falling off the blog bandwagon

My life has changed a lot in the past six months. Generally for the better, but it’s made it…harder to care about things like blogs. It’s made it harder to write: I don’t have the extra brainpower sitting around (quite frankly, what I want to do when I’m not working 60 hours a week is have a beer and play some video games). How do people push through this? I never was impressed by the people who wrote an entire book while they had a full time job…but now, damn. That’s not easy.

I can’t say a thing about reading a book over more than a week either.

See, my thoughts are all fragmentary. I don’t have enough to say anymore.

But I do have a book to edit…more on that eventually.

The Cake Rejection Letter

Dear Ms XXXXX:

We appreciate your interest in XXXX Agency. Unfortunately, you did not quite meet our requirements.

We specifically mandated a short skirt and a long—long—jacket. While your skirt was, it should be noted, satisfactorily short, your jacket was merely long, whereas the needs of our agency at this time demand long—long. In addition, you did have a great supply of allocations, but we were unable to either confirm or deny the rightness of said allocations.

However, we are certain that many other agencies would be consider your dividends to be right. Please understand the subjectivity of this business, and know that, while we found your voice to be a roseate variety of glass, others will certainly find it dark enough.

We wish you the best of success in your future endeavors, and thank you for your interest in our Agency.

Sincerely,
XXXXXXX

P.S. Please consider repolishing your fingernails. At the moment, they shine more like martial law.

Why Haven’t Ebooks Changed Everything?

So maybe Borders managed to bankrupt itself through poor marketing of its own ereader (seriously, I’m convinced that’s what did it…they were pretty damn popular), and maybe it’s now possible to cart around a whole library in one little flat device (hold on, didn’t Douglas Adams predict this in ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’? Aweeesome)…nevertheless:

Why has nothing about the way readers interact with (successful) authors changed?

I mean, it’s still the same old system: you put out a book, people buy it, and maybe things are corrected and/or updated (if it’s the type of science fiction or nonfiction book whose fundamental premise is eventually threatened by obsolescence)…but that’s that. There’s a professional editor, there’s you.

 

Confession time.

 

I’ve been playing Minecraft lately. (It’s awesome, by the way. Like Legos with violence.) The system Minecraft is going on right now is, you can buy the beta version at a pretty good discount. In return for putting up with the total lack of structure (as my friends told me, it’s the one game where you really can’t feel guilty for looking stuff up), and also for the occasional game crashing bug, you get the full version for free once it comes out. There’s a mutual benefit: Mojang gets a ton of beta testers so when he’s ready for the final release he has excellent data and things really will be ironed out; plus, users get to try it out early, and offer their own feedback (or build their own mods if they are technically awesome enough).

So how come we can’t do this with books?

 

Really, I would love to see (and, if I can get my act together, will do it myself) a beta model. Say you write up your novel. Put it out for free (or, like, 99 cents) and provide an email address, so people can let you know what they think and any errors they find (stylistic, grammatical, and factual…whatever they choose). Then, once you release the next version, give it to the people who emailed you for free.

I’m aware of some drawbacks with this method–above all, the impossibility of pleasing everybody–but, well, what’s the point of having an enormous audience if you never make use of it?

Does Good Horror Have to End Unhappily?

First of all, I think I should reiterate the point that I just don’t scare. I’m not sociopathic–there are things in reality that freak the hell out of me, and it’s not like I would cheer a real life axe murderer on–but when I know it’s fake, I’m going to sit back and enjoy the ride. (Also, no startle reflex. Seriously, I just don’t jump. This is probably a bad thing.)

Anyway, after reading ‘House of Leaves’, I’ve realized that by far the one thing I hate most about horror (and, it seems, this is especially common in American horror) is a happy ending.

Review: ‘House of Leaves’ by Mark Z. Danielewski. Includes partial spoilers: no explicit details about the ending, but all sorts of implicit ones. Also, more rant than review.

Maybe a little bit of my disappointment comes from the fact that this was described to me as ‘super-scary’, which just sets the bar really, really high. (My golden standard is still ‘The Ring’–English movie, 2003 (?).) However, most of it is the fact that a) the literary fiction barely hits mediocre, and I’ve been on an Umberto Eco kick for at least the past three months, and he’s pretty much the god of run-ons; b) I recently read a few books by people who were either acquainted with or former junkies, and this one doesn’t read like one at all; c) the science is just terrible…have you ever seen a geologist offer a date without some kind of plus or minus?; d) Stephen King’s ‘Rose Red’ about an evil expanding house made the entire concept just amusing.

All in all, the whole thing reads like it was written by some punkass English major who knows all sorts of things about writing, especially in an academic style, but pretty much nothing about reality except through books and, maybe, an interview here and there. Considering the layered nature of the writing, I can’t exclude the possibility that it’s intentional (well, at least the non-Truant parts), but it just doesn’t work. The whole thing is caught in this uncomfortable limbo.

As to the ending…they wouldn’t have found each other, he would have ended up in asylum, and bits of frozen corpses would have tumbled out randomly after the house was sold to new owners. (Overkill? Not if you pace it out correctly. Actually, I have to call this just enough kill.)

Alright, so now that that’s off my chest…my favorite horror movies all end on a very ambiguous or negative note. ‘Secret Window’ has the corn; ‘The Ring’ has ‘she never sleeps’ (note: the graphic novel, and probably original novel, version of this actually improves on the bit where she copies the tape for her son…she calls up her own parents and asks them to do a favor for her son. It’s beautiful); huh…these are pretty much the two horror movies I like.

Then again, ‘The Grudge’ was pretty much terrible. But I think that was more execution than anything else: wooooOoooo haunted house! A…grudge! It just didn’t translate well.

Bookwise, the short story behind ‘Secret Window’ (‘Secret Window, Secret Garden’) has a lame ending where the good people win; although ‘Pet Sematary’ still has one of my favorite closing ambiguities. (I hear in the movie, she snaps his neck. It’s better in the book, where you can imagine them teaming up and just exponentially increasing the evil.) ‘Carrie’ is okay but not awesome…has anyone else written horror recently besides Stephen King? Seriously, there’s got to be someone else out there. I swear I’m missing someone (will have to go through my old booklists and see if I remember). I suppose ‘Uzumaki’ (more Japanese graphic novels) is a big pile of fun, but it’s more straightforwardly bizarre than anything else.

If you like the idea of literary fiction and happen to have an Authonomy account, go look up ‘Faust’s Butterfly’ (assuming it hasn’t been snapped up by publishers).

Anyway, maybe this is just a personal preference. But it’s hard to shake the sense that what makes a truly fantastic bit of horror is its ability to keep you up all night picturing the exact same thing happening anywhere, anytime…happening right now, to you.

And that’s just not possible when there’s a happy ending.

Writing a Successful Query On Purpose

…seriously, it’s not easy! I wish I could just straight-out ask what I’d done right on what is either the third or fourth draft of my query letter, and third attempt sending things out (to be fair, the second was a complete “AAARGH WANT PUBLISH” try, Neandertal in personality and simian in well-thought-outedness).

For all I know, though, it was the timing that did it. Beginning of year, guys–from what else I’ve seen, through April or May (starting right in January, I guess) is when to do it. Or maybe it was adding another 7,000 words, so I queried with 70,111 instead of 63,000…. And this time, I knew it was short for a book, so I actually addressed that issue (AgentQuery had this nice bit of advice mentioning that literary works can get away with shortness…they also said not to use their name, oops…).

 

I was originally planning to do a number of helpful little advice-y posts here, but quite frankly all I did was read up on what these things are supposed to look like, and there’s a ton of good advice on it–even, or perhaps especially, Query Shark (right? Oh man I haven’t been on Twitter in ages. Simply because getting a constant flood of new tweets drives me nuts). Anyway, the point is there are a ton of good resources. If you can’t Google well enough to find a good resource (or do the obvious and hit up AgentQuery.com), you should learn—twenty-first century, yo. Actually, I assume you’d know how to find resources if you’re here….

Writing a synopsis: now there’s something I might do a real guide to, because the ones I found weren’t much help at all.

What are Computers Doing to Language?

–A question I never tire of asking. Between trendsetters like ‘Neuromancer’ (“cyberspace” is from that book! whoa!) and tools of convenience (chatspeak, namely), we should expect language to be undergoing some kind of change.

Of course, there’s the simple addition of terms related to computing–motherboards, hard drive, CPU, Internet, software, etc. And then there’s factors like common misspellings, which led to terms like ‘pwned’ (did you know that’s pronounced like ‘owned’? I did not) and, depending on the site, special intentional misspellings stemming from common misspellings (‘tiem,’ for instance).

Now, a lot of this has got to stem from how used to MS Word’s autocorrect we’ve all gotten. I regularly forget to capitalize ‘I’, now, and I’ve noticed that I am far more neglectful about transposed letters than I used to be. It doesn’t matter, people can read it anyway!

…Overall, I see a certain amount of laziness–but, from a different perspective, what’s really going on is greater casualness. Not only is anyone permitted to be an author, now, as opposed to the dilettantes with too much money and formal education–but anyone can talk to anyone else from around the world.

Yes, those of us who are purists will never get used to the notion of ditching good grammar and real spelling entirely, but don’t knock it. The way of the future is in quantity, not quality–let’s data-mine this business.

(trying not to be whiny about getting published. come on, I can’t wait for replies and acceptance letters at the same time!)

Fame, Money, and the Broken Publishing System

A moral dilemma for people who are in debt…. For the record, I just owe a ton in college loans, I’m not an irresponsible spender or in real dire straits. (And this is after most of it’s been paid off. Sometimes I really regret going to private university, especially the one I went to.)

Anyway, recently I had to decide between being published without getting paid (the original plan was for payment, but the publishing company made some changes) and trying to resubmit until I found someone who’d give me money for what I have to say is a pretty fun story, if you’re into gruesome metaphors.

I think the main reason I went with the former option is because this system sucks. Most decent anthologies are not going to take simultaneously submitted pieces, and at the same time refuse to reply in accordance with any decent human schedule (seriously, three months is a little–no, way–too long, considering we no longer need the Pony Express to get our mail). So what you end up with is months and months of stagnating, and by the end the original love for the story is gone, to the point where the worth of going through this hellish pain of searching, searching, and agonizingly putting queries/cover letters/biographies together just isn’t worth the time, especially since one could be writing instead.

And at the same time, writers aren’t able to hold publishers to a more appropriate deadline. Those of you who do this professionally need the revenue and usually can’t risk self-publishing. Granted, I’m on the amateur level, but it wouldn’t do me any good to get a reputation of rejecting great offers–provided I get any in the first place…. You have to make a name.

There really needs to be some kind of check on publishers. Even having to cater to their audience with regular updates isn’t that much of an issue, considering the slow timeframe and the fact that writing is a one-of-a-kind thing. The usual supply and demand curves don’t apply.

(NB: I’m sorry I don’t actually post on any kind of schedule anymore. When I started this blog, I didn’t have a job or much of a plan. Now, I have both–and the plan’s actually going somewhere.)

Setting up for Smashwords

I guess this is a ‘I’m not dead!’ sort of post–just, so so busy. I’m very bad at saying no when people ask nicely, and yes I do keep an eye on the comments here. I’m inclined to focus more on the projects that get responses, so….

SMASHWORDS! Coming eventually. Though I’ve already learned some useful things about making ebooks.

How to Write Good Horror

I’m either the best or the worst person to ask about this, because I don’t scare. Rather, I don’t have a scare reflex (I never jump), and I’m too pragmatic to be bothered by imaginary bad things happening to imaginary people. Or, for that matter, anything in a book….

 

Before going any further, I should mention now that I think Stephen King does his best work when he’s not trying to be scary, and my horror style has been described as having a fairly simple plot, though with the ‘dark’ piled on. If you don’t like this, you should totally disagree with me! I love debates.

 

Anyway…much as I love writing gore, I sadly note that there’s no longer as much of a reason for visceral horror. If you look at movies from thirty or so years ago, you see these special effects that, unbelievably, were thought to be realistic at the time–well, the upshot is that modern society is very, very desensitized to images, and modern good horror really needs:

1. Psychology. The best kind of bugs crawling under one’s skin are entirely in one’s own head.
2. Suspense. Build it, and then build it some more! Obviously, too much buildup just bores people. I think this may be the hardest thing to control, because it is very individually determined–I read fast enough where I tend to miss when it’s happening. (The only thing to do is make sure the buildup is relatively long in comparison to the bursts of action.)
3. Imagery. Just because you shouldn’t go all out with gore doesn’t mean you shouldn’t evoke the senses! Smell and taste seem to be particularly neglected, which is a shame because those memories are far stronger than visual (it’s one neuron per smell memory, but I’m not sure what exactly that’s supposed to mean).

 

I’m going to leave you with some real horror now.

 

National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo)

I swear the word ‘November’ fit into there somewhere…anyway. Depending on the websites you frequent, NaNoWriMo is either a huge deal or one of those background things that’s viewed with a vague contempt because We’re Better Than That.

Personally, it does nothing for me. I’ve done the rush thing, gotten it all out in 15 days (it was only 69,000 words and I was unemployed, okay?!)…and ended up with utter crap. Which, I am given to understand, is somewhat the point: not to produce any kind of masterpiece or thing worthy of publication, but to show yourself that you can indeed write a novel if you just get your ass down to it! And, of course, it comes with the whole communal sharing of experience thing, which despite my “best” efforts this blog hasn’t done….

 

Obviously, I don’t have a whole lot to say right now…so I’d like to hear it from you: whether you’ve participated, how successful you think it would be for you, &c. &c.

 

 

Quick tip! Turn your page background dark…it’s much better on the eyes.