Tag Archives: novels

NaNoWriMo ’09

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Is this the year for me?

As I finish up a crazed month and a half that included of two 6-day helicopter excursions and a week-long trip to Ventura, CA to record a new video training course for Lynda.com, I find myself with an almost empty schedule — right before the start of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo).

The idea behind NaNoWriMo is to write a novel in a month. The quality or marketabilty of the novel doesn’t seem to matter. Apparently, it’s more important to get the words out, preferably to complete a story, than to write something that might one day be published.

Whatever.

I commented extensively on NaNoWriMo back in 2005. I didn’t have much to say about it that was nice. I expanded on my thoughts in a post a few days later. You might want to read those two posts before you continue. My opinions haven’t changed.

In fact, my opinions were confirmed just today. I happened to be in a Barnes & Noble bookstore in Flagstaff, AZ. On a little table near the coffee shop area was an arrangement of books for and about NaNoWriMo. Despite the fact that November is still two weeks off, publishers and bookstores are cashing in on the needs of wannabe writers, offering them guidance for writing a novel in a month. I counted eight titles, from a small paperback to a shrinkwrapped “kit.”

I didn’t buy any of those books. I’ll never pay for anything branded as NaNoWriMo merchandise or in support of NaNoWriMo or even designed to help writers succeed in their NaNoWriMo efforts. I detest the very idea that organizations and individuals are trying to cash in on NaNoWriMo.

I’ve never participated in NaNoWriMo. My excuse is that I’ve just been too busy. When you spend all day writing about computers or something equally dull, you don’t want to spend your evenings writing.

I don’t have to prove I can write a book in a month — I’ve already done it. More than once. And my books have been published. And I’ve even made money on them.

But this year, I’m thinking I might use the ticking clock of NaNoWriMo to write the novel I started and lost. Maybe NaNoWriMo can motivate me to finish it.

So this week, I’ll pull out my notes and look them over. I’ll track down my outline and blow the digital dust off it. I’ll remember all the loose ends and how I planned to tie them up. And maybe — just maybe — I’ll be a NaNoWriMo author this year.

Anyone else out there thinking about giving it a try?

Revenge

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A book review.

Way back when, I subscribed to Bookmarks magazine. It’s a magazine of book reviews for readers of fiction and non-fiction. The subscription was expensive and the content was primarily a regurgitation of reviews in other magazines and newspapers with a summary rating system. There would also be articles about specific reader groups and a featured author or genre or both. Based on what I read in the magazine, I’d choose books I wanted to read. But more often than not, a glowing book review would point me to a hard-to-find book or a book that simply wasn’t up to par.

Product ImageProduct ImageRevenge by Stephen Fry is both of these things. What attracted me to the book was the claim that it was a “modern-day Count of Monte Cristo.” The Count of Monte Cristo is a classic story of revenge, written by Alexandre Dumas in 1844. Dumas, the French author of The Three Musketeers, Twenty Years After, and Man in the Iron Mask, weaves incredible, well written and thought out tales of intrigue, adventure, and even love. The movie and television adaptations of his work offer shallow hints of his complex story lines. The recent Man in the Iron Mask movie staring Leonardo DiCaprio is an example that made me cringe, from the moment Leo uttered the word “Huh?” in his role as King Louis XIV to the revealing of the king’s true father at the end. (Readers of The Man in the Iron Mask know that the story has quite a different ending and is, in fact, the final book of the musketeers trilogy.)

In any case, The Count of Monte Cristo is one of my very favorite books. I’ve read it two or three times, which is no small chore, considering its length and the writing style. So when a modern day version of the same tale appeared in Bookmarks with good reviews, I immediately put it on my reading list.

It took about two years to track down a copy of Revenge. (Remember, there’s no real book store here in Wickenburg and the local library doesn’t read Bookmarks. It wasn’t very high on my Amazon.com wish list, either.) I finished it on Saturday.

To understand how I rate books, you need to understand my “can’t put it down” test. These days, I read before bedtime. In most cases, I’m horizontal, propped up with a pillow with reading glasses perched on my nose. One light is on. I’m tired; it’s the end of a long day and I’ve been up since 5 or 6 AM. Most books I read these days can engage me for a dozen or so pages before I’m ready to pass out. But a good book can actually keep me awake and reading long after Mike has shut off the television, come to bed, and begun to snore. (For the record, he doesn’t snore all the time or any more than I do.)

Revenge started out a bit worse than usual. It was one of the books that I start and then put aside while I work on another one. It was well-written, but not very entertaining. The “setup” — which is where the author introduces a protagonist that you can feel real sympathy for as well as antagonists you really want to hate — was too long and drawn out. I put it down for about two weeks.

I finally got back to it when I took it to Howard Mesa. The wind was howling up there all weekend, making it very unpleasant to be outside. There’s no television there and Mike had a lot of work to do that I couldn’t help him with. So I picked up Revenge and finished it up.

I found Fry’s writing style perfectly fine. In my mind, when you can read a book without frowning at the way sentences are written or dialog is composed, the writer has pulled you in. In those books, the author has stepped back, out of the picture, and you’re just reading an account of what happened to his characters. Stephen Fry did a great job of stepping back, letting the reader get the story without interference from awkward constructions, idiotic dialog, etc. (One of my main complaints about The DaVinci Code was Dan Brown’s awful writing skills.)

That’s not to say that the story didn’t have its faults. My main problem with the book was the way it finished up — far too quickly. In The Count of Monte Cristo, main character Edmond orchestrates a complex revenge scheme that gives his betrayers what they deserve. It almost goes exactly according to plan — in other words, there was still some suspense near the end of the book. In Revenge, main character Ned begins to plot his revenge 2/3 of the way through the book, leaving only 1/3 of the book’s pages to complete it. There’s no complex scheming; he’s simply put himself into a position to extract revenge at his leisure. While I don’t want to spoil the ending for those who may want to read the book, I will say that it’s too quick and easy. While Ned doesn’t get everything he wanted, he also loses the sympathy of the reader by the cruelness of his revenge on some characters. In contrast, at no point in The Count of Monte Cristo do I feel that Edmond has stepped over the line. And while I don’t have the book in front of me now to consult, I’m pretty sure that at least half the book’s pages are devoted to his plotting and the manipulation of his characters before the final “gotchas.”

Revenge, of course, is one several age-old plot basics that can be found in books, movies, and television dramas. Dumas did it best. Fry tried and, in doing so, may have exposed a few people to Dumas’s work. But if you have to choose between the two to take along on a journey or relaxing weekend, leave Fry behind and take the classic. It’s a far better work.

As for Bookmarks — I let my subscription slide. Frankly, its self-promotional content urging readers to buy subscriptions for their local libraries was annoying me. I had also begun to suspect that many of the lesser-known titles the magazine highly recommended were planted there by the books’ publishers. (If I wanted to read advertisements for books, I’d browse the New York Times Book Review.) Coupled with the high subscription price, I decided it just wasn’t worth it.

Besides, I already have a pile of books to get through. I don’t need anymore recommendations!

Copy Editing – Part I: What Is Copy Editing?

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Copy editing — an important part of the publishing process.

Prepare yourself for the usual author rant — but with a difference. This one is coming from an author who just completed her 69th book. An author who has worked with about eight different publishers and dozens of copy editors over the course of 15 years.

So no, this isn’t a newbie writer griping about a heavy-handed editor on her first or second book. It’s coming from someone who has been doing this for a long time and feels as if she’s “seen it all.”

I’ve taken this topic and split it into three parts. In this part, I’ll start off with an introduction to the topic of copy editing and tell you what I believe it should be.

Stet!What is Copy Editing?

The purpose of copy editing should be to ensure that the original text is:

  • Free of spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors. Note the use of the word “error” here; that’ll be important later in this discussion.
  • Consistent with a publisher style guide. A style guide, in the world of publishing, is a document that sets forth usage in those gray areas. I’m talking about capitalization issues such as web vs. Web, hyphenation issues such as email vs. e-mail, and design issues such as boldfacing figure references.
  • Clear and easy to understand. This usually involves breaking up long or complex sentences or possibly rearranging sentence components.
  • Unlikely to be misinterpreted. For example, when you say the “Color in pop-up menu,” do you mean a pop-up menu named “Color in” or are you talking about color in a pop-up menu?
  • Consistent with the writing style of the established book or series. This only comes into play when you’re writing for a series that has a predefined format and style. For example, Visual QuickStart Guides (VQSes) tend to be short and to the point, so I don’t have room for personal stories, as I do in other books. VQSes also have level 2 headings that begin with the word “To” and are followed by numbered steps, each of which presents a single task. (I could list about a dozen style issues specific to a VQS, but you get the idea.)

Flowers for AlgernonOf course, what you’re writing should determine how much of the above is required. If you’re writing a novel much of this may not apply at all. Consider the book, Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes. The book’s first person narrator is a retarded man. The book is in journal format and the first few chapters are so full of spelling and punctuation errors (or omissions) that the book is difficult to read. But that’s because of the author’s choices and the method he uses to communicate. Would you expect a retarded man to have perfect spelling, grammar, and punctuation? Of course not. The author is using the character’s shortcomings as a writer to make his character more real — as well a to drive home the changes in the character as the story progresses. This technique was used again more recently in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which featured an autistic first-person narrator. If a copy editor had done a thorough job on the grammar or punctuation in either of these two books, he would have altered the characters. The same can be said for dialog in most novels, since few people speak using perfect grammar.

So copy editing of fiction is a different subject — one I’m not addressing here. I’m discussing copy editing of non-fiction, primarily technical or how-to books, since that’s where my experience is.

More to Come…

This is the first part of my discussion of copy editing. There are at least two more parts to go. In the next part, I’ll rant a bit about my experiences with one particular book over the ten-year course of its life (so far). You’d think that after 10 years, the process would be trouble-free…

Why not take a moment to tell us what you think copy editing should be. How do you expect it to change or improve your writing? Use the comments link or form to share your thoughts.