Category: writing

Arguing with a reviewer is a really bad idea

One of the people I follow on Twitter recently posted a link to an epic example of how an author shouldn’t behave. The writer in question, Stephan J. Harper (not to be confused with the Canadian Prime Minister!), wrote Venice Under Glass, a mystery set in La Serenissima that features teddy bears for protagonists. Michael Cohen over at Tidbits.com gave the book a middling review. Instead of grumbling to himself and moving on with his life, Harper had a meltdown in the comments section. He began by citing passages from the book that allegedly refuted Cohen’s criticisms, but when the other commenters basically told him to chill out, his responses devolved into ad hominem attacks.

What Harper doesn’t seem to understand is that writing a review is an inherently subjective exercise, and people will inevitably have different reactions to a given work. Although he keeps insisting that Cohen needs to support his arguments with quotes from the text, doing so would be pointless. When Cohen says that Harper’s prose is ‘workmanlike,’ that’s his opinion. It can’t be proven or disproven because it’s ultimately a question of taste, and as they say in Latin, de gustibus non est disputandum. I may think Firefly is one of the most overrated shows in the history of television, but that doesn’t mean that the legions of Firefly fans are in the wrong.

Harper might want to take a page from Colin Morgan’s book. An interviewer once asked him if he read what the critics were saying about his work, and he said no. He thought that positive reviews would give him a swelled head, while negative reviews would just bring him down. Those are wise words for creative-types.

Pinkwashing

I read an interesting article in the Telegraph about the practice of ‘pinkwashing,’ which in this context refers to parents surreptitiously editing books that they read to their children. Apparently, this became a source of heated debate in the comment section of the New York Times‘ parenting blog, with one shrill commenter blurbling on about how “Censorship of the written word should never be an option.”

That might be true if we were talking about the government, but we’re talking about parents reading to their kids, and frankly, I don’t understand why people are getting their panties in a twist over this (though I suppose “this is the Internet” is probably enough of an explanation).

Many years ago, my aunt gave me a copy of Anne Rice’s The Mummy or Ramses the Damned. I don’t remember exactly how old I was at the time, but I was waaaaay too young for a book like that (I was probably younger than 10; I was definitely still in elementary school). I really wanted to read it, but my mother insisted on reading it to me. This let her make a large number of strategic edits in the process. Instead of reading a particularly explicit love scene, she simply said that Ramses and Julie went into the pyramid and “became very good friends.” I didn’t give it a second thought at the time, and it wasn’t until many years later that she ‘fessed up.

Was she right to “censor” Anne Rice like that? Absolutely. As a parent, it was her job to decide what was or was not appropriate for me until I reached the point where I could figure that out for myself. I think the same principles apply even if a parent is reading a book that’s ostensibly for children. Parents presumably know what their kid can or cannot handle, an author doesn’t.

The pitfalls of scene-setting

One of the things that really annoys me about historical fiction is the tendency of some authors to go overboard when it comes to background information. It’s like they’re bound and determined to shoehorn in every single fact that they uncovered in the course of their research, regardless of whether or not it’s actually relevant to the plot. I recently started rereading The Scroll of Saqqara by Pauline Gedge, and several particularly blatant examples of this jumped off the page (though I hasten to add that it’s still one of my favorite books). Take this piece of dialogue, for example:

Sometimes I wish that Grandfather had not moved the capital of the country north. I can see the strategic advantage in a seat of government close to our eastern border and located on a river that empties into the Great Green for good trade, but Memphis has the beauty and dignity of the rulers of old.

That quote is spoken by the protagonist’s son as he and his father sail northward to the capital in question (Pi-Ramesse). But it doesn’t seem natural. It feels like a modern author trying to include another fun fact instead of an ancient Egyptian having a casual conversation with his father. The fact that it’s the only thing the son says in that scene just makes it seem even more awkward.

A few pages later, the protagonist is on the deck of his boat watching Pi-Ramesse come into view. As he watches the scenery pass by, he sees the old city of Avaris, the temple of Set, and “a heap of rubble that Khaemwaset knew was the remains of a Twelfth Dynasty town.” I’m not quite sure why Gedge felt the need to include that bit of information. It’s not relevant to the plot; it’s just another factoid she uncovered, and it’s not even all that interesting.

Base of a statue from Pi-Ramesse. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Now I get the fact that authors who write historical fiction need to provide more description than usual. When you’re writing about the past, you have to do more to help your readers envision the scene. But the tricky part is that your characters, being natives of their world, wouldn’t normally go around explaining everyday things. That’s why I’m not a fan of first-person narrators in historical fiction. It’s incredibly jarring to have the protagonist suddenly provide a detailed description of something that he or she would have taken for granted in real life. I prefer to write in the third person in order to let the invisible narrator do as much of the info dumping as possible.

Going back to Pi-Ramesse and The Scroll of Saqqara, I think it would have been much more effective if, instead of nattering on about the city’s strategic location, the protagonist’s son had commented on its splendor. Judging from the few first-hand accounts we have of Pi-Ramesse, that’s what really stuck in the Egyptians’ minds. They were impressed by the city’s beautiful temples and palaces, not its proximity to the Levant. That would have allowed Gedge to provide useful scene-setting while avoiding a blatant jump into Author Mode.

There’s a very fine line between setting the scene and bogging your story down in detail. Readers are going to have varying levels of interest in the historical setting you’ve chosen, and you can’t assume that everyone is as fascinated with the details as you are.

Indie publishing as a gateway to traditional publishing

Amazon recently published their 2012 best-seller lists and it revealed something interesting: four of the authors on the adult top-ten list originally went the indie route (i.e. self-publishing or publishing through a small press). However, each of them ultimately had their work picked up by a traditional publisher.

So what might this tell us about the future of publishing? For one thing, I think it suggests that traditional publishers aren’t quite as moribund as many people might think. Given their strategic advantages, they will probably dominate the best-seller lists for the foreseeable future.

But at the same time, traditional publishers will likely become more and more receptive to the idea of acquiring successful indie works. Indeed, there may come a day when indie publishing becomes a semi-official alternative to the industry’s traditional gatekeepers.

After all, relying on literary agents and the slush pile can be a risky proposition, which is why so many books never earn out their advance. But with indie publishing, a lot of that risk is borne by the author. That means that traditional publishers can sit on the sidelines and see who’s winning before they have to pony up any of their money.

Still, I don’t think indie publishing is going to completely supplant literary agents and slush piles. As I’ve mentioned before, the indie route is a difficult one, and you need to sell a lot of copies if you want to catch the eye of a traditional publisher. But if all you’ve done is taken your unedited NaNoWriMo manuscript and uploaded it to the Kindle store, you’re not going to find your inbox flooded with offers from traditional publishers.

Yes, I’m a bad blogger

My apologies for the lack of updates. Between the Toonari Post and the second Khamtir novel, I don’t have a lot of time for miscellaneous writing, hence the tumbleweeds that are drifting through this blog.

However, I do have some exciting news to report: two of my stories will be appearing in Tendrils and Tentacles, an anthology of flash fiction written by speculative fiction writers from the Madison area. One of the stories is set in the Khamtirverse (naturally), but the other one is set in the same universe as A Theft of Bones.

The anthology will be available early next month, and I plan on doing some public readings to help promote the book. It should be a lot of fun!

J. K. Rowling shifts gears

Little, Brown and Company announced last week that J. K. Rowling is planning to release a new book aimed at adults. For the moment, she’s keeping mum about the specifics, so fans have no idea what this new book will be about. Her only comment has been that it will be “very different” from Harry Potter.

Since Rowling is now richer than Croesus, she has a degree of artistic freedom that most writers can only dream about . She can write about whatever the hell she wants. She could write a 1,000 page book about a young gay physicist who ruminates about dusty plasmas and cookies, and it would still make the New York Times best-seller list because lots of people will buy it no matter what. Of course, even if it were a total flop, she wouldn’t exactly be worrying about how to put dinner on the table.

It will be interesting to see what Rowling does with this freedom. Will she stay within the confines of speculative fiction, or will she try to break out of that mold entirely?

Iteration, or why I love Blizzard Entertainment

The sturm und drang surrounding the development of Diablo III continues. Back in September, the game’s release was postponed until “early 2012,” but Blizzard has still not given any hint of when we’ll be seeing it on store shelves. The game director recently took to the official D3 blog to explain what the team has been working on over the past few month. Some of the changes concerned core elements of the game, and many fans expressed outrage that the designers were still making major changes this late in the development cycle. As usual, Blizzard was unapologetic, stating once more that they will only release the game “when it’s done.”

Why am I bringing this up? Well, it occurred to me that Blizzard and I have a lot in common: we’re both addicted to iteration. I’ve technically been done with Evil in Thebes for months now, yet I can’t seem to stop tinkering. I suppose the most notable change was the main character’s name (Ptahmose is now Khamtir), but most of these changes are rather small: some additional wordsmithing here, a few extra tidbits of lore there.

None of these changes are particularly earth-shattering, so you might be wondering why I’d bother making them. After all, every minute I spend making changes to EiT is a minute I can’t spend querying or working on the sequel. But, like Blizzard, I’ll only stop fiddling with something when it’s actually done. However, there comes a point where you’re just making changes for the sake of changing things, and that’s when it’s time to stop and close the Word document for good. Unfortunately, it’s often difficult to figure out when you’ve reached that point. In most cases, there’s no objective standard you can use to make that determination. It ultimately boils down to gut feelings and hunches, but the more you write and revise, the more self-aware you’ll become. “Übung macht den Meister,” as my German professors would say.

Sometimes research drives me batty…

While working on my WIP yesterday, I had to ask myself whether or not an ancient Egyptian would have known anything about sharks.

After spending hours scouring both my library and the Interwebz, the answer still remained elusive. The Egyptians weren’t all that keen on sea travel, so they didn’t spend much time discussing marine life (though Hatshepsut’s mortuary temple contains some interesting depictions of creatures found encountered in the Red Sea during the journey to Punt).

Eventually, I decided to make an educated guess and assume that an Egyptian might have heard stories about great predatory fish that lived in the sea and occasionally took bites out of swimmers. The historian in me hates making guesses like that, but he’s rapidly learning to swallow his pedantic outrage. But it’s stuff like this that tempts me to switch gears and write about a world of my own creation. 🙂