Beyond the Elements of Style

Times Online!

The Times of London recently made its 200-year archive available at the Times Archives.

The presentation is very user-friendly: you can use the site search functionality, of course, but you can also click on a scrolling timeline, which allows you to browse for something that may be of interest. As a historical novelist myself, I’m very excited about the potential here, both for research and also — frankly — for trolling for ideas!

You’ll also see a separate photograph archive, some featured articles, the ability to do a single-day search (along the lines of “this day in history”), and Times recommendations.

Why am I so excited? After all, the History Channel’s been offering something similar on its site for years.

The point is that this is primary source material. It’s not someone’s account of what may have happened, it’s what the newspaper reported happening. Authentic, not too biased (no reports are completely unbiased), and arranged in such a way that the user can get information quickly and easily.

Note that there is currently a free introductory period for use of the archives; it’s unclear what the cost will be later on down the line, but it’s sure to be well worth it to those of us needing the resource. It has my vote for Site of the Month, that’s for sure! Check it out yourself, and you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

ADDENDUM: My colleague and friend Dick Margulis (he of Ampers&Virgule fame) has helpfully noted that “The date widget is day-month-year rather than the American-style month-day-year. So if someone is looking for news on a particular date, they should be careful to enter it in the right order.”

(You can tell that he’s beyond the elements of style!) Thank you, Dick!

Happy Thanksgiving … Anyway!

I have to admit that when it comes to Thanksgiving, I’m a bit of a bah-humbug sort of person. I don’t celebrate the holiday and it makes me vaguely uncomfortable, as you’ll see in a moment.

But I do want to say that taking time off to acknowledge everything for which we are thankful is an excellent idea, and one we should implement all year, not just on one day. I’m grateful for so many things and many people: the growth of my company, Customline Wordware, and for all my wonderful clients who make it possible; for my sales team, headed up by Julia Blackburn, and mostly, my business partner, friend, and husband, Paul Cézanne. I’m grateful to my publishers for continuing to put my words out there, and for my literary agent, Philip G. Spitzer for enabling that to happen. I’m grateful to my readers (”if a writer falls in the forest…”) who mean the world to me: I don’t know who all of you are, but I thank you!

As for the rest … well, I explain my attitude best in this op-ed I wrote that appeared in last week’s Provincetown Banner:

Thanksgiving, Provincetown-Style

Having decided not to travel for the holiday (the sanest course of action when one considers how difficult flying anywhere has become), I found myself recently wondering how to spend it. While I’m totally onboard with the general sentiment of the time – it’s an incontestably Good Thing to stop and feel gratitude for all we have and all we are, and an even Better Thing to thank people who have been good to us this year – I’ve never been able to feel right about celebrating a holiday that has its historical roots in a genocide.

So how does one mark the day?

At one time the Wampanoag did a sort of anti-Thanksgiving at Plimoth Plantation, but I’ve not been able to find anything out about it in recent years. And while one could of course go to one of the local restaurants and gorge oneself, it seems a little pointless. So I was delighted when the solution was suggested to me: perhaps I should celebrate Thanksgiving exactly like the first Europeans did!

You don’t have to go far to research the roots of the holiday: the museum up at the Provincetown Monument tells the story. The Pilgrims, we learn via a diorama there, were close to starvation and despair when they suddenly found some corn! It was carefully stacked and well preserved, apparently just waiting for them. They rejoiced over that discovery, took the corn back to their ships, and thus famously survived the winter.

So here’s my plan: on Thanksgiving morning, I’m going to break into the Grand Union grocery store over on Shankpainter Road. I’m going to proceed to the canned vegetables aisle (it is, after all, past the season for fresh vegetables) and take the corn I find stacked there. Surely the store owners and the local police will understand, just as no doubt the rightful owners of that original harvest did, right? Stealing is, apparently, a holiday tradition.

Okay, so I’m not going to really do it, but it’s a tempting thought. After all, as long as you get to write the history books, you can – apparently – do whatever you want. Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving indeed, on this and on every day! Being grateful puts us all … beyond the elements of style!

Deadlines and Other Strange Creatures

Well, we’ll make it short and to the point his week, as I am wrestling with every writer’s best friend and deadliest enemy –– deadline time. I’m co-authoring a chapter in the upcoming second edition of Wiley Publishing’s Official Guide to Second Life, and this is Crunch Week. So I’m feeling neither erudite nor clever… just a little over-caffeinated!

But it’s a good subject for writers of all sorts to think about, as deadlines are as inevitable as the proverbial death and taxes. Amd when we sign the contract or make the agreement, the deadline is so blessedly out of sight in the future that it seems like a Small Thing.

Believe me, it very quickly morphs into a Very Big Thing indeed!

How do you deal with deadlines? While I could go off into the predictable every-writer-is-different spiel, there are some concrete bits of advice that will apply to all. To wit:

1. Write something on that first day when you’ve signed or sent off the contract. Even if you don’t eventually use what you write, write something having to do with the project anyway. That keeps you grounded in it, makes it real.

2. Plan the project. This is the next day, after you’ve had the champagne and the excitement has fizzled a little along with it. Use project management software if it’s complex, plain pen and paper if it isn’t. In one column, note the parts that you can do off the top of your head, no problem. In another column, note long-term pieces (if you need to get permissions, for example, or quotes: the sooner you’re on to that sort of thing, the better off you are). A third column will have to do with items, actions, etc. that have to be done in order for the first column to be completed (looking up references, speaking with someone, etc.).

3. Now take the information from #2 and look at your deadline date. It’s calendar time: look at how long you have to complete the project, and plug dates into the pieces of the project you;ve separated out in #2.

4. Start the long-term part right away. Seriously: right away. Don’t wait for the Muse: she’s notorious for disappearing once you’re on deadline.

If you plan everything out well in advance and follow that plan, you have a much better chance of not losing sleep — or sanity! –the last week or two of your project.

Speaking of which, I’d better get back to mine! Need to stay beyond the elements of style ….

Everyone is Acting Like Everything is Okay

The power of words and the power of art are fused in the work of Camille Rose Garcia, a Los Angeles-based artist whose “narrative art” captivated me last week when I was in San Jose speaking at the Search Engine Strategies conference. I took a couple of hours off from the conference to visit the San Jose Museum of Art and was, as the expression would have it, blown away by Garcia’s work.

Each painting or series of paintings is preceded by Garcia’s own take on it, whether she was inspired by her own thoughts, as in Plan B (“I was already deep into thinking about the collapse of society, the degradation of the environment, and military catastrophe”), or what she observes, as in Operation Opticon (“I wanted to do a group of works that specifically addressed the war machine and all of its evil agendas”).

Garcia creates dreamlike landscapes through which charming beings sleepwalk, relying on antidepressants and the joys of 500-thread sheets to keep them from seeing where they are and what they are doing. Her colors are vivid and supplemented with bits of mica and glitter to make the destruction in them seem even more removed, magical, inevitable. Garcia grew up near Disneyland and contrasts that so-called perfect world in denial with the real world that surrounds it in ways that simply jump off the wall at the onlooker. I fervently hope that The Tragic Kingdom will be exhibited elsewhere, so that others can get a glimpse of Garcia’s genius, which unfortunately is not well captured on paper or on the web.

So what does this have to do with words? Plenty. There’s the narrative art dimension to her work that appeals to me, as a writer and someone who generally absorbs meaning through words; but there’s something deeper here, too, a fusion of the different arts to communicate a vision to the world.

And that puts her way … beyond the elements of style!

Why Is My Company Called Customline Wordware?

It’s because of a car. Really.

Most of you reading this today will be far too young to remember the Ford Customline. That’s okay: I’m far too young to remember the Ford Customline! But it does exist (see picture) and my husband owns one, an old car that belonged in its heyday to his late aunt.

So that’s the Customline piece.

I’d been freelancing for a lot of years before I met and married Paul, but when I did, he pointed out my hopeless lack of organization and business acumen. Some years before, he had started a consulting business that he called Customline Software. So it seemed fairly obvious for me to tag along with Wordware.

I’m happy to say that Customline Wordware has grown and flourished, so much so that it has completely eclipsed its former Web-mate, Customline Software. I don’t know how Paul feels about that; but he was right: whether you’re a writer, an editor, or — as I am — both, you need to treat what you do as a business.

Whether or not you name it after a car is, of course, up to you!

Behave in a businesslike manner and you’ll see that people begin to treat you that way, too. It’s the only way that writers and editors will be given the respect that they deserve. And when you do, you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

Take That!

Here’s an unusual service, though a similar thought may have occurred to those of us accustomed to dealing with rejection letters. Lulu.com (a subsidy publisher) is offering something new: for $90, you can turn your rejection letters into… toilet paper!

Here’s how Lulu introduces the service:

“JK Rowling, Agatha Christie, Hunter S. Thompson, James Joyce and George Orwell all received their share of publishers’ rejection letters. Stephen King got so many that he used to nail them on a spike under a timber in his bedroom. Margaret Mitchell got rejection letters from 38 different publishers before finally finding one to publish her novel, Gone With The Wind. William Saroyan may now be rated a literary great, but he amassed a stack of rejection slips 30 inches high — some seven thousand — before he sold his first story.”

Perhaps it’s an idea whose time has come. Certainly I tell many of my clients and writing students that chances are good they’ll accumulate enough rejection slips to paper at least one room of their houses; but certainly that’s a depressing choice for wallpaper. Why not another kind of paper altogether?

Lulu goes on to say, “This groundbreaking new Lulu service recalls the remark attributed to (among others) the great Sir Winston Churchill, who is said to have written in reply to an unwelcome letter: Dear Sir, I am in the smallest room of the house. I have your letter before me. Soon it will be behind me.”

Anyone want to try it out? Have the frustration level it takes to spend “from $90″ to put it all behind you? Then go to Lulu’s fabulous toilet paper offer — and then come back and tell us all about it!

That will take you well… beyond the elements of style!