Category Archives: Just don’t even argue with me. I mean really.

crotchety & opinionated old bitch

Advice: The Road Not Taken

Copyright 2013 David Belt

I belong to a number of writing groups. I have participated in a number of writing workshops and panels, and the best advice I can give anyone about writing is… don’t take anyone’s advice.

It’s not that other writers don’t have really good ideas. It is that every writer has their own ideas.

As I draw nearer to my English degree, I realize that there are far fewer rules in the English language than I thought, a few years ago. The English language, however, is repute with options. As these options are so varied and irregularly used, many writers will jump on to the nearest soap box and brazenly declare their own personal rule of thumb.

Before you accept anyone’s personal rule of thumb as law, do a little fact checking of your own. Grammar rules are easy to look up on the internet. My personal “go to” site for grammar rules is grammarbook.com, but most any will do.

The other, and truly more important, reason for taking advice with a grain of salt, vice swallowing the tuna whole, is that it is your  writing. You are expressing your self through your  words. The moment you start using someone else’s words, you stop expressing yourself and start expressing someone else.

Now here is the real kicker to that last idea:

Until you start creating your own language and your own dialect, you’re going to be using someone else’s words, but the manner in which you do so, must reflect you, not someone else. Put yourself into your writing and let that medium of art portray your ideas to the world.

I may read a book written in a style I find grammatically distasteful… and there is nothing wrong with that. It is simply the manner in with that artist chose to express his/herself at that time, and I will be enriched, just the same, for the experience.

Dumb Cover Art

We’ve talked about this before, but they’re still publishing them so we gotta keep talking about it.

This is the same book, a later reprint. Same book.
Which one are you going to buy? Yah, me too.

20121025-004624.jpg

20121025-004637.jpg

Publishers: I do not like these half-dressed waif teen cover images. I’m not going to buy them. This image is boring and completely misrepresents Kiernan and her quality of writing. To me, with the $evere book buying habit, this cover gets lost in the noise. I completely overlooked this and all her other titles when I had the opportunity to buy them at a book store recently. I did discover Kiernan through the older cover art, above. Kiernan deserves better than to be lost amongst the bajillion others with so similar art. It also insults me, your potential customer. The book is about paleontology. Could we compromise? Can we at least give girlfriend here a rock hammer, not that she could lift it…

Oh, wait! I get it. That’s supposed to be Dancy? Yeah, you missed that one.

I REALLY LIKE this book, Threshold, and am looking forward to reading more from Caitlin R. Kiernan and her pseudonym Katherine Tierney.

Wool Hipster

http://shelf-life.ew.com/2012/12/13/wool-author-hugh-howey/

It’s not often that I know about anything before it’s cool. But I knew about Wool before you did, I bet. My hubs found a small link on reddit and passed it onto me. A cheap set of 5 books for the kindle about some neat sci-fi story that Ridley Scott is rumored to be interested in. I am very interested in Ridley Scott and his fantabulous sci-fi, so I tried the book I’d never heard of.

It was amazing. I devoured all five of these in like two weeks, mostly on a road trip with two young children (both under 4) and during the summer when aforementioned four year old and his one year old little brother were climbing all over everything including me. The story made me cry, for pete’s sake. Honestly, this story was every single thing I wanted from it and more. I feel like I Discovered Something Important, that this is only the beginning of someone’s very successful writing career and for once I was along for the ride.

I also blabbed about this book to anyone within ear shot! You have to read this. Now. No, NOW. Stop doing what you’re doing and and read it! I don’t care if your book/movie/project/game/class/job is ineresting read it right now you won’t be disappointed! This Howey guy is gonna be huge! I emailed poor Beth countless times and who knows how many annoying “zomg this book is teh bom” postcards I sent.

I am the only one I know that has read them, so far. I have one friend who is reading it now but just the one and last I heard she was only on book 2.
So now that he is being published by the massive and powerful Simon & Shuster, don’t be surprised when, later this year, after you tell me how awesome this book is, I go all hipster on you. I’ll smile knowingly and say, “Oh I read that last year, before it was mainstream.” and sip my coffee.
Cuz I did. And it’s amazing. I strongly recommend it. ;-) You won’t be disappointed.

An Opportunity

There’s a difference between thoughtful criticism and idle shit talk, and this post here explains it very well. (Little Red pointed me to this)

Please read this from Iceburg Ink.

No one ever clicks on links, ever, so to quote this guy:

One instance I recall was last year when a co-worker talked about how much she loved the TWILIGHT books, and I told her how poorly written they were and how awful the stories were and how they portray the characters in a really bad light.

Her answer to me was “But it’s the only book series I’ve ever read with such a passion.”

I stepped back. Out of myself. And I had a good long look at what I was doing. I was telling this girl that her “joy” was no good. I was telling her that her judgment must be flawed in what she chose to entertain herself with.

Yes! That! Thanks for your article, Mr Iceburg Ink Guy.

When I meet someone with a different opinion on a book or whatever, I try to view it as an opportunity for mutual encouragement. “That’s great that you liked that book. What other books do you like? Do you know about this book that I like?” Probably the first book on both our lists weren’t great choices for the other of us, but we work around and find those satellite book suggestions that are winners.

It’s easy to shit talk stuff and make others feel bad (this is called “bullying”, by the way) in order to make ourselves feel righteous or smart or whatever. It’s way easy. And lazy.

Reading the Iceburg Ink post, I want to re-affirm that I don’t roll that way here on Darkcargo, which is probably why we don’t get a lot of hits.

My hugest peeve in the whole wide world is this silly pre-conceived assumption that women who read romances are dumb women. That is patently untrue and I hate seeing that idea out there in the ‘Webs.

I want to know why you like to read what you like to read.

What are you reading now?

Roll down the window!

So I’m sitting in the car, the Hubs and I are driving someplace and we’re listening to an audiobook of his choice.

Fiction, fantasy.

I’m getting ready to roll down the window and dash my brains out on the pavement at 70mph because the story is so boring.

Thing is, I’ve already read a dozen variations on this theme.

We’re focused on a young lady who is to be married to the king. She’s naieve, bordering on stupid. She’s trapped in this destiny engineered for her. We’re going on and on about how young and nubile her body is. The physician has inspected her to make sure she’s a virgin… Now we’re going on and on about the quality of the cloth that makes up her gown. The cut and drape of her gown. The way the laces work. How long the sleeves are… Huh. Now she’s getting detailed instruction on how to dupe this king into believing that he’s not raping her on their marriage night…

Why is this so intolerably boring to me? Am I old and cynical? Why can’t our fantasy fiction be about older women? Why can’t her area of expertise expand beyond the clothes she’s wearing? Why can’t the world building include a world that’s not obsessed with a woman’s physical beauty? Why can’t the totally imaginary society value their women for something other than their single-use-only fuckability?

It’s an imaginary world. Can’t we invent something better for ourselves?

Nuts. Hubs has turned on the child-lock for the window controls.

A Post in Which I Bitch Generally About Copyediting or the Lack Thereof.

Yesterday, I did some research on DAW and found a lot of interesting stuff. So, I feel not too mean about using one of their pubs as an example for the subject of this post. Ok, that’s not true. I feel bad. But I’m really angry that they let this book slip.

This weekend, we’ve talked about NaNo, about publishing your own material, about editing services and beta-reading services, about e-books and audio-books. My turn.

The single fastest way to piss me off is bad copy-editing. I don’t mean the occasional “staypos” (as Saladin Ahmed named them) that still remain in a text no matter how many eyes go over the work. I’m talking about the glaring errors that are just cheap and lame. Not just books: advertisements, those banners that hang from the ceiling over the aisle in the Kroger, this blog, my water bill…

What it says to me, the reader, is that you care so little about your publication that you won’t go to the extra work to have it copy-edited. I mean, there are dumb schmucks out there who have done this for free (*ahem*). If you don’t believe in your own product, why should I?

Copy-editing is not content-editing, or style-editing, or “chop out this bit and add a scene about an elephant”-editing. Copy-editing is the very last bit to check again for spelling errors, punctuation errors and formatting errors before it goes to print. It’s the final polish.

This book had a couple of different problems. I found it at the local used book store up the road, and I WANTED to LOVE this BOOK so BAD!

The Warriors of Spider by W. Michael Gear. 20th Anniversary Edition.

It’s got an Arapaho-derived world-view goin’ on, it ends with a horse (you don’t look at the last page first? Really? Ok, weirdo.), it’s a space opera–what’s not to get excited about, here? Plus, W. Michael Gear is this guy, who, with his wife Kathleen O’Neal Gear, writes the bestseller series North America’s Forgotten Past with more than 20 bestselling titles.  The Gears are publishing and practicing archaeologists. An SF written by a Native American archaeologist? Hot Shit! I found a real treasure here.

Ok, first problem. Why was this marketed so badly? It’s not hard to market this book. I just did in the paragraph above. 20th anniversary edition, the Gears have become very successful authors in those 20 years, you’d think DAW woulda put out a …poster…or somethin’. It says in little tiny print on the bottom of the cover “Bestselling author of People of the Weeping Eye”. Sigh. I’m a pretty book-savvy person, especially about SF and genre in general. I’ve never heard of or seen this book before, published in 2008 by a major national publishing house.

Now the copy editing dumbness. Please note that I’m not even going to get to page three. Dedication is to his dog. It’s a cool poem, causing me to tear up, and the dog lived from June 1995 to Oct 1990.

(I see you looking at those dates again)…yeah, I did that too.

First page, second sentence: “…the fully-automated GCI cargo ship.”

First page, second paragraph from the bottom: “…powered the shields as the CGI slipped beyond…”

Other instances in the book use GCI. This book had the opportunity to be copy-edited twice over. Once for the first edition and again for the 20th anniversary. Gear talks about the typos in the first edition right here, so it’s evidently well-known for its typos. So why didn’t DAW correct those for the 20th anniversary edition? And don’t tell me about it still being in an old and difficult to modify format, etc. The dedication to the dog wasn’t in the 1988 edition. (Well, it is a typo. Who knows what dates the dog was supposed to have lived.) DAW did a serious disservice to Mr. Gear with this publication, I think.

This is not a mistake that small-presses or indie-pubs can afford to make, you know? With the small number of books that a small press usually publishes each year, if one of them is this badly copy-edited, I can guarantee I’m not going to bother with that publishing house again. The small publishers and independently publishing authors that I know know this and work very hard to make sure these kinds of dummy errors don’t happen. It’s like they have to work extra-super hard to make sure they don’t ever make an error, because even one can kill them.

With that comparison in mind, I just wish that DAW had been a little more loving of this book. It wouldn’t have been a big stretch. I could have forgiven the crap marketing job, chalked that up to my not paying attention; but it was the crap copy-edit job on a celebratory 20th anniversary reprint that did me in.

For me, it’s a real betrayal. I don’t know if I can trust you anymore. Do you mean GCI or do you mean CGI and I missed some vital thing in the plot?

Dinner Discussion 1: Micro-analytics

It makes me feel small and little on the inside, and kindles those sensations of self-doubt and social anxiety. It’s like hearing other people you know talk shit about your best friend. Noteably, these are junior high emotions.

Net-travelling today, I started with the Publisher’s Weekly Week Ahead podcast because they briefly mention Saladin Ahmed’s book. Next, I find this Genreville blog site, and from there, they reference many of these types of micro-analytical book bloggers–> which I read for a while and then sadly got up and made myself a sad chicken sandwich, and somewhere between the sad tomato and the sad mustard, I reminded myself that I am an adult. Sad-Sacks that I am.

I understand that there is a time and a place for the ultra-literary picking-apart, over analysis of books, but I hate reading them.

I am a very happy person respecting your reading tastes. I like to hear about peoples’ experiences reading outside their comfort zone, and that’s about as intellectual as I like to get on that subject, thank you very much.

When I read these story-picker-aparter posts I find my shoulders falling in, my head drooping, and if I were in a room of people, I would be That Mute Glowering Girl.

Reading gives me joy and escape, and intellectual and personal growth. I like to learn about what I’m reading, where it fits in the timeline of literature and history, about the author, about where this book fits in an anthropological and sociological sense of place. I mean, I’m not stoopid, thank you.

When I visit these other sites (I do it occasionally just to remind myself), I wonder “Do you like ANYTHING you read? Why read at all if you hate every string of words ever printed? Why do you do something that makes you so miserable?”

Today’s adventure into Crit-Land took me to a many-multi-part pick apart of both the Chronicles of Narnia and the Twilight saga.

Even though Twilight wasn’t my personal schtick, my argument is: how many hundreds of thousands of gals now call themselves voracious readers as a result of these books? Can you really argue with that?

The Chronicles of Narnia were my first fantasy books. My dad gave them to me, like little candies on the path to literacy, one at a time. They allowed me to escape to an imaginary place during a childhood of watching my dad die from a disease that couldn’t be cured. I mean, COME ON! now you’re telling me that I am too stupid to have realized, as an 8-year-old, that these other 8-year-olds tromping through an imaginary forest had very poor time-management and leadership skills? I re-read these again recently, and like Kat’s Catcher in the Rye thoughts, the experience, emotions and meta-reading of these books are VERY DIFFERENT as an adult 20+ years later. Hey all you dumb little kids, did you pick up on these minor plot inconsistencies or subtle metaphors?

And then, this same blog has an extremely popular post with statistics showing how women authors are shunned by the industry. Ok, maybe, but I find it really hard to not dismiss that entire argument when they pick apart–sentence by sentence–really!– one of the Most Bestselling Fantasy Books to Women Under 25 (my assumption there), movie notwithstanding.  Ooohhh…now I’m really mad.

My point in summation: let’s pretend that I’m a 14 year old girl reading her first fantasy book ever, and I find that I really like it and I head out looking for more. Then I find these kinds of micro-pick-apart articles that suggest to me that I should have been smart enough to know that I shouldn’t have liked Twilight. End.

Please. Enough.

Emergency Book Giveaway.

Complete boxed set of the Chronicles of Narnia. Comment on THIS POST, all commenteers will be piled in a bin and one will be drawn on Monday at noon.

But the discussion–Now that you know my opinion, WHAT SAY YOU?

The Power of Cover Art

This is the story of how someone else’s cover art can sell your book.

Cover art is powerful.

*That* image, which you recognize as a thumbnail, or even as a corner of a tattered paperback sticking out of a pile of stuff, conveys so much more than just a sketch of the main character.

It continues to sell the book even after the book has been sold once, twice, thrice and is making the rounds at the library book sales.

It gives the author an image. Consistent cover art with similar design motifs from one volume to the next tie all of the author’s books together as a uniform package.

It also invites conversation.

The lack of cover art is the single thing I dislike the most about e-format. Not that the books aren’t displayed on the virtual bookshelves with a thumbnail image– I know that’s there. I hate that the e-device itself doesn’t display the cover to a passer-by.

Last Friday I walked into the pottery studio and this was on the worktable next to another potter’s workspace. It was face down, open on the table, and I could see that she was about 2/3 of the way through the book. I could see that she borrowed it or bought it used. I could see that she was likely to enjoy many of the same books I do. All this before I even knew her name.

Because that book was there, displaying its cover, we talked for a long time about our faves. That book and its cover made many more book sales beyond its own title, author and publisher.

Alternatively, another lady was reading a kindle and eating by herself at a table next to where we were playing Munchkin this weekend. I have no idea what she was reading. No cover, no discussion, no new book sales, no new friendships made. A table of five SF/F avid readers and participants in NaNoWriMo had no reason to interrupt her lunch.

Here’s what Margaret the Potter Gal and I discussed:

Abarat, Clive Barker

Julie Czerneda

Garth Nix, Sabriel series plus other series not Sabriel.

Alan Dean Foster, Pip and Flinx, plus the one about the dog

So You Want to Be a Wizard, Diane Duane

Wandering Star graphic novel, Terri S. Wood

Steven Brust, Jhereg series

Who Fears Death, Nnedi Okorafor

Leviathan Wakes, James S. A. Corey

Thraxas series by Martin Scott

Dresden Files by Jim Butcher

Sookie Stackhouse series by Charlaine Harris

Tanya Huff’s Valor series and Blood Price series

Because Kristen Britain’s Green Rider was face down open on a table, I went out and purchased Alan Dean Foster’s The Light Years Beneath My Feet and Clive Barker’s Abarat. This conversation and these purchases likely never would have happened if Margaret were reading on an e-book device.

If publishers let cover art die, they’re killing the industry.