Beyond the Elements of Style

To Be Honest … Or Not?

So after a hiatus from this blog to take care of matters in my personal life, I’ve been jogged back into it by reading this article, because it captures so much of the experience one has when beginning writers ask for an “honest” evaluation or critique.

One I’ve had recently, to tell the truth.

The reality is that most beginning writers have no concept of the fact that it takes more than a good idea to produce a book or a script. Everyone has good ideas. My car mechanic has good ideas. Should he write them down? Should he? Probably not.

It takes a great deal of time learning to take a good idea and translate it into something that people will want to read or go to the theater and see. Call it an apprenticeship if you will. Call it paying your dues (though that part is often reserved for the deluge of rejections one is sure to receive). Call it learning your art. whatever you call it, it’s essential to know that great writers become great writers by practicing, getting honest feedback, thinking about it, incorporating it, and practicing again. You’ll note the use of the word “become” in that sentence — it doesn’t happen overnight. Most “overnight” successes have been writing for many many years in obscurity.

Ask for honest feedback only when and if you’re willing to take it. And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

Social Media for Readers and Writers

So let’s start our tour of social media with my favorite group of people—people who read and people who write! With some exceptional help from some of my colleagues at LinkedIn (a social network site you’ll find mentioned here), I’ve put together a list of social media sites you might want to check out. They’re not in any particular order, so don’t bother looking for one; perhaps you can see it as an example of the random nature of the Net!

Remember as you browse the first rule of social media: there’s no one-size-fits-all here. Some of these sites may interest you; many of them will not. And that’s as it should be, because you don’t want to spend all of your time online! Explore the sites at your leisure, see which ones seem to work for you, try them out. If you don’t like one site, move on.

And if you find more to add to the list, drop me an email at jcezanne@customline.com and let me know!

• Literature Map: Gnooks is a self-adapting community system based on the gnod engine. Discover new writers you will like, travel the map. of literature and discuss your favorite books and authors.
• Book Glutton: Read books online with other people—suggest books, discuss books, see who’s reading what. Sign on as a glutton and take the video tour!
• Library Thing: So if you feel a need to catalogue your personal library online, Library Thing is the place for you. You can do it here, and then connect with others whose libraries you like. Note that there’s a fee once you pass 200 books.
• Good Reads: Another book cataloguing site. Also offer some great lists and trivia. (As I write this, Twilight is simultaneously on the “best books ever” and “worst books ever” lists, so it’s even-handed!)
• Author’s Den: From the site: “While some of the other sites focus on readers, here’s one that focuses on authors as well. From the site: “The largest most vibrant free online literary community of authors and readers! Visited by 1,400,000+ readers/mo.” It claims that authors “willreach many readers” and that readers
  can “discover, interact, get personal, buy and read!”
• Red Room says that it’s “where the writers are,” and explains, “Red Room provides authors and members with free, easy-to-use, elegant online homes. It’s a place for the literary community to promote their work, express themselves, and connect with their favorite authors.”
• Swap Tree is a book- (and music-, DVD-, and video-game-) swapping community. Have a book you want to trade for another? This is the place for you!
• We Read: Ger personalized recommendations for books, share your recommendations with others. Includes discussion forums.
• Write Lit“aims to bring writers and readers together from all parts of the globe. It seeks to help the writer — technical, commercial, and literary — earn a living, and find audiences for his work. Furthermore, it aims to provide a venue for readers to share their passion for the written word.”
• Authonomy: This is a community sponsored by HarperCollins UK that “invites unpublished and self published authors to post their manuscripts for visitors to read online. Authors create their own personal page on the site to host their project – and must make at least 10,000 words available for the public to read. Visitors to authonomy can comment on these submissions – and can personally recommend their favourites to the community. authonomy counts the number of recommendations each book receives, and uses it to rank the books on the site. It also spots which visitors consistently recommend the best books – and uses that info to rank the most influential trend spotters.”
• Writers’ News/Writing Magazine: This is a singularly useful site, a clearinghouse for a number of different activities: competitions, classes, book discussions, forums, links … it’s all here.
• Bookworm: a blog that celebrates books and reading with lovely enthusiastic reviews by the author, Lubya Kably.
• Media Bistro: Though not strictly an author/reader sort of site, Media Bistro is a community that can be useful to writers looking to improve skills, get jobs, and connect with other media professionals. They have local chapters throughout the United States that offer get-togethers in person.
• Book Marketing Network, part of the whole Ning family of social networks, describes itself as being “for book authors, self-publishers, book publishers, publicists, marketers, and others involved in writing, publishing, and marketing books.” Includes, in true social media style, something for everyone—photos, videos, discussion boards, events, and blogs.
• The Book Place, also a Ning community, features a blog, podcasts, reviews, and discussion.
• Writers Digest: the online community associated with the grande dame of aspiring writers’ magazines, Writers Digest , the site offers some social networking but mostly supports the magazine. Online subscriptions are available.
• Gaia Community: once you join the community you’ll have access to the books section. Very useful if you’re interested in spirituality and healing topics.

In addition to the list above, there is a Facebook application called Visual Bookshelf that you can access from inside Facebook. It’s another community that shares reading lists and reviews.

So that’s it for now! I’ll update this list periodically, as community life on the Net is always changing, always growing … but this should get you started. And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

Amazon Reconsiders

As we all know by now, Amazon listened and responded to the expressions of concern over its recent apparent censorship activities. It’s unclear (and probably always will be) exactly what happened to the listings of books deemed to be adult-themed over this past weekend, and the debates will probably continue for some time. At the end of the day, however, I think we can come away with a few important things to remember:

• The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
• Corporations do not and never have had your best interests at heart.
• Bugs can and do happen.
• Corporations will respond to pressure when it appears that actions they have taken will affect their financial bottom line.

Bear all that in mind, and you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

Literary Censorship

One of the acknowledged components of totalitarianism is the restriction of access to officially banned literature. But that term tends to refer to a given government’s plan; Amazon has taken the concept international and capitalist by making the decision (on behalf of its users, naturally) as to what ought to be read, and — more importantly — what ought not to be read.

Of course, the company has no authority to be sure that the material it deems offensive is not published. It simply is making sure that no one can access that material.

According to a story in the Seattle PI, Amazon’s move goes beyond censorship and actually takes a political stand:

As of around 4 pm on Sunday, plugging the search term “homosexuality” into Amazon returned top links to A Parent’s Guide to Preventing Homosexuality and You Don’t Have To Be Gay.

And an open letter to Amazon from writer Kassia Krozser added,

I can buy a book on training fighting dogs (something so offensive my stomach hurts just looking at the cover image), but specific types of human relationships are suddenly taboo?

While Amazon is blaming a glitch for what happened, according to Publisher’s Weekly, that does nothing to explain the letter that one author received from Amazon in response to his protest of the exclusion of material from Amazon’s search terms:

In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude “adult” material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.

And even Publisher’s Weekly itself admitted that “whether a glitch or new policy, titles like James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room and Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain are among the those that have lost their sales ranking.”

I don’t suppose that I need to underline any of this: banning books, no matter how you try to justify it, is still banning books. I’ve written to Amazon, not wearing my hat as an author of books, but as a frequent buyer: if there were ever a reason to move one’s internet business to Powell’s, it seems that this is it. Please think about doing the same: censorship is wrong, no matter how you dress it up. And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

Simultaneous Submissions

There’s an ongoing and probably never-ending discussion on the Net about simultaneous submissions—sending your work to more than one publisher at a time. Should you wait the painfully long time it often takes to be rejected, or fling your submission out to the four winds and hope that someone, somewhere, will want it? But what if two “someones” should want it at once? Dilemmas, dilemmas, dilemmas.

When it’s a book, the line is pretty clear: send out multiple query letters, but once someone has asked for the full proposal (um, you do have a full proposal, right?), then give that editor the courtesy of not sending it out all over the place. Tell the publication that it has three months to decide, after which you’ll feel free to submit the proposal elsewhere. That’s pretty simple.

The complications come in when you’re talking about sending out articles, short stories, op-ed pieces, and so on.

Frankly, sending your work to multiple publications is absolutely fair and reasonable. Editors receive an incredible volume of submissions, do what they do more for love than money, and are absolutely unable to respond at the speed of light. That shouldn’t keep you from carrying on with your agenda.

Common courtesy applies. If your work is accepted somewhere, immediately notify the other publications with a simple note saying, “Please withdraw my story entitled ______. I apologize for any inconvenience.”

Do you tell them? That’s another gray area. Personally, I never mention that I’m sending multiple submissions; if something is accepted, I follow the procedure outlined above. Chances are, with the few slots available and the thousands of submissions the journal receives, it’s not as if there were going to be a bidding war on my bit of flash fiction!

The bottom line? Follow the golden rule, in this and all things, and you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

Lists? Let Me Count The Ways

Some time ago there was an article in the New York Times about the popularity of life lists. The article was constructed to reflect the list, and it was an interesting conceptualization of form following function.

More recently, both friends on Facebook and fellow members of various email communities have challenged others to create lists. Some are odd, some require reflection, and all encourage one to summarize a part of one’s life in short numbered sentences. Talk about being concise!

I live with lists. I am never as happy as I am when I have a list by my side. Things to do on Monday. People with whom I need to communicate this week. Grocery list, hardware store list, trip-to-Orleans list. There’s a sense of being in control that comes with making a list, consulting a list, crossing accomplishments off a list.

It’s an illusion, of course; the fact that none of us is really in control is demonstated to us daily. But maybe an illusion is better than giving in to the dark side of that lack of control: panic, anxiety, depression.

So what does this have to do with words? As writers, we can also serve the same function as lists. We can remind readers to dream, encourage them to accomplish what they’ve been putting off, challenge them to become great. Words are far more inspirational than lists; we just need to remember why we’re writing them. And then we’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

Texting as Writing?

I have two stepchildren. Anastasia is fifteen, and Jacob is seventeen. Until a few years ago, I understood most of what they had to say … and write.

That changed once they obtained mobile phones.

Now their speech and writing alike are peppered with obscure acronyms, the exclusive use of lower-case in all written communication, and expressions that are at best nonsensical. One wonders what the standards will be in another few years, when the generation raised on text-messaging will come of age. Will entire books be written this way?

A member on a list to which I subscribe writes incessantly in iChat or instant message format—not so much the IKYN and AFAICT abbreviations, as “prolly” this and that, no punctuation that follows any rule with which I am familiar, an almost complete lack of capitals, and a rigorousness of thought to match. It’s like reading messages written with alphabet cereal … in the bowl.

Okay, so I’m a curmudgeon. I’ll freely admit it. But I love love love the English language and fear that I’m seeing its waning days. Let’s try and keep texting on mobile telephones, and reserve “real” (as in, correct) language for other communication? And then we’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

More on POD, self-publishing, etc.

Since I wrote my post a couple of days ago, I’ve been pointed to some interesting articles and helpful resources on the subject, a couple of which I’d like to share with you here.

Yesterday’s New York Times carried this article, Self-Publishers Flourish as Writers Pay The Tab. (Misusing in the process several terms as author Motoko Rich refers to “self-publishers”—in fact, the article is referring to subsidy presses—and speaking of iUniverse as a “print-on-demand” company. One sees the writing on the wall: once the Times has misused a term, it’s hard to regain accuracy!)

An older article that appeared in Information Week in 1999 spoke to the hopes and plans surrounding the print-on-demand technology. In Barnes and Noble, IBM to Develop Electronic Books, analyst Tischelle George discusses another use of the technology: a kiosk in every bookshop that will in fact print a book immediately and on-demand so that every book on the planet is available, all the time. This is a truly breathtaking use of the technology that, sadly, has not come to pass; and now we’re stuck with the term referring to authors willing to pay to have their books (at best) enter into public discourse or (at worse) gather dust on Aunt Edna’s bookshelf.

This past weekend I was sitting in the green room of a theatre, waiting for a play I’d written to go onstage, and was reading to pass the time. One of the actors looked at me in surprise and asked, “What’s that?

“A Kindle,” I responded. He continued to look baffled, so I expanded: “It’s an ebook reader.”

The actor shook his head. “I have no idea,” he said, “what any of that means!”

Soon he will; soon just about everybody will, as electronic books are the literary technology most likely to survive hard economic times and downturns in reading rates. I’m probably a lone voice crying in the wilderness here, but I believe that the way we name and communicate about these various ways of making books available to the public matters.

Think about what you want to communicate, and how you want to communicate it, so that you too can be … beyond the lements of style!

No Double Spaces, Damn It!

Some very smart people hire me to either write for them or to edit what they have written. I call these very smart people “clients,” and I like to think that I provide a valuable service to their businesses. Most of them appear to believe that I do, as I have ongoing contracts with many of them; in several cases, I’ve been writing for the same companies for ten years or more.

And yet I occasionally find that these same smart people do not actually trust the very person … in whom they’ve theoretically put their trust.

It usually has to do with something that they all believe they “know to be true.” In these cases, I apparently play the renegade by trying to change something that everybody “knows” to be correct. And it almost always has to do with the old rule of placing two spaces between sentences. Time and time again I write or edit client copy, placing only one space between sentences, only to have the client gently correct (and, occasionally, admonish) me about it.

I may have pointed you to this site before; if so, bear with me. Read it. Read other articles. Read Robin Williams’ books. You do not have to take it on faith that I’m correct: do your own research.

And then repeat after me: It is incorrect to place two spaces between sentences. In fact, according to a colleague of mine, it has been incorrect in the typesetting world since 1954; if that’s true, then the change in practice is not even due entirely to the advent of computers (and the subsequent demise of monospaced type).

The simple truth is that your eye doesn’t need those two spaces to know that another sentence is about to begin. Your brain is smart enough to sort that out.

So, smart people, unite: learn the rules of usage so that you can write correctly, or — alternately — keep on employing me to do your writing and editing … and trust that I know what I’m doing! And then you’ll be .. beyond the elements of style!

Data in One Place Doesn’t Exist

This week’s guest blogger is Bill Blinn, who knows a thing or two about backing up data.

Any data that is in just one location doesn’t exist.

Why? The answer is that bad things can happen to good data. Have you ever used an existing document as the basis for a new document and then, without thinking, saved the new document using the old filename? I have. Goodbye old file, unless you have backup. I did.

Have you ever formatted one of two disk drives in a machine, thinking that you’re formatting the C drive and accidentally pointed the format gun at the head of the D drive, the one with all your data, time billing records, photos, and music? Yeah, I’ve done that, too, I’m embarrassed to admit. The only recovery is backup.

Ever have a machine just die? Been there. Done that. Recovered the data.

So far, I haven’t had a computer stolen. We did have a network-spreading virus/worm years ago when the “I Love You” messages circulated. That was May 4, 2000. We’ve become smarter since then and we’ve instituted more safeguards, but backup saved the day. A lot of people I know lost every jpg on their computer because that particular virus overwrote (among others) all jpg, jpeg, vbs, vbe, js, css, and doc files.

Files exist on fragile magnetic or optical media. The more copies you have, the less likely it is that you’ll lose something important.

Backup is an essential part of living in the computer age, yet no-one seems to take it seriously until it happens to them. I’m raising my hand here: I lost an entire novel which, though possibly not the Great American one, was nonetheless dear to me. It broke my heart. I started doing backups.

Just running whatever backup software you favor isn’t enough, either. What happens if your home or office is burned, flooded, or otherwise destroyed? Good-bye, data. Offsite backup is the only reliable solution.

It doesn’t have to be costly, either. You can keep thumb drives of important files at a friend’s house. You can exchange backup with a friend, too: store hers on your computer, she stores yours on hers. There are many creative ways to deal with the issue: the only incorrect way is to not do anything.

Back up all your files regularly, and you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!