of their land is the Great Divide, a huge wall of rock that stretches from coast to coast and is lost in the clouds above. No one knows how high it is, what’s at the top (if it even has a top) or anything else. So, for reasons explored in interesting ways through the book, Ramus and Nomi set out to climb the Great Divide.

It is a good book and I enjoyed it for the most part. Other than the ending, which I won’t spoil, the other thing that really annoyed me was the climbing research. I don’t know how much experience Tim Lebbon has as a climber. Personally, I’ve only climbed a little bit. It’s a great pastime and one I’d like to do more. However, when I started reading the bit about the climb (which, as you can tell from my brief synopsis above, is a very large and integral part of the book) I had a shock. The characters, as they climbed, kept hammering crampons into the rock face to tie their ropes to for safety. Crampons? I has a confused. This is a crampon:

Crampons are things you strap to your boots to improve traction on snow and ice, especially for ice climbing. You can get walking versions too, for glacier walking and the like. Can you imagine hammering one of those into a rock face and tying a rope to it? You be pretty fucking dead, pretty fucking quick.

These days people use passive safety devices called nuts or hexes for securing their ropes, or more active devices like spring-loaded camming devices. In the old days, they would have just hammered iron spikes into the rock face, I imagine. I don’t know this for certain and would have to research it, but that wouldn’t be hard. Especially with things like Wikipedia and all the hobby forums out there.

Incidentally, even though Lebbon made that mistake, how does something like that get past an editor? Does no-one connected with that book know what a crampon is? Well, I guess that’s a stupid question. Obviously no-one did. And it really spoiled the read for me, because I do know what a crampon is and every time I read about a character hammering one into the rock the narrative became farcical and I ground my teeth and had to try to ignore it and push on regardless.

I’m glad I did because, like I said, it is a good book, ending notwithstanding. Except for the bloody crampon thing. There was another thing I read once, written by an American, where a character passed briefly through England and stopped in a shop. He was charged in Euros. They don’t use Euros in Britain – still the good old pound sterling. It’s a small thing that’s really annoying because it makes the author look dumb and makes the reader question everything else included in the book. If a writer can’t tell the difference between a shoe accessory and a safety device, can I trust him or her on anything else? Unless, of course, I’m really missing something vital and there’s another definition of crampon that I’m not aware of and couldn’t find when I checked.

Even in fantasy and other forms of speculative fiction, it’s really important to get the details right. Internal consistency is essential and building your speculative world in a framework of believable and accurate detail is the only way that suspension of disbelief will survive. We all make mistakes, I’m sure. I bet there are some things in my books that make certain people grind their teeth in frustration. I really hope there aren’t, but I’m not so egotistical to think that I’ve got everything exactly right. But I do try to get things right, I research deeply and the bonus is that I really enjoy that research.

We’re always told to write what we know. Which is a load of bollocks, of course, because we’d run out of things pretty quickly. But we can learn about stuff and then write about it. It’s important that we do, because the process is good fun and it makes us better writers and more informed people. Then we write better books and stories.

Perhaps this whole post is easily summed up thus: When you’re writing, make sure you know the difference between a spiky shoe accessory and an iron spike.

This is a reprint from Alan Baxter‘s Warrior Scribe site.

This article originally appeared on The Daily Mail site.

He wrote that the ‘human mind is capable of excitement without the application of gross and violent stimulants’.

And it appears that simply reading those words by William Wordsworth prove his point.

Reading challenging works by the greatest writers in the English language such as Shakespeare’s King Lear and Philip Larkin’s poetry provides a ‘rocket-boost’ to the brain that cannot be matched by more simplistic modern books, research suggests.

Researchers at the University of Liverpool found the prose of Shakespeare and Wordsworth and the like had a beneficial effect on the mind, providing a ‘rocket-boost’ to morale by catching the reader’s attention and triggering moments of self-reflection.

Using scanners, they monitored the brain activity of volunteers as they read pieces of classical English literature both in their original form and in a more dumbed-down, modern translation.

And, according to the Sunday Telegraph, the experiment showed the more ‘challenging’ prose and poetry set off far more electrical activity in the brain than the pedestrian versions.

The academics were able to study the brain activity as readers responded to each word, and noticed how it ‘lit up’ as they encountered unusual words, surprising phrases or difficult sentence structure.

This reaction of the mind lasted longer than the initial electrical spark, shifting the brain to a higher gear and encouraging further reading.

Read the rest of the article, which also includes brain scan images, on The Daily Mail site.

This article originally appeared on the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Student Affairs Counseling Center site. While it’s geared toward students, procrastination is a pretty universal problem and one many writers particularly struggle with, so if this is an issue for you, the article is definitely worth a read.

Overcoming Procrastination

Procrastination technically refers to the avoidance of a specific task or work which needs to be accomplished. But this technical explanation doesn’t begin to capture the emotions triggered by the word. For most of us, the word “procrastination” reminds us of past experiences where we have felt guilty, lazy, inadequate, anxious, or stupid–or some combination of these. It also implies a value judgment; if you procrastinate, you are bad, and as such, you lack worth as a person.

Procrastination and Its Causes

In order to understand and solve your procrastination problems, you must carefully analyze those situations where your work is not being completed. First, determine whether the cause is poor time management; if so, you will need to learn and develop time management skills. If, however, you know how to manage your time but don’t make use of those skills, you may have a more serious problem. Many individuals cite the following reasons for avoiding work:

• Lack of Relevance – If something is neither relevant nor meaningful to you personally, it may be difficult to get motivated even to begin.
• Acceptance of Another’s Goals – If a project has been imposed or assigned to you and it is not consistent with your own interests, you may be reluctant to spend the necessary time to see it to conclusion.
• Perfectionism – Having unreachable standards will discourage you from pursuing a task. Remember, perfection is unattainable.
• Evaluation Anxiety – Since others’ responses to your work are not under your direct control, overvaluing these responses can create the kind of anxiety that will interfere with work getting accomplished.
• Ambiguity – If you are uncertain of what is expected of you, it may be difficult to get started.
• Fear of the Unknown – If you are venturing into a new realm or field, you don’t have any way of knowing how well you’ll do. Such an uncertain outcome may inhibit your desire to begin.
• Inability to Handle the Task – If through lack of training, skill, or ability you feel that you lack the personal resources to do the job, you may avoid it completely.

Procrastination Takes Many Forms

Read the rest of the article on the UIUC Student Affairs Counseling Center site.

This post, by Jeff Gerke, originally appeared on the Speculative Faith blog on 1/11/13. In it, the publisher for Marcher Lord Press explains his decision to start a new imprint for a controversial book rather than risk being blackballed by a prominent Christian Fiction writers’ group and awards process.

Could I publish a book with vulgarity, nudity, and sex? That was the real question. What would my mom think, you know? What would all the awesome homeschooling moms who love MLP think? What would my other authors think?

Since our launch in 2008, my small publishing house, Marcher Lord Press , has billed itself as “the premier publisher of Christian speculative fiction.” We were premier in the sense of “first,” and also, I hoped, in the sense that we would remain at the forefront even when other small presses eventually joined our ranks.

Our niche is that segment of Christians who love fantasy, science fiction, time travel, superhero, and all the rest of the wonderfully weird genres. We target Christians who love Big Bang Theory, Christians who shop at ThinkGeek.com, and Christians who would go to Comic-CON if given half a chance.

Since 2008, we’ve racked up three Christy Award finalist nominations and two wins, something like ten ACFW Carol Award finalist nominations and three straight wins, a number of EPIC and Indie and Inspie nominations and wins, and several positive reviews in Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, and USA Today Online, including a coveted “starred review” in Publishers Weekly.

One of the advantages of running your own publishing company, especially one that doesn’t try to get its wares into brick and mortar bookstores, is that you can publish anything you jolly well please. It used to be that Christian bookstores (and, sometimes, the very conservative patrons of those bookstores) controlled what could and couldn’t be published by Christian publishers. One complaint from these folks, and a book could die. Multiple complaints, and there was big trouble. But with a small press selling online, this is not an issue.

That’s both good and bad. The good is that you can publish any book you want to publish. The bad is that…you can publish any book you want to publish. It used to be that those folks at bookstores were drawing the line in the sand about what could and couldn’t be published. Now, there is no line. Now it’s up to the individual publisher as to what will be published. The mantle of censorship, so to speak, has now been placed on my shoulders and on the shoulders of any indie publisher.

In late 2011, one of my MLP authors came to me with an idea. He was disappointed with the latest volume in George R. R. Martin’s hugely popular secular epic fantasy series that began with Game of Thrones. My author wanted to produce “the Christian answer to Martin.” He wanted to write an epic not only in scope but in actual size—he wanted a book as big as Martin’s. A typical novel runs around 100,000 words. A typical MLP novel runs around 125,000 words. This one was set to be more than 200,000 words (and ended up being even larger, as you’ll see).

But the story idea was going to push the boundaries of Christian fiction. It was to be a warfare book, so there would be lots of violent content—but that wasn’t a problem for me. I often laugh that traditional Christian fiction is allowed to have so much violence. You can have a body count as high as the sky…but you can’t say dang or have a couple French kiss. Anyway, I wasn’t bothered by the prospect of violence in the book.

What threw me was that the author felt very strongly that the book needed to have vulgarity (which, he informed me, is different from profanity), nudity, and even sex. He had one scene in mind especially, the reunion between a husband and wife when the man comes home from war. He wanted his book to be a corrective to secular fantasy fiction, which almost never shows sexual conduct between married people but seems rather to glorify adultery.

Indeed, much of his novel was imagined as a corrective to secular fantasy. He wanted to show the Christian faith as a positive influence, for instance. He wanted to show Christian clergy as real people—some good, some bad—instead of as the uniformly sinister and corrupt hypocrites that secular fantasy shows them.

In many ways, this epic fantasy was designed to be the fiction equivalent of a Christian standing up in the middle of, say, Comic-CON and saying, “I love all the things you guys love and are doing, but you’re missing the most crucial aspect, the aspect that matters for eternity. Come over to my booth, and I’ll explain what I mean.” It was, in a sense, a work of apologetics (which has nothing to do with apologizing, btw).

So then the decision fell to me. Of course I wanted to create the Christian answer to Martin, not just for the large audience we’d be sure to attract-slash-irritate, but also because of the author’s noble intent.

But could I publish a book with vulgarity, nudity, and sex? That was the real question. What would my mom think, you know? What would all the awesome homeschooling moms who love MLP think? What would my other authors think? I tell you, this decision drove me to my knees. I spoke to my wife, my advisors, and my stable of authors.

I ultimately felt that God was allowing me to go forward with it, so we did.

In terms of the mature content, about the only thing I changed in editing was to scale back that husband/wife reunion sex scene. The author wrote it out explicitly, leaving it to me to decide where to draw the line. Ack. I scaled it back a couple of times until I could read it without freaking out.

Meanwhile, during the editing of the book, word was getting out that we were heading toward the launch of this book. One woman wrote me to say that we were no longer a Christian company and when I came back to God I could drop her a note and she’d think about supporting us again. I expected that sort of thing.

What I hadn’t expected was the support I received. I had a number of authors—some were my own authors and some were folks who had despaired of ever finding a publishing outlet for their mature Christian novels—privately tell me how much an answer to prayer this new development was to them.

Things were going along pretty well until two days before the book was to release. I got a note from the folks at a prominent Christian fiction writers group in America saying that if we released this book, they would take MLP off their list of approved publishers. That meant that all MLP books would not be eligible for their annual award.

 

Read the rest of the post on the Speculative Faith blog.

I don’t really believe in new year’s resolutions. I get the concept, and it’s an entirely admirable pursuit, but it’s often like crash dieting or NaNoWriMo – it’s fundamentally unsustainable. People make all these promises to themselves in the heat and excitement of a new year, and then sink in guilt and stress when those things may not come to pass.

After all, January 1st is only one day after December 31st and it’s entirely arbitrary that we choose to tack onto that day a new identifier for the year. The Chinese aren’t celebrating their new year until February 10th next year, for example. It’s all bollocks, as is all time. As Terry Pratchett said, we just invented time to stop everything happening at once. Which is funny, but also not true. Time is a purely human invention to help us make sense of things and organise when to meet at the pub.

My simple point is this – making specific resolutions for the new year is a fine sentiment, but it’s often very hard to follow through. For example, saying, “I will lose 20kg in 2013″ is potentially opening a person up to failure. But if you say, “I will be a healthier person in 2013: eat healthy, exercise and try to lose some weight”, then that’s more of an attitude than a particular goal and easier to hang onto for a longer period of time. It’s easy to look at that sentiment throughout the year and try to stick to it, as there’s no specific measurement involved that might slip away. And if you fall back from that attitude for a while, it’s pretty easy to look at it, remind yourself and get back on that horse to ride again. Giddy up, motherfucker, there’s no point in crying when you could be trying.

So instead of making new year’s resolutions, I’m going to list a bunch of things I intend to hang onto all year. Not resolutions, but attitudes to never forget. These are ways of being that I’ve always tried to maintain, and intend to maintain into the future.

So, in 2013 (and beyond):

I will continue to work hard at being the best writer I can be, because this shit isn’t easy, nor should it be.

I will finish all the things I start.

I will continue to pursue publication in all the places I’ve yet to crack and further publications in the places I’ve already been featured.

I will have more work published.

I will write novels, novellas and short fiction, because stories are great in all sizes.

I will grab every opportunity that comes my way, because I am a fucking professional and time is made, not found.

I will celebrate the successes of all other writers, because their success is proof I can succeed too. And they deserve it.

I will share the good shit and ignore the rubbish.

I will help my writer friends wherever I can, because I didn’t get where I am now without help.

I will strive to excel and improve, because where I am now is nowhere near where I want to be. I want the moon and the fucking stars, baby.

I will continue to read like a voracious word devourer, because a writer who doesn’t read is a crappy writer. And a bad person. A really, really bad person.

I will look after my health.

I WILL WRITE, because the only actual requirement to be a writer is that you write. Being published, being famous, being rich and successful, being happy with your creative endeavours, none of it comes unless you write. First and foremost before everything else: WRITE. You will not find the time to write – you MAKE the time to write. If you really want it, you will make it happen. Only got one hour, twice a week? Fine, start there. Write for two hours a week, every week. Guess what? You’re a writer now. Then make more time. Make. It. Happen. Then all that other stuff can follow.

These are only my writerly attitudes, of course. Similar philosophies apply to my life as a martial artist, instructor and personal trainer, and to my life in general as a human person of Earth. It’s good to focus on these things and remind ourselves of them regularly. New year is a fine time to take stock, but so is every other day of the year. These things are not resolutions. These things are constants.

May 2013 be everything you want it to be. I wish you all (and myself) happiness, health and success in all you do. Now get out there and make it happen, motherhumpers. I want to hear your names sung from the mountaintops, and mine sung along with them.

This is a reprint from Alan Baxter‘s Warrior Scribe.

As usual, the spammers and hackers have ruined things for everyone.

For months now, among the hundreds of new user registration applications received each week, ten or fewer are from legitimate people who genuinely want to blog and comment about writing and publishing here. All the rest are from spammers and hackers, but we can’t know if a given application is fraudulent or from a legitimate prospective member until it has been physically inspected by a real human being.

While it’s nice to know Publetariat has become a big enough online fish to be seen as a worthy target for this level of spammer/hacker attention, we’d much prefer not to be showered with that type of praise. We simply don’t have the time or resources to waste on this nonsense.

Publetariat is entirely volunteer-staffed, and is offered as a free, public resource for writers, authors and publishers, indie and mainstream alike.

Since we don’t want to put our valued readership at risk by eliminating or streamlining the registration inspection/approval process, but we also can’t keep spending so much time and effort keeping the bad guys out, we regret to report that for the time being and foreseeable future, Publetariat will not be accepting any new user registrations.

We have also been forced to clean up our catalog of registered users, to try and eliminate nefarious user accounts from the past. All of the following accounts have been deleted:

1. Any account with a suspect email address

2. Any account with a suspect or spammy username (e.g., MyBestBargains)

3. Any account that duplicates a pre-existing username or email address

This post, by Katie Roiphe, originally appeared on Slate on 1/9/13.

There has lately been a rising backlash against the ubiquity of personal writing. Hamilton Nolan’s anti-confessional diatribe in Gawker claims that journalism students are now taught only to write about themselves, which I can say as a full-time faculty member at a journalism school is patently absurd, but he raised some interesting points about the dubious rise of confessional writing over the last two decades and the market pressure, especially on younger writers, to make a splash, or at least publish something somewhere, by turning to their own, possibly limited, life experience.

And then, of course, there were recent critiques of Elizabeth Wurtzel babbling incoherently about her pure heart in New York Magazine.

All of which leads me to believe it may be time to think methodically about what separates good confessional writing from bad confessional writing. It’s dangerously cartoonish to say all personal writing is bad, and to automatically attack every writer who dares to delve into his own experience, but there are a million different ways to write personally and some of them are undoubtedly better than others. Here, then, are some basic principles I have come to over the years as both a professor and a writer (though, of course, I am still puzzling through them and tinkering with them and will continue to do so probably for the rest of my life):

1. The writer should turn her fierce critical eye on herself. (One of the great masters of this is Mary McCarthy, who was terrifying and brilliant in her critiques, even of her own pretentions and snobbisms.) It is always satisfying to read a writer who sharply and deftly attacks the hypocrisies and delusions of the world around him, but we trust that writer more completely when he also attacks himself, when he does not hold himself to a different standard, or protect himself from scrutiny. Take David Foster Wallace’s famously dazzling essay, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.” He obsessively, comically, gorgeously dissects everything around him on the cruise ship, but does not exempt himself from his high level satire:

Read the rest of the post on Slate.

This post, by Terry Odell, originally appeared on her blog on 1/7/13.

Authors want to see lots of reviews for their books. Why? Reviews and star rat­ings can move a book up or down the vis­i­bil­ity charts at the e-book stores. Some pro­mo­tion sites won’t con­sider a book unless it has over 15 reviews with a 4.5 star aver­age. But are they really reviews if they’re writ­ten by read­ers and not pro­fes­sional review­ers? Some folks just leave a num­ber of stars and that’s it. Oth­ers write “book reports” and tell the whole story, includ­ing giv­ing away crit­i­cal plot points. But no mat­ter what, the sites want you to assign a num­ber of stars to your review.

What do the stars mean?

At Ama­zon, this is what you see if you hover over each star.

1. I hate it
2. I don’t like it
3. It’s OK
4. I like it
5. I love it

At Barnes & Noble it’s this:

1. Poor
2. Below Aver­age
3. Good
4. Very Good
5. Exceptional

Goodreads uses the fol­low­ing guide­lines:

1. Didn’t like it
2. It was OK
3. Liked it
4. Really liked it
5. It was amazing.

Now, there’s a big dif­fer­ence, in my opin­ion, between “I hate it” and “Didn’t like it.” I’d also con­tend there’s a dif­fer­ence between “Excep­tional” and “Amaz­ing.” But one thing Goodreads and Ama­zon have in com­mon is that they’re ask­ing for opin­ions. Per­sonal reac­tions to the book, which often have noth­ing to do with the qual­ity of the writ­ing. Barnes & Noble’s guide­lines lean more toward content.

The reviews on these book sites are reader ‘reviews’ and many of those who post them have no idea what a ‘review’ means. Per­sonal exam­ple. I noticed a one star review for Rooted in Dan­ger. Since the book received a starred review from Pub­lish­ers Weekly (which are pro­fes­sional reviews, not reader reviews), I won­dered what this reader found so ter­ri­ble. The review said, “All the authors other books are avail­able in dig­i­tal for­mat, but this one is only hard cover.” Is that a book review? Hardly. Nei­ther is the “the book took two weeks to get to me” or “the cover was ripped.”

Read the rest of the post on Terry Odell’s blog.

This post, by Steven Ramirez, originally appeared on his Glass Highway site and is reprinted here in its entirety with the author’s permission.

Normally I don’t like to talk about a work-in-progress. For me, it’s better to actually write than talk about the writing. Anyway, here’s the thing. I’ve been slogging through my new zombie novel—yes, that’s right, I am daring to be awesome—and I am at the point where things need to get bigger. I mean, really big. Like soldiers and guns against ravening armies of the Undead. My only problem? I don’t do big.

If you’ve read any of my work, you’ll know right away that I am the kind of writer who likes to focus on small, tense situations with very few characters. And over the years I’ve refined those particular chops. I am pretty comfortable coming up with painful dilemmas for these poor imaginary souls. And I always find a way to write my way out of them. Or else the characters die at the end, which is fine with me.

But now I’ve taken on a much bigger project, which is not to say I am writing about the zombie apocalypse. No, there are plenty of good books, movies and television shows covering that ground. I am particularly fond of ‘The Walking Dead‘ on AMC.

Small can be Big My story has more in common with the original ‘Night of the Living Dead.’ You know how that one goes, right? First, there’s a single zombie (actually they are referred to as ghouls in the movie) stumbling around the cemetery where Johnny and Barbra have just laid a wreath at their father’s grave. Soon the gates of Hell open and now a bunch of twitchy strangers are trapped in a farmhouse, trying to find a way to stay alive while outside a horde of these ghouls is clawing its way in.

I watched George A. Romero’s excellent horror movie the other night and guess what. It still holds up. The writing is great. Not only is there the requisite gore but he gives us plenty of humor as well. Like when the field reporter, played by Bill “Chilly Billy” Cardille, interviews Sheriff McClelland and asks him, “Are they slow-moving, chief?” People pay good money for those kinds of laughs.

Romero does a great job of hinting at a bigger movie. Through a series of television reports, he lets us know that pretty much the entire eastern third of the United States has been overrun by ghouls. He tells us that top scientists are meeting with the President of the United States and that soon the National Guard could be deployed. But he never shows us those scenes—brilliant!

Now of course if you interviewed Mr. Romero, he’d probably smile affectionately like you were some kind of moron and say something like, “Of course, I didn’t show that. We had no money!” Fair enough.

Getting back to my book… Budget is irrelevant so I am free to write big scenes if I want to. The problem is, I really don’t know how without mimicking every apocalyptic disaster movie ever made. I refer to H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds. In that book, the unnamed narrator carefully describes the Martian invasion. Compare that to Steven Spielberg’s version from 2005. Night and day, my friend. Night and day.

Time for Plan “B” Because these kinds of set pieces don’t come naturally to me, I am forced to try another approach. I’ve decided that I will tell myself the story—in my head so that people don’t think I am a lunatic. In fact, I will describe scenes to myself as if I were watching a movie—but my movie.

Once I’ve gotten down the big strokes, I will then dissect the scenes and write about them piece by ear-splitting, gut-busting, brain-bleeding piece. With luck when I suture the parts together, I will have me one whopping good scene.

Will it work? I’m happy to report that I’ve begun to rewrite a few chapters this way and I believe it is in fact working. And to be clear, this is not big for big’s sake. The story requires it. At some point, the National Guard is deployed and given that they usually arrive packing lots of cool weapons, military vehicles and helicopters, things must get bigger. Which leads me to my next problem.

Research is Key Recently I finished reading Stephen King’s excellent On Writing. Unlike James A. Michener, apparently Mr. King doesn’t do a ton of research before banging out a first draft. He is more interested in getting the story out of his system. I imagine the process is like pouring molten bronze into a mold—only there is no mold, just the hot metal holding itself together, somehow defying the laws of physics. Once that’s done and he is revising, he goes back and researches those things that need researching and makes the appropriate adjustments. I actually do some “pre-research,” then more after the first draft.

There’s a lot of research required to make the scenes in my book believable. Not to mention the idioms that people who are in the Army use. On that note, I recently met with a friend of mine, a retired police captain, who clued me in to how a local police department might handle a real outbreak. My next task is to interview someone from the National Guard to better understand how they actually bring order. Fun stuff.

So to recap:

1. Dream big scenes
2. Write them in small chunks then string them together
3. Apply research to correct and enhance the scenes

How does that sound to you? I’d love to hear how other writers handle this. And now for that excellent TV reportage where you’ll hear Sheriff McClelland provide the best description of a zombie ever.

 

This post, by Jason Gurley, originally appeared on Writing-World.com.

If you’re anything like me — the traditional short story writer — then perhaps you’ve had the same reaction I exhibited when I first heard of something called “flash fiction.” I stopped, stared, then turned to a writer friend of mine and said, “What?”

Flash fiction has been around for years, but has become increasingly prevalent in the literary community. Once the obscure little sister of the conventional 2,000 word story, flash fiction has shrugged off that obscurity to accept its new position: the intellectually challenging blurb. Dozens of literary publications, both print and online, have shifted their focus to include (or focus exclusively upon) flash fiction.

So what is it?

A Flash in the Pan?
In brief, flash fiction is a short form of storytelling. Defining it by the number of words or sentences or even pages required to tell a story, however, is impossible, for it differs from writer to writer, editor to editor. Some purists insist that it is a complete story told in less than 75 words; others claim 100 should be the maximum. For less-rigid flashers, anything under 1,000 words can be considered flash-worthy. And there are even a few who stretch their limits to 1,500 words.

Not only is the definition of flash fiction unstable, but the name is as well. Pamelyn Casto recounts its various titles in her article Flashes on the Meridian: Dazzled by Flash Fiction:

Other names for it include short-short stories, sudden, postcard, minute, furious, fast, quick, skinny, and micro fiction. In France such works are called nouvelles. In China this type of writing has several interesting names: little short story, pocket-size story, minute-long story, palm-sized story, and my personal favorite, the smoke-long story (just long enough to read while smoking a cigarette). What’s in a name? That which we call flash fiction, by any other name would read as bright.

So we’ve now got a fairly blurry idea of what flash fiction is. The question now: How can one write it?

Flashes of Inspiration
Though the form is by definition extremely short, it is not a medium that tolerates fragemented storytelling. The challenge of flash fiction is to tell a complete story in which every word is absolutely essential, to peel away the frills and lace until you’re left with nothing but the hard, clean-scraped core of a story.

Do not make the mistake of assuming that such bare-bones writing is less than elegant or beautiful. Sometimes beauty, or even inspiration, can be found in the simplest of things.

What makes a complete story? Lila Guzman, author of “Ask the Author”, once told me that a complete story is “A beginning, a middle and end.” How difficult is that?

When it comes to cramming such things into less space than the back of a playing card, it can be very difficult indeed.

Read the rest of the post on Writing-World.com.

This post, by Jamie Todd Rubin, originally appeared on his site on 12/17/12.

Every now and then, when I write about the vast number of story rejections I’ve collected over the years, I get asked why I don’t self-publish some of the stories that I haven’t sold elsewhere. The short answer is that self-publishing is not for me. To be clear I am speaking only about me and my goals as a writer. Different writers have different goals and different reasons for writing.

I grew up reading science fiction stories and I admired the writers who wrote them. I wanted to be just like them. Most of these writers didn’t self-publish. They went through a process of submission and rejection, until they ultimately started selling stories. Later some of them transitioned to novels. Each of them had to overcome some kind of editorial bar. While this editorial bar is an arbitrary judgement of quality, it nonetheless means something to me. I think of it like trying out for a baseball team. No one just starts in the majors. You play ball in Little League, and work your way up to the older leagues. Then there is junior varsity and varsity ball. Maybe college ball and if you are really talented and lucky, the pros. But who judges that talent? That bar that is set to get the pros is set high for a reason. This doesn’t mean you can’t settle into an adult softball league and have a blast. It also doesn’t mean that settling into such a league implies a lack of talent. It’s just a different path.

When I started out writing, I did so with the intent of being just like those writers I admired so much, and that meant, as much as possible, following in their literary footsteps. I always tried to keep the bar high for me. It wasn’t just about getting my stories in front of as many eyes as possible. It was about honing my craft so that the stories I wrote were good stories, worthy of a position in the same magazines as my heroes’ stories appeared. It meant that I rarely submitted stories to magazines which were not considered “pro” markets until after I made my first “pro” sale.

Then, too, I might like a story I write. I might love it, but I am probably the worst judge of my own stories. Who might be qualified to tell me if the story is any good? It seems to me that a professional editor at one of the major magazines is just that person. They are extensively read within the genre. They know what sells and what does not. Sure, their opinions are their own, but it is the same yardstick that applied to my heroes, so why not to me as well?

Read the rest of the post on Jamie Todd Rubin’s site.

Publetariat is observing the New Year’s Day holiday, and knocking off work early for New Year’s Eve. We will resume our usual posting schedule tomorrow at 6pm PST. The site will remain online and registered members can still access the forum and post to their blogs between now and then.

(No need to click through – this is the end of the post!)