Tag Archives: novels

No Uncertain Terms

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A slow but enjoyable read.

In No Uncertain TermsI’m currently wading through William Safire’s book, No Uncertain Terms: More Writing from the Popular On Language Column in The New York Times Magazine. The odd thing is, I’ve been reading it for over a month.

William Safire writes the “On Language” column in the New York Times Magazine. That’s the magazine that comes with Sunday’s New York Times. When we lived in New York and New Jersey, we were occasional subscribers and I’d read the column whenever I got my hands on the magazine.

“On Language” points out recent word or phrase usage in the press, usually quotes by politicians and other oft-quoted people. (I had to look up oft-quoted just to make sure it was a correct usage; it wouldn’t do to make a mistake in usage in this particular entry.) Mr. Safire basically tears the victim word or phrase apart, discussing its development throughout the years and pointing out first recorded usages for each meaning that applies. It’s like reading an entry of the Oxford English Dictionary, but it’s full of puns and things to make you smile — if you catch them. And, of course, it points out whether the word was correctly or incorrectly used and why.

I’ve been reading the book at bedtime and I must admit that I can’t read more than four or five pages before my eyelids grow heavy and I have to put the book down. This isn’t because it’s boring. I think it’s because it’s forcing me to read slowly and carefully and think about almost every word.

This isn’t an exercise I’m accustomed to. When I read novels, I breeze through them so quickly that I just don’t get my money’s worth when I buy the darn things. But this book, which was a “bargain book” on BN.com (and was part of my Christmas list so I didn’t actually pay for it anyway) is definitely worth the money. It’s helped keep me entertained and enlighted — and made it easier to fall asleep — for the past month! That certainly says something.

It’s also taught me a lot about words that I use and other words that I’ll probably never use. It’s made me realize that the English language is even richer than I thought. And although I’m a writer — a real one who actually writes for a living — my knowledge of vocabulary is not nearly what I think it should be.

Perhaps that’s why I often pause while writing these entries, trying to find the right word to say what I mean. (And in most cases failing.)

But then again, it’s hard to build a strong vocabulary when you spend most of your time writing sentences like: “The Save dialog appears. Enter a name for the file in the Name box and click Save.”

Sheesh. I think that sentence appears in every single book I’ve written.

Anyway, I think this book is helping me to build my vocabulary and understanding of word usage. If you’re a word lover, I think you might like it, too.

Three Quick Book Reviews and a Rant about Amazon.com

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What I’ve been reading.

Late yesterday afternoon, while taking a relaxing, hot bath, I finished reading The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. Those of you who are movie-goers may remember the movie of the same name, which came out in 1986, starring Sean Connery and a very young Christian Slater.

I vaguely remembered the movie and was drawn to the book by its mention in a number of lists that appeared in Bookmarks magazine and Mystery Scene magazine. So I went to our excellent library here in Wickenburg and borrowed a copy of the book.

I’m fast reader, but this book was a slow read for me. The underlying mystery of the dying monks is what interested me, but the book was also full of insightful details about monastery life in 1300s Italy. And there was another plot line concerning a meeting of several orders of monks with delegates from the Pope. That was backed up by page after page of information about religious beliefs and differences of opinion and Middle Ages politics. Although I’m sure this is interesting to a student of those times, it was the part that slowed me down.

Since there was a movie made from the book and since I only vaguely remembered it, I picked up a copy at the video rental place on my way home yesterday. I couldn’t get it in DVD, so I was stuck with a less-than-perfect VHS copy. That’s okay; it was good enough for a Sunday evening’s entertainment. Mike watched it with me. The movie simplified the book’s details and made a bit of a plot twist that put protagonist William (Sean Connery) in greater jeopardy — something that always seems to work well in movies. It was more entertaining than the book, but I think it could have been done better. Still, the visuals of the abbey seemed quite realistic.

I also purchased the recently published The Elements of Style: Illustrated, which I heard about in an NPR interview with the illustrator, Maira Kalman. This book is a faithful reproduction of the grammar and usage classic with a twist: many of the example sentences are illustrated with full-color paintings. This little hardcover book will replace my old softcover edition on my reference book shelf. The illustrations are colorful and amusing. I bought four copies of the book and plan to give the other three to my favorite editors as Christmas gifts.

A few months ago, I heard another story on NPR, this one about a new computer DVD set called The Complete New Yorker. This eight DVD set includes scanned images of virtually every page of the New Yorker magazine going back to its first issue in 1925. Extremely flexible and well-designed reader software makes it easy to find, browse, view, or read each page of each issue. I’d read some feedback on Amazon.com (which I no longer use to buy my books; more on that in a moment) about this “book” and most of the complaints centered around not being able to read the articles without seeing the advertisements. But that’s precisely why I find this book so interesting. I can see magazine content with advertisements side-by-side. That might seem weird, but when you consider that the ads go back to 1925, you may realize the historic significance of it. Or at least my interest.

I installed the reader software on my PowerBook — it works great on Mac OS x 10.3 or later, as well as Windows (as you might expect) — and was soon browsing the very first issue of the magazine. Then I tried out the search feature, which enables you to search by year, issue, author, department, or topic. Although the search feature could be a little quicker, I suspect it’s my G4 PowerBook that’s holding it back. (The computer is just starting to show its age.) I look forward to loading everything up on my dual G5 in the office — including disk images of the 8 DVDs (if that’s possible) for something to browse through when I’m on hold, waiting for some kind of customer service or technical support. (I seem to spend an awful lot of time on hold these days.)

If you’re wondering why I’ve called it quits with Amazon, here’s the deal. I became an Amazon associate back when the company was first started and sold quite a few books for them, pocketing a generous 15% commission. Somewhere along the line, they changed the commission structure and my revenue stream suffered for it. But that’s not why I’m cutting them out of my life.

I first started getting annoyed by Amazon’s reader review program. Reviews seemed to fall into three categories: normal people writing reviews (okay with me), people who were very full of themselves and thought they were great reviewers writing reviews (get a life, guys), and people who obviously wrote a review to bash the author or the book for some personally-motivated reason. This came to a head when I read a review of one of my Quicken books and realized that the reviewer hadn’t even read the book before soundly bashing it. Most of what he said was simply not true and anyone paging through the book could see it for themselves. But one of the problems with buying online is that you can’t page through the book. People rely on the reviews and when they bash the author, people don’t buy. Of course, it goes the other way, too. I once bought a book on Amazon.com because of several rave reviews. I truly believe the author had his friends write those reviews because the book was just awful. But Amazon rewards people for their “opinions,” no matter why they were contributed or how realistic they are.

Amazon also constantly “suggests” titles based on previous purchases and searches. I once bought two books about eBay for my sister, who was trying to put my godfather’s antiques on eBay for sale and needed help. For months afterward, Amazon kept pushing eBay books at me. And I’m really tired of seeing lists of suggestions by people I don’t even know. Yet there’s no way to turn off this feature — I’ve written to them and asked.

The final straw happened last month when I ordered three books and a calendar, all of which were supposedly in stock and ready for shipment. I chose the “Super Saver” shipping option, which gives you free shipping when all items can be shipped together. Suddenly my order was shifted to the back burner. I received an e-mail message saying that the items would be shipped out on December 26 — more than two months after my order! I wrote to them asking why I had to wait. I got a response with some nonsense about multiple warehouses and how the items would have to be collected in one place for shipment. But they made a “one time” exception for me. I had the books in 3 days. I’m still waiting for the calendar.

I started browsing Barnes & Noble’s Web site, www.bn.com, and found the same prices as Amazon with fewer annoying “reviews” and targeted marketing. BN also has free shipping for orders over $25 and when you choose it, your books go out within 3 days using 3-day UPS shipping. So now I use BN.com and highly recommend it to anyone who buys books online.

What’s next on my reading list? I think I need to finish up a few books I started and set aside. More on those in another entry.

NaNoWriMo Expanded

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I talk more about beginning novelists.

The other day I wrote an opinion piece about NaNoWriMo ’05, which I turned into a podcast for Maria Speaks. Here are some related thoughts and experiences.

One of the things that has always bothered me was way organizations prey upon people who want to be writers — particularly novelists. They have writers’ workshops and writers’ magazines and and writers’ Web sites with forums and writers’ mail-away courses. They sell products to writers to motivate and inspire them and make them better writers. I’ve seen these products and although I admit to have bought my share of writing books, I’ve also seen enough to know that only a small percentage of what’s sold will really help a writer. And the thing that bothers me most is the fact that the vast majority of writing publications focus on topics of interest to beginning writers — people just starting out. I’m talking about people who haven’t had anything published yet. It’s as if they never expect their readers to get beyond that point.

The people they prey upon — the beginning writers — have a story (or or two or three or dozens) inside their hearts that they’re trying to get out. They’re convinced their work is better than bestselling author, fill-in-the-blank. They believe that the editors who have rejected their work are stupid, selfish, and evil. But rather than spend their time writing, getting those stories out and fine-tuning them for submission and possible publication, they waste a lot of time whining about editors and publishers and the industry in general in online writers’ forums. Or providing all-knowing (or sarcastic) answers to serious questions posted by other want-to-be novelists.

This is where something as silly as NaNoWriMo can help. If these people would stop wasting time and get down to it, they might actually get some work done. A novel in 30 days sounds impossible, but if they’ve been thinking about it as much as they’ve been wasting time in online forums, they should have all the hard part done: the planning, plotting, and character development. Getting the words down should be easy. Just stop procrastinating.

And if there’s one thing that’s always helped me produce, it’s deadlines. Ask Cliff, Nancy, and Megg, three of my editors. (More on that in another blog entry.)

Here’s a real life story about someone I knew years ago. There’s a slight chance she might read this and, if she does, I hope she’s not offended by me telling her story from my outsider’s point of view.

Mary (not her real name) always wanted to be a novelist. I think she was partial to fantasy and science fiction, but she may have had other things in mind. I don’t know because I only had an opportunity to read one thing she’d written. She spent most of her non-working hours online, frequenting bulletin board systems’ (BBSs’) message boards (precursors to the Internet’s forums). She had a BBS and so did I. In fact, that’s how we met.

Her BBS posts were consistently negative toward publishers and editors. She spent a lot of her writing time writing short stories and entering them into contests. She never won. (More about writing contests and other gimmicks in another entry.)

Sometime around then, she sent me one of her short stories to read. I don’t remember what it was about. I don’t recall it being bad, though. But it did have one big flaw. At the end of the story, which takes place in Washington, DC, the main character looks out the window and sees the Pentagon. It was an important part of the story’s irony — seeing that building. I remember that clearly. But it was also a serious flaw because the Pentagon is not in Washington, DC. It’s in Arlington, VA. And it simply cannot be seen from the location her character was standing. When I pointed this out to her, she got extremely offended, as if I’d gone out of my way to find something wrong to pick on her story. I hadn’t gone out of my way. The glaring error was there, right in my face. I would have done her a disservice if I hadn’t pointed it out.

Anyway, she didn’t send me any more stories.

Then one day she decided that the biggest thing holding her back from being a published author was her job. I’m talking about her “day job” — the one where she spent time to earn money to pay rent and buy food. That job. So she quit and retreated into her apartment to write her novel.

A year later, Mary was completely out of money and borrowing from family members to survive. She hadn’t finished her novel and she hadn’t had anything published. I think someone pulled the money plug and she was forced to go back to work.

That’s about the same time I left my day job and started teaching computers and writing how-to books. She claimed I “sold out.” I think she meant that I was writing non-fiction instead of fiction because I was in it for the money. Maybe I did, but my current lifestyle sure beats the 9 to 5, suit-wearing grind I’d be stuck in if I’d kept that corporate job. And who the hell wants to be a starving writer, anyway?

I moved to Arizona and we pretty much lost touch. I heard she had a short story published in a small literary magazine. She was paid in copies. (See my blog entry about Freebies.) But she had her first clip.

The point of this story: this is one person I know who falls into the same category as many of the beginning writers attracted to things like NaNoWriMo, writers’ magazines, and writers’ Web sites with their forums. I’ve just reported her progress in about five years of her life. Five years is a long time. Too long to waste if you’re serious about becoming a writer.

Every day you don’t write, though, is a day you waste if becoming a novelist is your goal. And don’t fool yourself into thinking that participating in those writers’ forums is good practice for writing your novel. I’ll agree that it’s good practice for typing your novel. But it isn’t going to get you any closer to finishing your work in progress.

So why are you reading this? Get back to work!

NaNoWriMo ’05

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Maria Speaks Episode 17: NaNoWriMo.

My comments about the National Novel Writing Month project and the NaNoWriMo ’05 Podcast by Darusha Wehm.

Transcript:

Hi, I’m Maria Langer. Welcome to Maria Speaks Episode 17: NaNoWriMo

I’ve been listening to the NaNoWriMo 05 Podcast by Darusha Wehm. And I’m really sorry if I just mangled her name.

NaNoWriMo — that’s capital N – A – capital N – O – capital W – R – I capital M – O — is short for National Novel Writing Month. The idea is new to me. The goal appears to be to write a 50,000 word novel during the period of November 1 through November 30. It’s an interesting idea, a sort of forced deadline for procrastinators who don’t have an editor reminding them of a deadline as it approaches.

I subscribed to Darusha’s podcast to learn more. You can subscribe, too, at nanorwrimopodcast.blogspot.com. I’ve found that after each episode, I have some comments I’d like to add. That’s what this podcast is all about. I’ll record it and send it to Darusha and she can decide what she wants to do with it. She did, after all, ask for comments in MP3 format. I’m not sure if she expected them from such a cynical realist. But I’ll try to behave myself and be gentle with everyone listening.

First, let me tell Darusha’s listeners a little about me. I write for a living and have been doing so since 1992. That means I write stuff and I get paid for it. I’ve had over 60 books and literally hundreds of articles published in the past fifteen years.

I mostly write computer how-to books and articles. I make a good living doing what I do, but there’s no rest for the weary. Every time a new version of a software product I’ve written about comes out, I have to hit the keyboard to revise my book. I don’t earn royalties on out-of-print books, and most of my books have gone out of print. After all, the average life of a computer book is 12 to 18 months.

I’ve worked on a number of novels over the years but have never finished one. I think it’s because deep down inside, I fear the rejection of something that’s near and dear to my heart. You see, fiction comes from your imagination and soul. Having an editor say he won’t publish it might hurt. Having an editor turn down a new computer book title, on the other hand, doesn’t faze me in the least because there’s so little of me wrapped up in it.

Maybe I need NaNoWriMo to get my latest work in process novel done. I don’t know. I have some thoughts about the 50,000 words in a month deadline that I’ll get to later on in these comments.

And now my comments about things I’ve heard on Darusha’s podcast.

NaNoWriMo gear?

Darusha mentioned that you can buy NaNoWriMo gear on the NaNoWriMo Web site. That raised a flag. And I may as well start these comments with a bang by pissing off some people.

I visited the nanowrimo.org Web site and maybe I’m just dense, but I don’t understand why they need to raise $110,000. I’m also trying to understand why would-be novelists should be so interested in building children’s libraries in Laos. I’m not trying to say that children’s libraries aren’t a worthy cause. But why do NaNoWriMo writers need to support it? And why not support libraries in their own countries?

Okay, so I’m a cynic. It’s hard not to be one when you’re born and raised in the New York City metro area. It just seems to me that the NaNoWriMo gear you can buy at the Web site does more to serve the people selling it than the people buying it.

You want to write a novel in a month? Do you really need a t-shirt to do it? I don’t think so.

And who are the people running the NaNoWriMo web site anyway? It looks to me like some kind of scam to get wanna-be novelists to fund annual vacations for a bunch of Web programming geeks. There’s no indication on the Web site of any real writing organization behind it.

Sorry.

Supporters

Darusha’s episode 3 talked about the importance of supporters. I couldn’t agree more. And I have some comments to add.

I agree that you cannot write a novel or anything else in your spare time without the complete support of your significant other or family. If you just require support for this one month, it’s easy. Ask for it. Explain how important it is to you. Make them understand that by supporting you, they’re helping you achieve your goal. When you achieve your goal with their help, it’s a team effort. But the ball is in your court: if you get the support you need, it’s your responsibility to succeed. Failure would let down everyone and make it just a little tougher for them to support you next year.

Remember, you can’t completely neglect your responsibilities. Do your best to fit your regular chores into your schedule. Rearrange your schedule if you have to, if you can. Just make sure you fit in the things you absolutely must do — like have dinner with your family or go to work — with enough time to get your writing quota done each day.

If you’re trying to write a novel outside of the NaNoWriMo one-month deadline, getting long-term support from your significant other and family might be a little more difficult. One word of advice: be reasonable. Locking yourself up in a room every evening or morning or whatever and neglecting your responsibilities because you’re writing a novel month after month, year after year is just plain irresponsible and stupid. Don’t do that to the people you love. Don’t do it to yourself. Make a deadline and stick to it. And take off enough time during the writing process to keep your life alive.

Novel writing software

Episode 4 talked about tools. Darusha specifically mentioned the phrase “novel writing software.”

I’m sorry, but isn’t any decent word processor an appropriate tool for writing a novel?

This reminds me of an e-mail I got from a guy who wanted to start writing computer how-to books. He asked me to recommend some book proposal software. I told him to try Microsoft Word. That’s what I use and it hasn’t failed me yet.

Here’s the point. There’s no special software that’ll make you a better writer — unless it comes with a creative writing teacher who can critique your work and offer tips for making it better. You can fool around with writing software all you like and it all comes down to your own capabilities. Either you can write or you can’t. Either you have a good idea that you can form into an interesting plot or you can’t. Either you can write realistic dialog and good descriptive prose or you can’t.

That’s not to say that you can’t get better. The best way to be a better writer is to read more, write more, and listen to feedback about your work by people who know what they’re talking about. That doesn’t include your spouse, aunt Tillie, mother, or fellow writing club member — unless one of these people has already had his or her fiction published or works in the industry.

But novel writing software? I looked at CopyWrite, the software package Darusha suggested. It doesn’t look like something you could pick up and start using effectively without a lot of experimentation. So don’t run out and start playing with it now, especially with the NaNoWriMo clock ticking. Use your favorite word processor to write. It has a word count feature built in. And take notes on index cards. Big ones or small ones — your choice. They’re easy to sort, modify, and read. That’ll help make your downtime — like the time you might spend on a bus or train on your way to work or the time you spend at lunch — more productive.

And that brings up something else. Writing a novel is more than just typing words 2 to 4 hours a day until you’re done. It’s planning and plotting. It’s creating backstories for your characters so they’re real. It’s including little details that make your work come alive. When you’re not sitting at your desk, typing away to meet your NaNoWriMo deadline, open your eyes and look around you. Take notes about what you see. Use the index cards. You can put them in your purse or a jacket pocket. Make the most out of all your time, not just the predefined writing time you’ve set aside for this project.

NaNoWriMo forums

Darusha’s Tools podcast also mentioned the NaNoWriMo forums. I visited those on the Web site, too. And here’s my sad report: There are literally hundreds of thousands of posts. My question: why aren’t these people working on their novels? I know from experience that fooling around on the Internet is a great way to procrastinate. Cut it out! Get to work!

If you feel you absolutely must participate in these forums, set a time limit for yourself each day. Something like 15 minutes. Remember, if you type 50 words a minute — which is probably pretty average for someone who actively participates in Internet forums, in those 15 minutes, you could have typed 750 words in your novel. If you wasted an hour in a forum, that hour could have been spent meeting your word count quota for the day.

The good thing about podcasts is that you can listen to them while you’re doing something else. Like driving the car, taking a shower, or working out. So if you must get an Internet fix, do it with podcasts. That’s another way to make the most out of down time.

Backup plan

Darusha also talks about having a backup plan — that is, a plan to backup your novel files. This should be a no-brainer, but I’m sure it isn’t. Most people probably don’t even think of backing up important files — until those files have been wiped out by a hard disk crash, virus, or fire.

Back up your important files. Period. It doesn’t matter what kind of files they are: accounting records, contact databases, or word processing files containing your novel. If you’ll miss it when it’s gone, back it up so you won’t lose it.

Darusha makes some good suggestions for backing up. The main idea is to have an offsite backup. That means backing up on a computer or other device that isn’t sitting right next to the computer where the data lives and breathes. What good is copying your important files to a CD once a week if you store the CD next to your computer? When the burglar steals the computer, don’t you think he might take the disks with him? When the fire breaks out because your superfast, undercooled computer processor got too hot for its own good, don’t you think everything around the computer will burn, too?

Okay, so it isn’t likely. But it is possible.

It’s odd because I was sitting at my desk finishing up for the day while I was listening to Darusha’s podcast in iTunes. Just as she was talking about backing up, I was setting up a folder on my publisher’s FTP server to back up my current work in progress. That folder is accessible by me, both of my editors, and my indexer. I made sure my editors knew why it was there. You see, I’m also a helicopter pilot and there’s always the possibility that I might not match successful landings to take-offs. If something happens to me, I want my editors to be able to get someone else to finish the job without reinventing the wheel.

Check with your ISP. Chances are, you have space on your ISP’s server for your own Web site or something like that. Use that to back up your important files. All of them.

Well, that brings me through Episode 4 and I’ve already said nearly 2,000 words. (Hmmm, if I were writing this for NaNoWriMo, I’d already have my quota met for the day.) But I do have one more thing to say, and that’s about the whole idea of NaNoWriMo.

If you’re participating in NaNoWriMo because you see it as a great way to meet the challenge of writing a novel before a specific deadline, great. You must know what goes into writing a novel and see that it’s more than just the challenge of getting words down so they can be read.

But if you’re participating just to see if you can write 50,000 words in a month, stop and think about it. Are you writing 50,000 words that someone else might want to read? In other words, are you crafting a novel or doing what 100 monkeys at keyboards could do?

My point is this: if you want to be a novelist, it takes more than just saying you’re one and typing 50,000 words as a way to prove it. It takes planning, creative genius, writing skill, and a lot of hard work. NaNoWriMo is one way to see if you can meet deadlines. But there’s more to being a novelist than meeting a deadline.

Do I think it’s possible to write a publishable novel in a month. Yes. The people who do it regularly are referred to in the industry as hacks.

Heck, I’ve been referred to as a hack. But there’s something magic about seeing your name on the cover of a book in a bookstore. Even after the 60th time.

Good luck!

Old Stuff

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I re-read some very old work.

I just spent an hour re-reading portions of a novel I was working on back in the 1980s.

The files are on my laptop and I know how old they are because I read the creation date of the files — August 1989 — and know for a fact that they date before that. In fact, if I’m not mistaken, they were originally written in longhand on yellow legal pads when I had my first job, right out of college. That would set the date at around 1982 or 1983. More than twenty years ago.

I probably typed them into my first computer, an Apple //c, not long after I bought it in 1984. I used AppleWorks back then. Then, when I bought my first Mac in 1989, they were probably among the batch of files I transferred from the Apple //c to the Mac IIcx via a specially-constructed serial cable as an upload into Microsoft Works. Somewhere along the way, I converted most of the files to Word format, but a few of them are still Works files. Word will open them, but there are a lot of extraneous characters that need editing out to make the work really readable.

I don’t really want to discuss the work here. I will say that it’s one of several novels I never finished and it really isn’t bad. It isn’t good, either, though. I know there’s more to it — still on yellow legal paper — somewhere in a box downstairs. I remember reading it not long ago when I was cleaning out a closet. It was never typed into AppleWorks. I probably lost interest in the piece before the typing was done.

I typed much slower in those days — only about 20 words per minute — and I remember how tedious all that typing was. I’m much faster now — probably 80 to 100 words per minute — and I actually type much faster than I write longhand. Maybe someday I’ll finish typing it all in, just so I can have some more aging computer files to look back on.

My PowerBook has just about all the fiction I’ve ever written and put into digital format stored on its hard disk. The backup is on my desktop Mac back at my office and on my iDisk storage space. I don’t write fiction in the office. And I don’t write computer books on my laptop.

Of all my fiction, I’ve only put one short story online. It’s a story about some of the characters from yet another unfinished novel. A back story, turned into a short story. I have a bunch of those back stories, but the one I put online is the only one I wanted to share with others. That story is also old — at least 5 years, according to the creation date of the file on my laptop. But then again, that might not be the original file. It could be older. Maybe I should date my work so I can tell how old it really is, even after file creation dates get changed by software updates and the like.

I think I’ll dig out those yellow pad pages again. I’d like to read the rest of what I wrote.