Category Archives: The Writing Life

Posts about writing for fun and profit.

AmazonConnect

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I officially become an AmazonConnect Author.

If you regularly read these blogs, you may recall my rant against Amazon.com a few months ago. I was POed because Amazon offers free “Super Saver” shipping but, when you choose it, they delay your order. In my case, they tried to delay it for two months. Then, when I complained, they sent half my order and never sent the rest. The incident convinced me to switch to BN.com for my book buying needs. Their free shipping orders are shipped promptly and in full.

Unfortunately (or in some cases, fortunately), BN.com’s Web site lacks many of the features of Amazon.com.

Unfortunately, it lacks a decent Wish list feature. On BN.com, your wish list is yours alone and can’t be shared with others. How idiotic is that? My Amazon.com Wish List, however, can be shared with a link on a Web page or by e-mail. What better way to ensure that I get what I want for Christmas or my birthday each year?

Fortunately, BN.com lacks all the marketing junk that Amazon.com is constantly throwing at shoppers. I’m talking about recommendations, member lists, “the page you made,” and “also bought” lists. Sheesh. When are those guys going to give it up already? What really irks me is how often I connect and get a recommendation for a book that directly competes with one of mine.

The other day, I logged in to look up the availability of a book I heard about on NPR. Amazon recognized me immediately from one of the cookies it had stored in my computer. And it displayed what it calls a “plog” with a series of blog posts from a woman I’d never heard of. Turns out, this woman is an author and she evidently wrote a book that Amazon.com thinks I bought. (I don’t recall buying the book; it’s about new age healing and I don’t believe in most of that stuff.) The blog entries were of a “here’s what’s new” and “here’s how you can learn more about my books” nature — marketing through and through. I found the link sequence to make them go away.

There was also a link on my page that invited me to be one of the blogging authors. I guess they matched my name with names in their book database. (Enough to recognize me as an author, but not enough to stop recommending competing books. Oh, well.) I followed a bunch of links and got myself registered as an author with my own AmazonConnect blog.

i’m not sure how this works. It seems to me that if I write a blog entry, it might appear on pages for everyone who has purchased one of my books. Now although Amazon.com lists 68 titles for me, I only claimed about 10 as mine — no sense doing virtual paperwork for out-of-print titles. So I think that if you bought one of those 10 books and connected to your Amazon.com account, you might just see a blog entry from me.

Anyone out there qualified to try this? If you bought one of my books on Amazon.com, do try logging in to see if they push some of my prose at you. Then report back here, please, and use the Comments link to let us know.

Now this means I need to contribute to yet another blog. Just when I thought that I’d combine a bunch of my sites to reduce my blogging workload, there’s another blog to write for. But don’t worry — I won’t write nearly as much or as often there as I do here. And I won’t fill it with marketing bull.

There’s enough of that on Amazon without me adding to it.

The Dan Brown Code

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More on Dan Brown.

Slate’s recent article, “The Dan Brown Code – In a court filing, the best-selling author of The Da Vinci Code reveals all the secrets of a pulp novelist,” by Bryan Curtis, offers some interesting insight into the mind of a failed songwriter turned bestselling author. It also makes for some amusing reading.

Also from Slate, Tim Wu’s “Holy Grail Wars” echoes many of the concerns I blogged earlier about the plagiarism lawsuit. If you don’t have time to read or listen to it, here’s the crux of it for me:

The authors of Holy Grail chose to make claims to truth—and while that gives their book a certain rhetorical power, it should also mean their work loses much legal protection. When copyright starts saying you can’t borrow claims to truth, it stops helping and starts hurting all authors.

Let’s start at the beginning. One of the basic principles of copyright law is that you can’t copyright historical facts, though you can own how you express those facts. Say you write the first article ever saying that John F. Kennedy had Addison’s disease (a fact). If the law says that you now own that fact, almost anyone who wants to write about Kennedy’s life or illnesses needs your permission. That’s a broad right, one that’s not just a damper on future scholarship and authorship but possibly a damper on that fact itself—you might, for example, be a Kennedy loyalist who wants to keep his disease secret forever.

It also appears, from the article, that the British courts have a different take on the copyright issue than American courts. Evidently, borrowing ideas from material presented as fact is okay unless you borrow too many of those ideas. What?

Get Me a Spelling Checker!

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I used to know how to spell.

Plagiarism is not spelled plagerism. How embarrassing to have spelled it incorrectly — in the title, no less — of my previous post. I just fixed it.

Spelling checkers in word processing software have made me lazy. Why know how to spell a word when my word processor will simply underline it for me to call it to my attention if I get it wrong? Or, worse yet, simply fix it for me, as Microsoft Word often does? In exchange for convenience, just a little more of my mind is being sapped away by disuse.

WordPress, which I use to maintain this site, does not have a built-in spelling checker. That’s why you’ll see so many typos and misspelled words here. There’s no red underline to flag possible problems, so I just don’t notice them. I have, however, made a special effort to look up the spelling of words I’m not sure about (such as disuse and misspelled earlier in this entry). I do that with the Dictionary widget that’s part of Mac OS X. I leave it open and press F12 whenever I need to use it. Enter what I think is the right spelling and let Dictionary tell me if it recognizes the word. If it doesn’t, I think it out, trying to come up with the right spelling. It’s a good exercise for my brain.

The Dictionary widget is also useful when I’m reading an article online and need a word defined. Rather than try to glean meaning from use, I can just fetch the darn meaning to have a firmer grasp of the word and build my vocabulary.

If I can’t figure out a word’s spelling, I use Google. I enter my best guess at a word in Google’s search box — for example, plagerism — and Google instantly responds, “Did you mean plagiarism?” Uh, yeah. That’s what I meant.

Now at this point, Miraz, if she’s reading, is asking herself why I don’t use MarsEdit, like she does, to work with my WordPress blog. I tried it, but I wasn’t very impressed. I really don’t like using a lot of different software to complete a task. It’s more to learn. It’s more to figure out when it doesn’t work right. In my case, I couldn’t get MarsEdit to handle pictures the way I needed it to and I didn’t want to invest the time to make it work. I’ll probably use MarsEdit to do my blogging during the summer months when I’m away from a handy Internet connection most of the time.

So if you find a misspelled word in these blog entries, have patience with me. It could be my flying fingers unable to hit the keys in the right order. Or it could just be that I thought I knew how to spell the word…but was wrong.

DaVinci Code Plagiarism?

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What?

Okay, so we all know that I sometimes retreat into a cave where I have no knowledge of current events. But this isn’t even current. It’s been going on since February. And even I can’t stay in a cave that long.

I’m talking about the plagiarism lawsuit over The DaVinci Code.

I heard about it today and spent some time catching up on the news with some good old Google searching. It appears that the authors of The Holy Blood, The Holy Grail (HBHG), which I thought was a work of non-fiction, are suing the author of The DaVinci Code (DC), clearly a work of fiction, for “appropriating” the central theme of their book for his. The situation is summed up quite nicely in this article from the The Times of London.

I read both books. Here’s my take.

I read DC first, primarily because it was getting so much press. This was about two years ago. I found the story very interesting — in fact, it was the primary reason I kept reading. It had a lot of fascinating “facts” and puzzles. I’m a sucker for fiction based on little-known fact and this had me hooked with its wild premise — that Jesus married Mary Magdalene, who escaped to France with their child — based on a string of facts that could just make the premise true. But as for writing style, characterization, etc., Dan Brown missed the boat, at least as far as I’m concerned.

I’m not the only one who feels this way. Frank Wilson of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, quoted in Opus Dei, said:

In my view, the book is unexceptionally written, with minimal character development and a third-rate guidebook sense of place. It is, however, a quick and easy read, largely because most of the chapters are only a few pages long, and just about all of them end as cliffhangers.

If you don’t pay too much attention, but sort of let the book go in one eye and out the other, you’ll get to the end before you know it. [Emphasis added.]

And Peter Millar of The Times of London (again quoted in Opus Dei — they must love this stuff) said,

This is without doubt, the silliest, most inaccurate, ill-informed, stereotype- driven, cloth-eared, cardboard-cutout-populated piece of pulp fiction that I have read. And that’s saying something. [Emphasis added.]

They said it better than I could. But there was enough page turning action to get people to read it — I breezed through the first half in a day, then finished it up a few days later — and I think the premise was more than enough to get people talking about it. The result: a bestseller from a rather average piece of writing. (It wasn’t the first and it won’t be the last.)

After reading it, I remember wondering why it was a bestseller. Maybe I missed something? I read fast and that tends to lessen the reading experience. So I did double duty and I read Brown’s Angels and Demons, too. More of the same poor characterization but with better puzzles and an even less believable plot. I don’t need to read any more Dan Brown.

Anyone who thinks Dan Brown is a great writer must read an awful lot of crap. (I’m sure that statement will get me in trouble somewhere.)

Intrigued by the whole Jesus-was-married-and-the-Catholic-Church-tried-to-hide-it thing, I sought out HBHG. I found it in my local library, of all places. It was a slow read, even for me. But I slogged through it. Lots of fascinating stuff, in painstaking detail. (Too much detail for light reading, if you ask me.) It seemed to provide all the background information for DC — the well-researched facts to back up the book’s central premise.

In fact, I always assumed that Dan Brown had read HBHG — he mentions it in DC — and had written a novel based on it. After all, how could he — a novelist — have come up with all that material by himself? It would take years to dig all that up. Or a reading list that included HBHG and a few other books that covered the same general topics.

Mind you, I don’t think it’s wrong to base a work of fiction on a work of non-fiction. And that’s where I’m having a problem with the lawsuit. Is it wrong? Am I wrong to think that it’s not?

My understanding of copyright law is that you cannot copyright an idea. Has someone changed that?

As a Guardian Unlimited article points out,

The case is also likely to clarify existing copyright laws over the extent to which an author can use other people’s research.

And that’s what scares me. Suppose I read a handful of books about Abraham Lincoln in preparation for writing a novel that takes place during his presidency. Suppose one of the books says something silly — like he was gay (hmmm, why does that sound so familiar?) — and that becomes one of the underlying themes of my book. Will the author that built the Lincoln-was-gay premise be able to turn around and sue me for plagiarism?

I guess if my book became a bestseller, anything is possible.

And then there’s Lewis Perdue, the author of Daughter of God, who claims that Dan Brown plagiarized his book. I guess he’ll be suing next. Until then, he’ll keep himself busy with his own blog, The Da Vinci Crock. I haven’t read his book, but if his claims are true, it would appear that he has a stronger case than the HBHG authors. Perhaps he just doesn’t have as much money for lawyers.

The lawsuit’s court case ended today, which is probably why I finally heard about it. You can read the Reuter’s coverage of the closing day here.

I’ll be waiting to hear how the judge rules.

On Deadlines

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The reality of book deadlines — at least the way I’ve learned it.

Miraz confessed to me today that she was a bit anxious about getting our WordPress book done by its deadline. According to the project site she maintains for the book, we have only 18 days left.

I replied via e-mail with my take on deadlines. Here’s a slightly expanded version.

Every book I’ve worked on seems to have at least two or three deadlines:

The Contract Deadline

The contract deadline is the one that’s in the contract. It isn’t necessarily real and is often ignored.

Why? Well that deadline was cooked up to fill a placeholder in the contract template. It may or may not reflect a deadline that is possible.

For example, suppose I signed a contract today for my next Mac OS X book. When will that book be due? No one even knows when the software will be available to write about. Or when the software will be released. So how can someone put a realistic deadline in a contract? They can’t. But they have to put a date in the contract. It’s required. So they guess at a date and put that in. I sign it because I know it isn’t necessarily real and will likely be ignored.

The Editorial Deadline

The editorial deadline is when your editor expects to get the book. It’s based real-life things, like when the software will be available to write about it and how quickly (or slowly) you write.

Although this deadline is often after the deadline in the contract, sometimes it’s sooner. That’s the way it was for my Tiger book.

Sometimes there are multiple deadlines. That’s the deal when I work on my Quicken for Windows book. My editor actually has a spreadsheet that lists all the chapters and they dates they’re due. Sometimes they’re only a day or two apart. I used to follow those deadlines carefully. Now I just churn away at the revision and submit chapters as I finish them. Some come in early, others don’t. But it all gets done on time.

Does your editor tell you this deadline’s date? Sometimes. It depend on the editor.

The Drop-Dead Deadline

The drop dead deadline is the real date the book needs to be done. That date is often tied in with some third party event.

For example, my Peachpit books all have drop-dead deadlines based on printer schedules. Here’s how it works. I work on a book and my editors (editorial and production) get a feel for when the book will be ready to go to the printer. They schedule a printing date. The printer expects to get the files that make up the book by that date. If Peachpit and I miss that date, we’ll miss our printing slot and will have to wait for the next slot. I have a feeling that there’s a financial penalty involved with missing a drop-dead deadline, but fortunately, I’ve never been asked to cough up money.

Does your editor tell you this deadline’s date? Of course not! The book has to be done before that.

The Sad Truth

The sad truth is that most editors don’t expect their authors to meet deadlines because so few do.

I remember my third book (which was my second solo book). I finished the book the day it was due (per the contract) and actually hired a courier to deliver the manuscript to my editor in New York. (I lived in New Jersey at the time.) This was in the days before manuscripts were submitted electronically via e-mail or FTP. Back when they actually expected me to print out two double-spaced copies of the document and I’d send it in a manuscript box. Anyway, my editor was completely shocked to get the manuscript on time.

I, of course, was proud of myself for writing 300 pages in 10 days.

The moral of this story? Don’t sweat the contract deadline and get it done within a reasonable time.