tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-151216062024-03-12T22:40:21.389+00:00Honest CritiquesNo, I mean it. REAL honest. Email your excerpts or full stories, up to 1000 words or so, to honestcrits [at] yahoo [dot] co [dot] uk. Synopses would also be welcome. My backlog is so daunting now that I recommend not submitting anything you are not prepared to wait a couple of months for a response on.
<li><a href="http://honestcritiques.blogspot.com/2005/08/what-this-blog-is-all-about.html"> Click here to find out what this blog is all about.</a></li>Torgohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07220712985495316924noreply@blogger.comBlogger70125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15121606.post-1143299852897935152006-03-25T15:15:00.000+00:002006-03-25T15:17:32.933+00:00This week's assignment...<span style="font-family: lucida grande;">Please go <a href="http://tinyurl.com/p75xv">here </a>and read Joyce's "Refugee"... I'm blogging about it tomorrow. Password is 'Vista' if you haven't been to AW's Share Your Work forum before.</span>Torgohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07220712985495316924noreply@blogger.com25tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15121606.post-1142008166450044032006-03-10T15:45:00.000+00:002006-03-10T16:29:26.453+00:00A Game of Chess<span style="font-family: lucida grande;">Right, have you all had a look at "<a href="http://absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=27819">A Game of Chess</a>"? Good!</span><br /> <br /> <span style="font-family: lucida grande;">The first thing you'll notice is that it's highly observational; the method by which information is conveyed to the reader is the watchful narrator, who is capable of noticing fine detail. The narrative voice in any piece of work tends to imply a personality. I know people go on about first- or third- person or omniscient/unreliable/limited POVs, but I think it's initially easier just to think of a person telling a story, and what sort of person that is. </span><br /> <br /> <span style="font-family: lucida grande;">In this case, the narrator is an excellent psychologist and reader of body language with a flair for pithy imagery. He looks on at the events in the story from a detached perspective; see how Ian continually stresses the distance between the narrator and his subjects. He's in the corner by the noisy coffee machine (sound becomes another barrier to observation); he reminds us often that he is 'watching', 'seeing' or failing to see. Ian does not allow the narrator to become a part of the story, by having him remain aloof, and by not allowing him to comment directly.</span><br /> <br /> <span style="font-family: lucida grande;">The narrator is hypersensitive. We get all five senses from him. He can see fine golden hairs from the other side of the room. The cadence of his observations is simple, deliberate. Characters arrive trailing sharp, declarative images - crisp white shirts, green velvet ribbons. As you see, they're handled well and often compounded of one or more sense-impressions, which conduces to a feeling of keenness and clarity in the writing.</span><br /> <br /> <span style="font-family: lucida grande;">As I say, he's also able to read people. This can be a desirable trait in a narrator as it provides a bridge between two different kinds of narrator - the person like you or I, or the omniscient narrator. Ian's narrator tells us that the man and the woman are both trying to lose, which feels like he's jumped into their heads; but he's carefully set up that class of observation, for example when he sees the man's eyes 'slide along the diagonal', thinking about a bishop move. Not only close observation, but also analysis; a fitting person to comment on a chess problem, a conundrum he is trying to work out.</span><br /> <br /> <span style="font-family: lucida grande;">And he speaks in pleasant images. I like the fresh scrubbed air and the insolently stretched legs. There's a writerliness about him too.</span><br /> <br /> <span style="font-family: lucida grande;">Some part of the narrator is Ian, and the rest Ian has constructed out of his own craft to enable him to present this vignette. It is a small carefully-constructed piece of work, with a straightforward gambit and a tricksy endgame, and he's had to give us a voice who can sort it all out for the reader with equal care and brevity.</span><br /> <br /> <span style="font-family: lucida grande;">The story's very schematic, isn't it? That's the second thing you notice. He's had to stylise and maybe diminish all the characters to have them fit their chess-game roles. The narrator's aware: "The scene is unreal. It is like watching a play, or being a voyeur." That's the choice Ian has made, and he's executed it well, but it maybe leaves the reader a little uninvolved. </span><br /> <br /> <span style="font-family: lucida grande;">The weakest section is the section of dialogue in the middle, which veers uncomfortably from the abstract - "we have nothing more to learn from one another" - to the mundane - "All my stuff is packed in the car." The latter rings hollow in the context. I can't quite believe any of the dialogue, actually. The narrator's voice is so austere and controlled, and these people strike the wrong note. Maybe if the narrator were less detached, all participants could become a little more human; and the story, which shows promise and skill, would pack more of a punch. As it is, it feels like a successful exercise in writing, not a successful story.</span><br /> <br /> <span style="font-family: lucida grande;">I don't know enough about the short story market to say whether anyone would publish this. There's room for improvement, but maybe this is one of those things that a writer gets a lot out of writing, but maybe recycles into a longer a better work a little down the line.</span><br /> <br /> <span style="font-family: lucida grande;">Thanks for all your comments recently. One of the many things that is enjoyable about operating this site is when people start to debate and discuss things on the comment threads. </span>Torgohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07220712985495316924noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15121606.post-1141740186911356412006-03-07T13:50:00.000+00:002006-03-07T14:03:06.993+00:00All the Fun of the Fair<span style="font-family:lucida grande;">The London Book Fair's on at the moment. I went yesterday. I don't have much business to do there, other than wander about looking at what everybody else is publishing.</span><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">One thing you do see quite a lot is that other publishers do pick up on books that you've rejected; happened to me twice yesterday, big posters plastered all over the stands advertising books I felt we couldn't publish for one reason or another. The lesson to draw from that is that being rejected (or accepted) by a publisher isn't necessarily about the quality of the book. It's about how many copies a publisher thinks they can sell, and one house might be better set up to market a book, or just feel more bullish about it. Quality feeds in to that, but there is another set of factors, enabling us to account for the success of Jeremy Clarkson. (My money's on an infernal Faustian pact.)</span><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">Anyhow: the next crit I'm going to post, before the end of the week, is not in fact the top of the queue I gave you the other day. Ian submitted a short story to me just before the first one on the list, called <em>A Game of Chess</em>, which I didn't want to post in its entirety (only about 1K words) for fear of 'publishing' it. I didn't want to pull bits out of it either as it wouldn't really work. So Ian's posted it over at the forums on </span><a href="http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/"><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">Absolute Write</span></a><span style="font-family:lucida grande;"> in the <em>Share Your Work > Literary </em>folder. Off you go and </span><a href="http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=27819"><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">have a look</span></a><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">. I'll tell you what I think soon...</span>Torgohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07220712985495316924noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15121606.post-1141059124853195212006-02-27T16:49:00.000+00:002006-02-27T18:17:24.013+00:00What Fresh Hell Is This?<span style="font-family:lucida grande;">I am very bad at proofreading. Very, very bad. Such that I occasionally don't notice if there's a whole page missing from a book, or if a word is spelt wrong in sixteen-point type in the middle of a page. Added to this is my complete blind spot for several points of house style and grammar, such as the correct use of the restrictive relative pronoun or the distinction between -ise and -ize.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">Unfortunately, in a world where editorial service departments are a thing of the past, I have to do a lot of spotting these things myself, and then I get my work checked by people who proof professionally, and then my typescripts come back covered in post-it notes with tart little comments all over them. BAD editor. In extreme cases the competent person in this relationship will come and sit down with me and give me a little lecture, whereupon I thank my lucky stars I do not work for the Mob and therefore am not liable to be shot behind the ear and dumped into the Grand Union Canal.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">So the part of book-making that I particularly hate is when the creative part of it is over and it becomes a matter of getting the book ready to be printed. This is most of it. How much nicer it is when I am on the other side of the divide, just burbling away as author-on-staff, safe in the knowledge that my colleague with her editorial hat on will have to dot my undotted is and cross my uncrossed ts. Not to mention swap out all my whiches for thats and vice versa.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">With my author hat on, I have around 150,000 copies of my books in print (needless to say, not under my name) in the UK and Australia alone. Maybe it's time I got out of the office, chained myself to the word-processor and see if there's a more interesting way to make a living than checking very slowly for typos.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">Anyway, today I am freshly shamed by my proofreading rubbishness, so by way of blowing off steam, a few things that have come out of my reading of children's book manuscripts recently.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">1) Please would people stop titling their books "[PROTAGONIST'S WACKY FORENAME] [PROTAGONIST'S WACKY SURNAME] AND THE [SOMETHING] OF [SOMETHING]" E.g. "WIGGY FUMBLER AND THE SOAPDISH OF QZARD". No, it doesn't really make me think "Hey! It's the next Harry Potter!" It makes me think "I'm going to have to read 400pp about somebody called fucking </span><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:lucida grande;" >Wiggy</span><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">2) Please would people stop writing the book where the brainy awkward geek is oppressed by high school and shoved around by jocks but because he is sensitive and creative comes to a kind of triumph and inner strength and probably gets to kiss the prettiest girl in the school because he isn't like the other guys. Typical life-lessons / rites-of-passage learned in this novel include the shattering revelation that the pretty girl may not be so pretty on the inside, or that your parents aren't as bad as you think, or ... oh, you know the rest of the yadda yadda yadda. Here's a free novel idea for you: let's have a book called <span style="font-style: italic;">JOCK</span>, in which one of the Neanderthal stereotypes usually found picking on our pale-and-interesting heroes in the above gets to tell their side of the story. Why exactly do they beat up on future authors? Now It Can Be Told.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">3) The prologue where a child is born and bystanders make cryptic/prophetic comments whose true meaning will not be understood until later. Yes, fantasy writers, I am talking to you. It's really hackneyed. Just leave the damn prologue out already.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">4) You open a kids' fantasy manuscript and you get faced with something like this:</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;"></span><blockquote style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">"The prophecy?" said Dangalf the Sage. "For many years, the sages warred over its meaning, until now only I remain as the last keeper of the words of Khobblers the Oracle. I now impart it to you, my young friends, shoeless, feisty ragamuffins though you may be.<br /><br /> <span style="font-style: italic;">"Three shall come when times are dark.</span><br /> <span style="font-style: italic;"> One has a distinctive mark:</span><br /> <span style="font-style: italic;"> His head's the shape of English muffins</span><br /> <span style="font-style: italic;"> With birthmarks in the shape of puffins.</span><br /> <span style="font-style: italic;"> The second is a waspish girl</span><br /> <span style="font-style: italic;"> Whose wisecracks make you want to hurl;</span><br /> <span style="font-style: italic;"> And probably the plot will feature</span><br /> <span style="font-style: italic;"> Some annoying talking creature.</span><br /> <span style="font-style: italic;"> Inside they'll find the magic sword</span><br /> <span style="font-style: italic;"> And slay the standard Evil Lord"</span><br /><br />"Like, that makes sense! Do you understand it, Cloppy?" asked Kourtnee, waspishly.<br />"Naayyyy!" said the unicorn.<br />"Wait a second, guys!" said Wiggy. "MY head's shaped like an English muffin!"</blockquote><span style="font-family:lucida grande;"></span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">Wow, what are the odds. In the end we reach a crisis because there's no magic sword, but it turns out the magic sword actually refers to the magic sword of friendship the protagonists carry around in their hearts, and they defeat the bad guy with a group hug. Ooh, didn't see that coming, did you! Having destroyed any tension by telling you what's going to happen in the end with stupid doggerel, the author desperately tries to claw back some sort of drama by playing on words. <span style="color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">PLEASE STOP USING PROPHECY AS A PLOT DEVICE IN FANTASIES UNLESS YOU HAVE SOME KIND OF RATIONALE FOR IT</span>, e.g. time travel or something. It just makes it much more difficult to create thrills.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">The only great fantasy I can think of in which a prophecy is a plot device is Jack Vance's unfeasibly brilliant <span style="font-style: italic;">Lyonesse</span>, and that's only really because King Casmir's oracular magic mirror Persilian hates him and wants to fuck with his head. Actually, in the example above, if Wiggy and pals were to end up spitted on Axfang the Black's halberd by the end of chapter three, that'd be a fun use of prophecy.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">5) Please stop writing the post-apocalyptic SF thriller in which after the bomb/plague/enviro-meltdown the world is reduced to scrabbling around in little Hobotowns, disused quarries where everyone wears bits of old sackcloth and leather, and at some point someone will be discovered worshipping a burnt-out old TV set. Our hero/-ine will then go off on a quest and discover the forgotten history of Earth, probably including a secret enclave of people living at a 21st century level, yadda yadda yadda. Surely we are all bored of books and movies supposedly set in the future in which people have regressed to tribalism? You're writing SF for kids, give us some bloody robots and death rays.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">These dull SF-for-kids books are so often moralising and didactic (look what we're doing to the planet, how bad it is!) and usually display a decidedly un-SF-like poverty of imagination. (The reason film producers resort to Hobotown is usually that they've blown all their money on the SFX budget and there's nothing left over to dress the extras; but in a novel, exciting visuals cost you nothing.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">If anyone out there is still reading after my long absence, please use the comment threads. I'd like people to contribute to the critique process a bit more. In fact I think I'd like to see at least one helpful or interesting comment from each person who has submitted an extract before I blog about their work - I'm going to start bumping lurkers down the list... (If anonymity is an issue, you can always comment anonymously, but email me separately to let me know who you are.)</span>Torgohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07220712985495316924noreply@blogger.com38tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15121606.post-1140565578839516192006-02-21T23:43:00.000+00:002006-02-21T23:48:28.040+00:00Here you go: the top of the queue.<span style="font-style: italic;font-family:lucida grande;" >1.</span><span style="font-family:lucida grande;"> "Refugee" - Joyce</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:lucida grande;" >2. </span><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">"Filling the Gap" - Richard</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:lucida grande;" >3.</span><span style="font-family:lucida grande;"> "Insight" - Diana</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:lucida grande;" >4.</span><span style="font-family:lucida grande;"> "The Blood of Queens" - Valerie</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:lucida grande;" >5</span><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">. "The Walmart Way" - Julie</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:lucida grande;" >6</span><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">. "Hippie Chick's Life Lessons Learned" - Rene</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:lucida grande;" >7</span><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">. "One for the Ages" - Leo</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:lucida grande;" >8</span><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">. "Osama's Dream" - Richard</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:lucida grande;" >9</span><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">. "Joffa" - Suzanne</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:lucida grande;" >10</span><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">. "An End to Longing" - Stephen<br /><br /></span>Torgohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07220712985495316924noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15121606.post-1140530305527929202006-02-21T13:47:00.000+00:002006-02-21T13:58:25.563+00:00Short Stories<span style="font-family:lucida grande;">Two new crits below.</span><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">I've also been sitting on two short stories for a while - <em>A Game at Chess</em> and <em>In a Dark Time</em>. I can't really post them in full without that constituting 'publication' so I suggest the best thing for the authors is that they post them in Absolute Write's password-protected Share Your Work forum. Once they're up, I'll post thoughts about them here. </span><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">I'm so bored with having to keep logging in to a file-hosting service every few weeks to keep the Easter Island statue from disappearing off their server. So, please consider the statue on holiday. Perhaps he is walking the earth, solving mysteries, reuniting families, and possibly competing in secret underground bare-knuckle kickboxing tourneys in order to save the life of his feckless kid brother. (I did have this idea once for a TV series in which the late lamented </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ODB"><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">Ol' Dirty Bastard</span></a><span style="font-family:lucida grande;"> would drift from town to town doing good works but being pursued by the cops, inspired by the real-life incident in which he rescued a child from a burning car. It would've been called <em>The Dirtiest Hobo</em>. Sadly, it was not to be.)</span>Torgohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07220712985495316924noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15121606.post-1140529195148952942006-02-21T13:35:00.000+00:002006-02-21T13:39:55.156+00:00Mini-post<span style="font-family:lucida grande;">Er, not sure what this one's called. It's by Margaret and it's YA fiction.</span><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><blockquote><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">Gina Sarafino knew Eli Jenkins didn’t normally invite girls to his basement to play video games. He didn’t invite them one-on-one, nor to the big multiplayer games he often threw with a dozen friends and four networked television sets. It wasn’t that he didn’t like girls. In fact, he thought quite highly of them. Girls, he believed, just didn’t like video games. Gina, though, was welcome downstairs anytime. It wasn’t only that they’d known each other since he was in third grade and she in first, or that they used to be next-door-neighbors out in the country before his family moved to town, nor was it because they attended the same church. It was because she regularly smoked him at Halo, and if she beat him, she could certainly beat the other guys who weekly hung out in the Jenkins’ basement. When it came to video games, Eli wanted Gina on his team.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">Gina, on her part, felt honored to be there. She was a sophomore and not a big deal in Woodvale High School. Eli, on the other hand, was a senior and a very big deal. Since she’d known Eli so long, he seemed like a brother, and she hadn’t realized what an asset the association was until she started high school herself last year. As a result of Eli’s reflected glory, doors opened for Gina into places she would never have been on her own, like where she was tonight, playing games in Eli’s basement with a dozen senior jocks and a smattering of kids from the church youth group. She wasn’t the only girl present tonight, however. Her best friend, Amy Tsukada was included because the two were practically joined at the hip, and because most of the jocks thought Amy was hot: untouchable, but hot.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">It was a small place, Woodvale, Oregon, and there wasn’t a lot for kids to do in the rural, mountainous, logging and farming community. The Jenkins’ basement was a safe haven for many. At the moment, though, it was emptying fast. </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">"Where’d everybody go?" Benito "Benny" Sanchez asked, returning from upstairs with a can of the soda Mrs. Jenkins kept stocked in a spare refrigerator on the back porch. The largest group of game-players, Eli’s jock classmates, had left en masse while Benny was raiding the soda stash. It was a week before school started and most had summer jobs.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">"Claimed they had to work in the morning," Eli said, yawning.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">"They just got tired of Gina beating them," Amy said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">"Don’t we all?" Eli said, unplugging controllers from the game consoles. Gina began picking up pop cans and empty chip bags. Amy’s mother was on her way to take them home, but they had a few minutes and she didn’t want to leave Eli with a mess. Eli stopped suddenly and looked around the room. There were only four kids left, all from their church. Benny was helping clean up by finishing a bag of pretzels. Ian McNeel was still lost in a game on one of the sets. He could, Gina knew, easily play all night, then get up and ace an advanced chemistry quiz. Ian was a self-described "freakin’ genius."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">"Everybody’s here," Eli said, glancing around. Gina looked at Amy quizzically who shrugged.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">"You’re losing it, Eli," Amy said, continuing to stack pizza boxes to haul upstairs to the trash. "Everybody just left."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">"Caitlin!" Eli called, ignoring Amy. After a long moment, Caitlin, Eli’s younger sister, appeared at the top of the stairway, book in hand, with the slightly dazed look she always had when she’d been engrossed in a book. She was always engrossed in a book. Gina watched her make her way down the worn carpeted stairway, her limp, pale brown hair pulled back in a sloppy ponytail, a shapeless t-shirt over her grey sweat pants. She might be cute, Gina thought, giving her a quick smile, if she’d take the time. Standing next to the stunning Amy didn’t help any, but Caitlin seemed indifferent. For some reason she and Gina had never been close, although they were nearly the same age. It was Eli she’d spent time with when they were little, building forts together in the field that lay between their houses. </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">"They’re all here," Eli said to Caitlin. "Shall we reveal The Plan?" </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">"Sure," Caitlin said, closing the book in her hand and sitting primly on the edge of the couch. Benny nudged Ian who began the process of shutting down his game.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">When they were all seated on the floor or the worn brown velvet couch along the family room wall, Eli perched on the edge of a small piano stool and looked at them in that intense way he had, like the survival of all earthlings was at stake. He was medium height, not tall enough to be a basketball star nor hefty enough for football, although he had done both with some success. His hair, a shade lighter than his sister’s, curled down over his collar and around his ears. Eli’s hazel eyes turned green when he was upset, or when he was pumped about something. They were green now, Gina saw.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">"This is my senior year...," he began.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">"Go, seniors!" Ian said from his perch on the arm of the couch. Amy punched him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">"We have to hurry," she said. "My mom will be here soon."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">"You heard her; hurry it up," Ian said to Eli. </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">"...but before I leave for college, I want to start a band," Eli continued.</span><br /></blockquote></span><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">Wahey! I think that’s the plot right there, isn’t it - the band - appearing an economical 900 words or so in, the characters sketched in. The prose is solid – not incredibly stylish, but unobtrusive and functional. I’d probably get bored with it, but then I’m not the target audience.<br /><br />The only reason I wouldn’t ask to see more of this for a UK children’s list is that it’s really very American, and that’s a difficulty in kids’ books. School’s quite different over here in some ways. Still, the basics are good, and I’d want to read on to see what happens.<br /><br />This is what I mean about the beginning of a book giving the editor the best chance to grasp what it’s all about. (Cue Margaret telling me the band has nothing to do with the plot…)</span>Torgohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07220712985495316924noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15121606.post-1140528793088484682006-02-21T13:21:00.000+00:002006-02-21T13:33:13.126+00:00The City Council Murders<span style="font-family:lucida grande;">Here's the beginning of Jim's <em>The City Council Murders</em>.</span><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><blockquote><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">The mayor was lying dead on the floor and I was sitting on top of the best story of my life.</span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">If there's one inviolate fact I've learned as a reporter for a small-city newspaper, it's that city council meetings can be pretty boring. <span style="color:#ff6666;">[Inviolate fact and ‘can be, pretty much’ don’t match, nor does ‘usually’, next.]</span> It's usually just a lot of bullshit. I'm a damned good reporter and I'd been searching for something exciting to write about. <span style="color:#ff6666;">[You could cut this line – it’s a non sequitur, it makes me think Our Hero is up himself rather and of course he is naturally looking for something<br />exciting.]</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">I had a funny feeling before this meeting, though, and I'm not sure why. It might have been the way the city clerk's secretary batted her hot, blue eyes at me when she wiggled into City Hall. </span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">I admit I enjoyed the way she kept baby-bluing me from the front of the council chambers. She kept crossing and uncrossing her never-ending legs under the council table and, was it my imagination, or was that a flash of thigh peeking out from above a stocking top? Was I the first reporter to unearth the news that the heart-stopping Sheryl Lareaux wore, not pantyhose, but stockings and a garter belt? <span style="color:#ff6666;">[This is pure Mickey Spillane.]</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">I wasn't hallucinating; she actually WAS running her tongue slowly across her pouty lower lip every time she caught my eye. I wondered briefly why this knockout blonde was suddenly showing all this interest in me, the lowly reporter who sat through every one of these dry-as-dust council meetings. <span style="color:#ff6666;">[Odd, isn’t it – Our Hero ricocheting between being hard-boiled Mike Hammer and the ‘lowly reporter’ with the city council beat. One starts to suspect satire. I hope so, or it’s bathos.]</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">The session had started as usual, with the pledge of allegiance and a little prayer that no one really listened to. Me, I'd been at the back of the room, sucking on a smoke before I had to sit down and pay what passed for serious attention to the political hijinks going on up front.</span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">One of the perks of being a foot soldier in the journalism wars is that you get to meet some of the real people in government, the cops and the firemen and the building inspectors and the street superintendents and the clerks, the people who usually have the most interesting stories to tell, anyway. I always prefer to spend my time with them. It's like having the freedom to curse and scratch my balls without feeling like I farted in church. <span style="color:#ff6666;">[Why is this paragraph here? It doesn’t seem to relate to those on either side.]</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">I’d stubbed out my cigarette and ambled up to the front row of seats in the council chamber like I didn’t care who owned the place. I sat down next to the city solicitor, a high-dollar lawyer who was always pretty friendly. He usually kept me pretty well informed about the resolutions and ordinances that appeared on the council agenda. He could always be counted on to be helpful, as long as it didn’t interfere with his own agenda. <span style="color:#ff6666;">[Jim, like me, needs to watch his ‘pretties’, and other qualifiers that can dilute the impact of a sentence. Also, I get a big wave of I-don’t-care regarding the city solicitor, who seems kind of pointless.]</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">The council members were still discussing something earth-shatteringly important, like whether to approve the minutes of the last two sessions, when it happened.</span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">Glass shattered and the mayor spun around out of his padded leather chair at the far right end of the head table and crashed to the floor.</span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">For a lifetime-long second, nobody moved. Then one of the councilwomen screamed and everyone was up out of their chairs.</span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">I weigh a lot more than I should, but I can move fast when I have to, so I beat everyone to where the mayor lay crumpled like a used Kleenex on the floor. <span style="color:#ff6666;">[Definite bathos, and seems an inappropriate image. I can imagine the victim of some mob hit being dumped at the side of the road described sardonically as being ‘like a used Kleenex’ because the image conveys the body being disposed of thoughtlessly in the first place to hand. Unless the council chambers are a real sty, it seems incongruous.]</span> A big chunk of his face was gone. His last glance out the window by his desk had been his last glance at anything. Someone had shot him through the window. If the shooter had been trying for a between-the-eyes shot, he’d pretty much scored a bull’s eye. <span style="color:#ff6666;">[Ha! Redundant, no? You could say that about any gunshot wound: If he’d being trying to hit what he hit, he hit it. You could say that about Dick Cheney.]</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">I reached over for the mayor’s wrist to search for a pulse, knowing I wouldn’t find one. The police chief was beside me and he took over. He doesn’t carry a walkie talkie, so he shouted for someone to call for the cops and the ambulance. The look on the old cop’s face left me with no doubt that the ambulance wouldn’t be hurrying to the Emergency Room, though. <span style="color:#ff6666;">[Our Hero didn’t really need to tell us about the cop’s expression, as it’s been fairly comprehensively established that the mayor is dead.] </span>Those huddled around the mayor were in a noisy state of confused shock. but I couldn’t succumb to the temptation to join them. I was right in the middle of the biggest story to come down the pike in years and I had to stay alert, sucking up information like a nuke-powered Hoover <span style="color:#ff6666;">[comic imagery. What tone’s Jim going for here? Funny, thrilling…?].</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">It was immediately apparent that no one had seen or heard anything more than I had: the sound of the window breaking and the man being propelled backwards, spinning around and falling out of the chair onto the floor. <span style="color:#ff6666;">[How could this possibly be 'immediately apparent'?]</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">I glanced through the shattered window, wondering where in the hell the sniper could have been. It looked like the clearest line of fire was from a dilapidated, white-washed building across the street, the old County Welfare Office. At an angle, though, and several hundred feet away across a nearly empty county parking lot, was the high school. I tried to mentally fix the school window that had the clearest sight line to the broken window. And the mayor’s head. With a powerful rifle, and probably a scope, an expert marksman could certainly have lobbed the slug from the school. <span style="color:#ff6666;">['Lobbed the slug?']</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">Still, none of it made much sense. An assassin killing a mayor who had absolutely no enemies anyone knew about? <span style="color:#ff6666;">[We the audience know nothing of the Mayor so far, so I feel it’s an error to jump in with this piece of summary exposition – let’s have a little investigation from the journo before we conclude (even initially) that it doesn’t make sense.]</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">More cops and EMTs arrived, so I slipped out of council chambers, down the back stairs and outside, where a small crowd was beginning to gather. The guys from the firehouse next door were milling around the front door of City Hall. <span style="color:#ff6666;">[Why?]</span> I quickly scanned the windows of the high school and the old white building again, from ground level. I’m not sure what I was looking for, but I couldn’t spot a thing that spelled “murder.” <span style="color:#ff6666;">[It'd be traditional, in this sort of situation, for the sleuth to pick up some clue that everyone else has missed... maybe later.]</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">I slipped back inside before the <span style="font-family:verdana;">cops</span> could seal off the building and called the paper, telling the city editor what had gone down and asking for a photographer, tout suite. The office was only four blocks away, so the shutterbug could be here pronto. <span style="color:#ff6666;">[What with the toot sweet, the shutterbug and the pronto I feel rather overwhelmed by slang/jargon! A little slang is good to maintain atmosphere and character, a bit of flavour in the text, but too much and it can sound silly.]</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">The ambulance attendants were standing around with their hands in their pockets. The mayor was dead and they wouldn’t be taking him anywhere. The medical examiner, after he did his little rain dance, would have to move the body. <span style="color:#ff6666;">[Rain dance?]</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">By now, the place was crawling with uniforms and detectives. Even the county prosecutor showed up.</span><br /></blockquote></span><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">Caveat: I’m posting this in my lunch break, and I can’t check back on my email inbox at home to see if Jim might have sent me an updated version; if so, I’ll replace this post when I get home.</span><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;"><br />I’m not convinced by anything that happens in this passage. Our hero seems to want to be tough, funny, smart, streetwise and cynical all at once, with the result that the tone oscillates wildly from one sentence to the next. As a reader, you don’t know what to take seriously. I got irritated with the flip way the gory dead Mayor was being treated; our hero comes off like a jerk.</span><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;"> </span><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">To be fair, there are a number of local government employees over whose graves I would be hard pressed to shed a tear, but let’s at least establish who’s likeable and who isn’t before we start taking the reader’s sympathies for granted. </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">The whole thing’s incredibly pulpy, with the knockout-dame-with-legs-that-don’t-quit on femme fatale duty, the drawling slanginess, the breezy pseudo-gumshoe… I wouldn’t expect, from this, a great read. I’d expect something clunky and predictable.<br /><br />I think this sort of thing is highly difficult to write. The basic models – Hammett and Chandler – were both fine writers, and Chandler IMHO was exceptionally fine. You can’t just throw together a sultry blonde, a bit of Sam Spade attitude and a dusting of flashy simile. </span>Torgohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07220712985495316924noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15121606.post-1140033939183267752006-02-15T20:05:00.000+00:002006-02-15T20:08:53.326+00:00Side Dish<span style="font-family:lucida grande;">We now return you to your regularly-scheduled blathering. This is an excerpt from Danielle's </span><em style="font-family: lucida grande;">Side Dish</em><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"></span><blockquote><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">I looked up to the ceiling lights over my desk and saw a bug trapped under the plastic. Exactly how long it had been there I couldn't recall. Every so often my boss would point to it and say, "Claire, can't you do something about that bug up there?" </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">I'd then respond, "But we don't have a ladder." </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">To which my boss would say, "Oh right. Well, I've got some other jobs that need to be done. I'll just call someone."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">But he never did. He never did do much of anything. </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">And thus the bug would continue on in its insect limbo, suckered into its present state by the false hope of florescent. The poor bug had thought it was a way out but now he was worse off than when he started. He was stuck, he was screwed. He wasn't even granted a parting wish of being allowed to decompose properly like the other outdoor insects. All because he'd had the misfortune to fly in here. I felt exactly like that bug.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">Dr. Ogre approached and followed my eyes up to the light.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">"Claire, you haven't been able to get that bug out yet?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">"Dr. Ogre you haven't been able to get me a ladder, yet?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">"Oh, yes. Right. I'll call someone."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">Dr. Ogre was a nice enough man but his name was so befitting of his personage it sort of took your breath away. A large hulking man of 6'4 whose shoulders reached up to his baseball-glove-sized ears. He was hard not to notice. </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">And then there were his lips. Fat and heavy, they made it hard for him to keep his mouth closed. Not so attractive. Not exactly the look of a scholar. </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">Every new patient was greeted in precisely the same manner by the man.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">"Welcome. I'm Dr. Ogre."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">And every new patient reacted in exactly the same way.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">"Really? Oh yes, I mean, I see. I mean, nice to meet you."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">Dr. Ogre asked, "Do you have the medical history form for the new patient?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">"Yes, it's right here," I handed him the paper.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">Let me note here that there are two things a dentist would be wise not to meddle with, stain and soil. Yet Dr. Ogre delved into both fearlessly. In his spare time he built bird houses, always stained brown, always done without gloves. Once the bird houses were erected he would then plant a lush garden surrounding the structure using rich top soil and lots of manure. Heaps of the stuff. A good portion of which usually ended up under his nails. </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">Around the office there were many photos of these little shrines. Dr. Ogre was also an avid photographer. I thought it a shame that he used only a digital camera as I wondered if he developed the film himself that the chemicals might burn off at least some of the offensive stain and soil.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">As it was his hands were constantly in a gruesome state of neglect, scratched and scarred with tracks of brown running deep into his palms and cuticles. The surgical gloves (size extra large) masked the overall unpleasantness but the damage was usually done on that first day of introduction as Dr. Ogre extended his foul paw to the new patient, reaching out as if from a grave. The patient would take his hand reluctantly and afterwards no glove could successfully blank out the image. </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">I watched as the doctor scanned the form, thinking, He grinds his teeth at night. No conditions of the heart and he flosses once a day. </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">I peered over the counter out into the waiting room. And he chose the Entertainment Weekly over the Time, wears dress socks and a nicely pressed shirt. He is 27 and put his mother down as an emergency contact. </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">All of this was mere observation and was evident to anyone by simply looking at him and reading his chart. But there was one more thing that I knew about this guy with a certainty that hurt. He would never notice me. When he leaves today he will not suddenly stop and say, "Hey, could I take you out sometime?" </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">I knew this because he was a nice guy and in all of my 30 years I'd never been able to land one of those. Not because of my looks but simply because I was cursed. He'd smile politely at me when he paid and then he'd walk right out the door, leaving me and this stupid bug behind. </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">"Fine," the doctor said as he handed me back the paper. Stepping out into the waiting room, he made his usual grand entrance by first bumping into the magazine rack and then swearing. I closed my eyes, Could he not work on his entrance? </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">"Greg? Welcome. I'm Dr. Ogre."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">"Really? Oh yes, I mean, I see. I mean, nice to meet you."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">Once patient and doctor retreated back to the operatory I thought it safe to check my e-mails. There was rarely much to get excited about. The standards were- one supportive cheerleading type one from my mom telling me that although this wasn't the life I'd planned for myself it was not a total debacle- rah, rah! One chain e-mail from my college roommate urging me to forward it to seven other people and something magical will happen- seriously, this works was always noted at the bottom. Total crock and a scam to get your contacts. Honestly, this was from my college roommate who actually managed to graduate. One from CVS advertising deals of the week- usually everything I bought the week before. And roughly three to ten from my cousin Andrea complaining about her near perfect life.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">I looked at my mail inbox and saw 14 unread messages. Andrea must have sent an extra today. I guess the cleaning women missed a spot. </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">Clicking on the inbox, I perused the list and stopped suddenly. His name jumped off the screen. The title read simply "Hi." After three years it somehow seemed enough.<br /> <br /></span><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">My hand shook as I dragged the mouse over and clicked.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">The message read- </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">"Hi Claire. I know it's been awhile. I kept meaning to get in touch with you but I thought you wanted some time to yourself. I know you did actually. It's just funny how time flies, right? </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">So how are you? I wanted to let you know that I'm engaged. Can you believe it? Weird, huh? Anyway, I'll be home soon. I'd love to see you. If you want. Love ya, Darren</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">I pulled my hand off the mouse and let it slide down my leg slowly, feeling the thinness of my shin and then roll my ankle and listen for the crack. It was a habit I'd adopted over the last few years without even realizing. I'm sure I'd done it thousands of times before. But it was different for me now. It was in that brief but highly audible sound that I was most keenly aware of all I knew I'd lost. </span><br /><br /></blockquote><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">What, I wonder, is this? Are we in Bridget Jones territory? </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">Inauspiciously for my first critique back in the saddle, I find it's hard to react to this piece of writing. The bit with the ladder and the insect at the beginning is perhaps overplayed, but it isn't horrible. Dr Ogre is mildly amusing, although again the stain and soil seems strung out a little longer in more detail than need be. I love him reaching out his paw as if from the grave, that's funny and says more than five paragraphs of description about his hobbies.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">The whole thing is written fairly confidently although it feels... deliberate. Lightness of touch is a difficult thing to achieve and this narrator requires it. Jokes have to be finessed into as little space as possible, or strung out through the book as running gags or plot points that pay off in unexpected ways. I think jokes of the latter kind work on a credit/debit model; the more you invest in setting something up, the bigger the payoff has to be, or the longer you need to wait for it to mature. A nice example here is the way Dr Ogre's patients react to his name, which just about works here; the setup is a little bit laboured, but Danielle waits just about long enough for the punchline and it gets a chuckle. I'm not saying it's the gag of the century, but structurally, it's a joke.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">Lightness of touch may be hard to achieve in the kind of text where the narrator has an unvaried tone of voice, even if that tone is ironic or sassy. It can lead to a plodding read, and reader disinterest.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">There are also a couple of moments where it seems like Danielle is shoe-horning 'material' in to the text. For example, the whole email inbox thing seems unnecessary and a way to keep the narrator continually carping about things she observes around her. By this point, the whole insect bit has done the work of establishing that Claire is bored, dissatisfied, and harassed, so no need to then illustrate her being bored, dissatisfied and harassed by her email. Unless it's really, really funny. This only raises a rueful smile. (If the ECOLIFE COMPANY is reading this, please piss off and die, by the way.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">If we are indeed in Bridget Jones territory, I quite like the throwaway 'simply because I was cursed' as the narrator's explanation for Not Being Able to Find A Man. It's a good idea where a narrator's this chatty to keep some of the narrator's thought processes opaque to the reader (like a real person, not just a 'POV character'.) If the narrator feels they're cursed, you as author should know why they would say such a thing; then you can arrange their perceptions to fit that. Let the reader know that's how they see things once and then you don't have to refer to it again - show them, don't tell them.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">It's difficult to evaluate a fragment like this, which is why most publishers will ask for synopsis and first few chapters. I don't like getting chapters excerpted from the middle of the book. You can get a flavour of the writing from them but if you ask me it's the very first chapter that gives the best indication of a book's strengths and weaknesses. (Another reason I have a minor prejudice against prologues -- you can't tell much about the book from them, as they're usually so disconnected from the time and space of the main story.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">Danielle, if you're still out there and you'd like to, drop a synopsis into the comments thread. </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">I'm posting another screed in a minute...</span>Torgohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07220712985495316924noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15121606.post-1139339456759310822006-02-07T19:03:00.000+00:002006-02-07T19:10:56.786+00:00A Million Little Pieces of my PC<span style="font-family: lucida grande;">And they fixed all the ones that were broken. Hello again!<br /><br />Stephen Newton said,</span><br /><blockquote style="font-family: trebuchet ms;">When you're back online, I would be interested in hearing your perspective about the controversy surrounding James Frey's book, <span style="font-style: italic;">A Million Little Pieces</span>. </blockquote><span style="font-family: lucida grande;"></span><br /> <span style="font-family: lucida grande;">OK. I haven't read the book. But what I can't particularly understand is why people feel so very betrayed by the fact that Frey has embellished and exaggerated the details of his life.</span><br /> <br /> <span style="font-family: lucida grande;">Frey's book fits in to a recent trend for memoirs of personal ruin and redemption. We had Dave Pelzer a while back telling us about his horrible childhood for money; then Dave telling us about his horrible childhood again, for further money; then Dave again; then Dave's brother wanted to cash in; then everybody else who ever had an abusive or addictive background got a book contract and made Oprah cry. I find these books, on the whole, to be emotional pornography, and the publishing trend to be a somewhat distasteful bandwagon.</span><br /> <br /> <span style="font-family: lucida grande;">It seems to matter to Frey's betrayed readers that these things Actually Happened. Why exactly is that? Do the events he recounts have no power to move us unless they occurred? They must feel that they were sold a ghoulish souvenir of somebody else's misery, and discovered that it was counterfeit. (Or, more charitably, a holy relic of a miraculous cure.) </span><br /> <br /> <span style="font-family: lucida grande;">If </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-family: lucida grande;">A Million Little Pieces </span><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">were a novel, and it was being evaluated on its literary merits, none of those concerns would have come out. So, I can only see this controversy as existing at all because this is a kind of book that has value to its readership for reasons other than its literary merits (whatever they may be.) </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-family: lucida grande;">Oprah</span><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">'s involvement is interesting: a TV show whose successful model is to feed its audience vicarious emotional highs and lows. If that's how you get your fix, you want it to be pure. You want the author, the victim, staked out in front of the cameras, truly confessing. Putting it another way, they are the goat. They take the sins of the congregation away into the world. James Frey says 'I am an alcoholic' and all the viewers and readers who drink alone feel purified, because they do not end up in rehab, in jail or on a tri-state crime-spree, or whatever. </span><br /> <br /> <span style="font-family: lucida grande;">Anyhow, that's my theory. Frey's agent has been nicely dealt with by Miss Snark, so no need for me to rehearse that. The publisher should be trying to sell as many copies as possible, and I don't think they should have much trouble getting the book to stay on the shelves. As for Frey himself, without having read the book I can't blame him. He told a story and people loved it, then they attacked him because the story wasn't true. I simply wouldn't care, if it's a good yarn told well.</span><br /> <br /> <span style="font-family: lucida grande;">The one similar book I would like to recommend is Augusten Burroughs' </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-family: lucida grande;">Running With Scissors</span><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">, which is beautifully written and very, very funny. You alternately giggle helplessly and gasp in horror the whole way through, a tough thing for Burroughs to pull off technically, and it would stand up just as well marketed as fiction.<br /><br />I've retrieved my emails and thank heavens have all your MSs intact, so we should be back on track this week. Meanwhile at work things have slowed down a little - my big ol' project went off to print the other day. The previous one I ghosted has sold 40K copies so far, which teaches me a valuable lesson: ALWAYS GET A ROYALTY. Tattoo that one on an easily-accessible part of your body, dear reader.<br /> </span>Torgohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07220712985495316924noreply@blogger.com18tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15121606.post-1138301726686000352006-01-26T18:48:00.000+00:002006-01-26T18:55:26.713+00:00Number One Fan<span style="font-family: lucida grande;">Hello there.</span><br /> <br /> <span style="font-family: lucida grande;">This is the condensed version, as I am in an internet cafe and paying through the nose for the bandwidth. Couple of weeks back the fan that cools my computer's CPU wheezed fatally to a stop, and required replacing. I've only just managed to retrieve or reset all my various passwords - getting into my email has been an absolute pain in the Rumsfeld - so can post for the first time in ages. Tomorrow, with any luck, I get the PC back from the shop and will poke about to see if all my data's intact. Here's hoping...</span>Torgohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07220712985495316924noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15121606.post-1136506793556203262006-01-06T00:18:00.000+00:002006-01-06T00:19:53.576+00:00Ok.<span style="font-family: times new roman;">1pm GMT tomorrow. Goddamn but I was busy today.</span>Torgohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07220712985495316924noreply@blogger.com30tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15121606.post-1136386574744345822006-01-04T14:55:00.000+00:002006-01-04T14:56:14.766+00:00You gots to chill<span style="font-family: times new roman;">Back tomorrow.</span>Torgohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07220712985495316924noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15121606.post-1135032472492436632005-12-19T22:33:00.000+00:002005-12-19T22:47:52.520+00:00I'm back...<span style="font-family: times new roman;">...from </span><a style="font-family: times new roman;" href="http://www.kuramathi.com/cottage/index.htm">here</a><span style="font-family: times new roman;">.</span><br /> <br /> <span style="font-family: times new roman;">Am I terribly pleased to be back in chilly, grimy London? Not so's you'd notice. But it's Christmas soon and so just four more days in the office until another little break.</span><br /> <br /> <span style="font-family: times new roman;">However, I am full of beans; replete, bean-wise; awash with the legumes; I may indeed have cornered the world bean market, so any feelings of bean-deficiency you may be experiencing can probably be attributed thus. I'll just get my house in order at the office, so to speak, and will be back to your submissions very soon.</span><br /> <br /> <span style="font-family: times new roman;">By the way, the book is pretty much done, just requiring a good look at the design and copyediting done in my absence, so that seems to have gone over OK... phew!<br /><br />On my hols, I got through a whole stack of reading - the good (<a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/1852427361">The Sweet Forever</a>; <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0349108773">Infinite Jest</a>; <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0099450259">The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time</a>; <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0380793326">The Physiognomy</a>), the bad (<a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0752858513/">The Bourne Supremacy</a>; <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0752858467">The Apocalypse Watch</a>; <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0007180594">The Hundredth Man</a>) and the abysmally bad (<a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0007130775">The Taking</a>). I might bore you all with my thoughts on them some time...<br /></span>Torgohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07220712985495316924noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15121606.post-1133655461080569272005-12-04T00:15:00.000+00:002005-12-04T00:17:41.100+00:00See you in two weeks<span style="font-family: times new roman;">I'm now on holiday for a fortnight - have a great time, everyone, and see you later.</span>Torgohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07220712985495316924noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15121606.post-1133490959957834242005-12-02T02:33:00.000+00:002005-12-02T02:35:59.990+00:00Time I Was In Bed<span style="font-family: times new roman;">Well, it's late, but I've done too much work today to want to go to bed at a sensible hour. I say work - I imagine if I'd been down the mines for eight hours, I'd be long since knitting up the ravelled sleeve of care - but having spent the last six weeks focusing obsessively on minute details of style in this book we're outting together, I feel the need to sound off about nothing much in particular. Plus I have had a few glasses of wine and some grappa, but I probably shouldn't be mentioning that, right?</span><br /> <br /> <span style="font-family: times new roman;">Anecdote: I recently went on a training course which is supposed to teach us editors What Goes On In The Production Department. If we're the Eloi, these guys are the Morlocks - they often move mountains invisibly in the background, and only occasionally pop up to the surface to devour an unfortunate colleague who has made an unwise choice of format. So I sat there for a couple of days in the hope that the next time our lovely but unrepentantly monosyllabic Glaswegian production controller appears to tell me that my book's going to be late, I will be able to argue him into submission armed with my dazzling comprehension of what the hell he's on about.</span><br /> <br /> <span style="font-family: times new roman;">We get towards the end of it and my cranium is so stuffed with practical wisdom it feels like the liver of a foie gras goose. It's time for the exercise where we get together in little groups and prepare specifications for various imaginary books; we choose the Harry Potter-type book, a kid's paperback, 110,000 words, selling at $8.95, print run of 25K. </span><br /> <br /> <span style="font-family: times new roman;">My partner and I get to go first, and we knock it out of the park. Out presentation combines staggering technical insight with a deep and sympathetic understanding of the aesthetic value of the project. The whole thing is costed, down to each sheet of paper required on press, and laid out in a clear schedule that will get our book from manuscript to market in less than four months. Once the applause has ceased to echo, the next group is called - the unenviable task of following us made even more daunting by the fact that they've chosen the Potter assignment as well.</span><br /> <br /> <span style="font-family: times new roman;">Long story short: they'd actually done their sums right, and we only sounded like we had. Their book is 100 pages shorter, due to the fact that I'd misread the casting-off tables and specified a 5cm column width for our book. Quick, grab a copy of Harry Potter, open any page, and measure how wide the text block is. Now imagine it was 5cm wide, instead. Yep, that's an extra 8 tons of paper right there.</span><br /> <br /> <span style="font-family: times new roman;">Next time the Glaswegian comes round with bad news, I'm going to buy him a pint.</span><br /> <br /> <span style="font-family: times new roman;">What else. Well, I was going to reply to Lesia Valentine, who wrote:</span><br /> <br /> <span style="font-family: times new roman;"><blockquote>You're a professional, so what I'd like to ask of you, on behalf of us all, is just how the system "works." To us, all that means is that it works for you (and others on your side of the chasm). We don't feel it works for us. We're all frustrated with what we see as a system as slow and bureaucratic as the U.S. government [...] We are being reduced to churning out formulaic fertilizer where all that is necessary is to take the previous novel and insert a new name and occupation for the protag.</blockquote></span><br /> <br /> <span style="font-family: times new roman;">OK. The system is slow and bureaucratic because 1) there are a huge number of writers trying to get published; 2) in order to evaluate a piece of writing you have to read it; 3) this evaluation is subjective and so a book bought by one editor may not be bought by another; 4) every publishing house is, unavoidably, different, and so the writer is going to have to tick different boxes. I don't see any of these things changing any time soon. However, what I do see is that there are very many good, bad and indifferent first novels published every year, most of which have come through this system. So it continues to produce a wide variety of new publishing. It 'works for us'.</span><br /> <br /> <span style="font-family: times new roman;">But why should it work for you? The book market is - well - a market. You are trying to put your work on that market. The market doesn't owe you anything. It's up to you to create a product that will appeal to it. The publishers are just there to be your partner in case you can't afford to print, market and distribute a book yourself, and their decision-making process is geared towards deciding whether that market appeal exists. So, really, forget about the publishers. If a publisher asks you to retread your last novel, it's because they believe the market wants that.</span><br /> <br /> <span style="font-family: times new roman;">Sure, we sometimes publish stuff for love, but we have to be commercial, too, or we lose the ability to do that, too. If something crosses our desks that's obvious commercial gold, the system swings into frighteningly rapid action.</span><br /> <br /> <span style="font-family: times new roman;">If you're finding that your book is languishing in a slush pile, it might well languish in a warehouse or bookstore too. The former situation is cheaper and less traumatic for all concerned. Trust me on that. The first run of my first published book is 90% pulp. It's not a nice feeling. (The second one's selling very nicely, thank you...)</span><br /> <br /> <span style="font-family: times new roman;">Secondly, about that formulaic fertilizer. Can you make a living out of it? Then churn it out. You can always write the Great American Novel once you're financially secure. Believe it or not, there's lots of good new writing out there; I know the bloody <span style="font-style: italic;">Da Vinci Code</span> looms over everything like the Eye of Sauron, but things aren't as bleak as all that. And hey, lots of writers I know and respect have done their share of hack work. Don't be too precious about your trade.</span><br /> <br /> <span style="font-family: times new roman;">It's better than going down the mines.<br /><br />Good night all...<br /> </span><br /> <span style="font-family: times new roman;"> </span>Torgohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07220712985495316924noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15121606.post-1132914781800283542005-11-25T10:31:00.000+00:002005-11-25T10:33:01.820+00:00Just in passing...Via <a href="http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/">Charlie Stross' blog</a>, here's something interesting for writers of thrillers: just how hard <span style="font-style: italic;">is</span> it to '<a href="http://www.theboxotruth.com/docs/bot5.htm">shoot the lock off</a>'?Torgohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07220712985495316924noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15121606.post-1132692702179266842005-11-22T20:42:00.000+00:002005-11-22T20:51:42.216+00:00Remember me?<span style="font-family: times new roman;">Hello chums.</span><br /> <br /> <span style="font-family: times new roman;">Remember that writing job I was on? It's turned out to be trickier and more of an all-round pain in the neck than anyone had suspected at the time, or even last time I complained about it in similar terms. I've barely even been in the office for the last month - chasing around London interviewing people and tracking down odd bits of information.</span><br /> <br /> <span style="font-family: times new roman;">The current situation is this: I've got until the end of November to finish. With only about half of the 64 pages filled, it's going to be a long and busy week or so for me; and then I'm off on the 4th of December for a well-earned holiday for two weeks.</span><br /> <br /> <span style="font-family: times new roman;">I'll certainly be back on a more regular basis in mid-December, when the jobs that are currently keeping me busy in lunch-breaks and evenings will all be finished. I can't promise anything new to read before I go away, but I'll try my best.<br /><br />On a happier note, Honest Critiques and Torgoblog between them recently clocked up 25,000 page impressions. Even considering that about half of those are me opening my web browser with Torgoblog as my home page, I'm very grateful to everyone who reads, and continues to read; and, most importantly, continues to write.<br /></span>Torgohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07220712985495316924noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15121606.post-1131390622167775842005-11-07T18:45:00.000+00:002005-11-07T19:10:22.206+00:00A coupla questions<span style="font-family: times new roman;">From 'Yogy Bear':</span><br /> <br /> <span style="font-family: times new roman;"><blockquote>You say you're an editor at a publishing house and manage the slush pile. I thought publishers didn't have slush piles any more because they all refuse to read unsolicited unagented manuscripts. Is this a myth, or is your company an exception?</blockquote></span><br /> <br /> <span style="font-family: times new roman;">We certainly do still have one. It is becoming rarer and rarer, but I still believe it is a valuable resource for publishers.</span><br /> <br /> <span style="font-family: times new roman;"><blockquote>In other blogs I've read that agents (and editors) find the size of their slush piles so overwhelming that as a self-defence mechanism they read each unsolicited manuscript expecting to hate it and looking for a reason to reject it so that they don't have to spend further time on it. This sounds very understandable, but it's a daunting prospect. Is it true?</blockquote></span><br /> <br /> <span style="font-family: times new roman;">It's not so much the size as the quality (as the actress said, etc). If you've just read thirty terrible manuscripts in a row, it may create a strong suspicion that the thirty-first is also going to be terrible. And usually it is. However, when you say we're then 'looking for a reason to reject it', that's not really the case. We don't look for minute errors in formatting, or bad spelling, or wonky punctuation - that's the sort of thing that gets picked up at the other end of the process. We do look for things like awful prose and boring, hackneyed stories.</span><br /> <br /> <span style="font-family: times new roman;">You soon learn to give even these a chance, because it's surprising how often the start of a book is the absolute worst bit. </span><br /> <br /> <span style="font-family: times new roman;">One of the most pervasive myths I've come across reading writers' blogs and advice sites is that most often editors will not give a submission a fair hearing. If we did that, it'd defeat the point of the exercise, and it's not a particularly fun exercise, at that. Unless the MS is physically difficult to read, or is completely inappropriate for the list, it'll get a fair crack of the whip. Two examples from my time doing children's books: the occasional granny-submission, in spidery biro on onion-skin paper which requires a jeweller's loupe to read - nope, not going to bother. Sorry, Nan, please read the guidelines, and I'll take a chance on you not being the next JKR. Or the man who wanted us to publish his collection of erotic postcards. </span><br /> <br /> <span style="font-family: times new roman;"><blockquote>I've also read on other blogs references to editors/agents having to 'fall in love with' or 'feel passionate about' a manuscript before they consider making an offer. This seems rather a tall order; I've never fallen in love with a book in my life. Again, is it true?</blockquote></span><br /> <br /> <span style="font-family: times new roman;">Have you not? That's a shame. I do, very often. What these references are probably getting at is the fact that, with publishers' lists very strong, a book needs to be extra-special to muscle in. And some books do require a champion. Editors and agents like nothing better than to discover and fight for a talented new author - it reflects really well on them - and that's something that's worth being passionate about. Besides, we get to talk about books for a living - it's better than going down t' mines. </span><br /> <br /> <span style="font-family: times new roman;">On the other hand, lots of books - the majority, I'd say - get published without extraordinary levels of love and passion; they happen because they seem like shrewd bets commercially. So, don't worry too much.</span><br /> <br /> <span style="font-family: times new roman;">One thing that you might hear in a rejection is 'I didn't love it', which is one of those stock editor phrases. What this means is 'This book is reasonably competent, but I wouldn't have been too bothered if I'd put it down half-way and never picked it up again; it's not exceptional; I'll wait until something exceptional comes along.' It's a tough thing to hear, but it's miles better than most. </span>Torgohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07220712985495316924noreply@blogger.com16tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15121606.post-1131388345681168902005-11-07T18:30:00.000+00:002005-11-07T21:03:39.906+00:00A reply from Bookner<span style="font-family: times new roman;font-family:times new roman;" ></span><blockquote style="font-family: times new roman;">Dear Torgo,<br /><br />Thank you for your email.<br /><br />It's funny that you opted to concoct a fictitious interview when you could have interviewed me and posted the real thing. Perhaps you were afraid that I would come out ahead.<br /><br />I can't take your post seriously at all; it's certainly not journalism, and your post doesn't offer anything I haven't heard before.<br /><br />Just as you can keep insisting that there is nothing wrong with the status quo, so can I keep insisting the opposite, and nothing interesting will come out of the discussion.<br /><br />Please forgive me if I choose not to engage you in a debate.<br /><br />Jason Gonzales</blockquote><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;font-family:times new roman;" >And a reply that I have just this second sent:</span><br /><br /><blockquote style="font-family: times new roman;">Dear Jason,<br /><br />I felt that creating a dialogue based on statements on your website was at least as fair as your 'myth' and 'reality' concoctions, neither of which resemble the experience of my years in publishing in any way, and which many people in my position find not merely challenging or provocative but actively insulting.<br /><br />If my post does not offer anything you haven't heard before, you might consider this possibility: the fact that everyone in the industry is saying the same things about your endeavour is not because we are running scared, but because we are, in fact, perfectly secure in our position.<br /><br />I am more than happy to engage you in a debate upon any terms you care to mention and in any venue on the net - live chat, email, anything. However, I quite understand if you choose not to take up the gauntlet.<br /><br />Regards,<br /><br />Torgo<br /></blockquote><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;">EDIT: Irony from the B website:</span><br /> <br /> <span style="font-family: times new roman;"><span><blockquote>At Bookner, we believe in discussion and debate. Hopefully, by getting the basic misconceptions out of the way, we will have helped raise the level of the debate a little bit. So far, not anyone has given voice to what we at Bookner consider the truly difficult issues which merit discussion and a lot of hard thinking.</blockquote><br /><br />A shame, then, that Mr Gonzalez does not see fit to answer any point that I raised in my original post; although this might be explained if by 'debate' he understands '</span></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;font-family:times new roman;" >you keep insisting that there is nothing wrong with the status quo, I keep insisting the opposite, and nothing interesting will come out of the discussion.'<br /></span>Torgohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07220712985495316924noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15121606.post-1131371229743640322005-11-07T13:33:00.000+00:002005-11-07T13:47:09.790+00:00Devil's Honor<p style="font-family: times new roman;font-family:times new roman;" >Here's the synopsis for SW's book, <span style="font-style: italic; font-family: trebuchet ms;">Devil's Honor</span>. </p> <o:p style="font-family:times new roman;"><o:p style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span></o:p></o:p><blockquote style="font-family: trebuchet ms;font-family:trebuchet ms;" >Ten years ago, SHIRO KURODA came to New York from Japan in the service of the Harada zaibatsu, a criminal empire of drugs, prostitution, streetfighting and contract killing. <span style="color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">[My understanding is that a zaibatsu is a corporation?]</span> Now, he participates in an organization originally comprised of five Houses--one for each borough in New York--as a fighter. In the ring, he is known as Akuma...the devil. <p face="times new roman">Though he enjoys the thrill of the crowd and the heat of battle, Shiro is growing uncomfortable with his role. He is bound by honor to serve his shujin: TOMI HARADA, leader of Staten Island's House Pandora. And the matter is compounded when a match gone awry results in the death of a fighter from another House--with Shiro to blame for causing it.</p> </blockquote><br /><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;">This sounds like the setup for an action movie. There's going to be some difficulty for SW in showing the fight scenes to the reader in this medium... see </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-family: times new roman;">Instinct</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"> below.</span><br /><p></p><br /><p face="times new roman"></p> <blockquote face="trebuchet ms"><span style="font-family: trebuchet ms;"> As punishment, Harada orders Shiro removed from the fighting roster, and then presents him with a tanto, a dagger used in ritual suicide. Instructed to keep the dagger with him at all times, Shiro is warned that he will soon be given a task to complete--and if he fails, he will be ordered to take his own life in shame.<br /> <br /> </span><span style="font-family: trebuchet ms;"> For the sake of his honor, he cannot refuse the command.<br /> <br /> </span><span style="font-family: trebuchet ms;"> While Shiro is being instructed in his new duties as part of the House security team, the dead fighter's House seeks retaliation by attempting a drive-by shooting on ANGEL, Shiro's best friend and founder of the fledgling House Phoenix. Fortunately, House Prometheus' fighters have abysmal aim, and Angel escapes their wrath...for the moment.</span> <p></p> </blockquote> <p style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /></p> <p style="font-family: times new roman;">Abysmal aim is a bad plot point. It's never good to have a serious story that hinges on the incompetence of the bad guys... perhaps think of a different way for Angel to cheat death.<br /></p> <p style="font-family: times new roman;"></p> <blockquote face="trebuchet ms"><span style="font-family: trebuchet ms;"> It isn't long before Harada assigns Shiro his task. Three years earlier, a fighter by the name of SHONEN betrayed the organization by rigging its annual tournament and fleeing with the five million dollar prize. Now Shonen has returned to New York, and Harada wants revenge. Shiro is ordered to hunt him down and kill him.<br /> <br /> </span><span style="font-family: trebuchet ms;"> Shonen is a dangerous man: trained in the art of assassination, deadly with a blade or bare hands, and utterly devoid of a moral code. Compounding the assignment further is a fact known to few outside House Pandora's walls: he is also Shiro's brother.</span><p></p> </blockquote> <p style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /></p> <p style="font-family: times new roman;">Is it over-egging the pudding somewhat to have them be brothers? It's also sailing rather close to kung-fu movie cliche.<br /></p> <p style="font-family: times new roman;"></p><blockquote style="font-family: trebuchet ms;">He has been spotted in Manhattan, and since that borough is the home of both Angel and JENNER--Shiro's sensei, who was formerly employed by the Harada clan--Shiro concentrates his search there. But Shonen has allied himself with the leader of House Prometheus in Brooklyn, and is using his newfound influence to breach the inner circles of the organization in his own pursuit of revenge.</blockquote><br /><p></p> <p style="font-family: times new roman;">I can't say I really believe the secret fighting tournament house system. It's fine on screen, but it'll get ten times less credible set down on paper.<br /></p> <p style="font-family: times new roman;"></p><blockquote style="font-family: trebuchet ms;">By the time Shiro realizes what his brother's intentions are, Shonen has managed to travel to the island off the coast of Staten Island where House Pandora is located and strand his pursuers on the mainland. Shiro, Angel and Jenner commandeer a boat and give chase...but when they reach the island, Shonen has murdered Pandora's head of security and seems to have disappeared. </blockquote><br /><p></p> <p style="font-family: times new roman;">Why has he killed the head of security rather than Harada himself? Or Shiro, for that matter? Either there's lots more plot there or it's kind of facile.<br /></p> <p style="font-family: times new roman;"></p> <blockquote style="font-family: trebuchet ms;"> Believing that he has failed those he cares about, Shiro does not protest when Harada orders him to carry out the suicide ritual. With Angel as his witness, he prepares to take his life in dishonor -- but a phone call revealing Shonen's location stops him in mid-thrust.<br /><p></p> He finds Shonen hiding on Harada's yacht, and gives him the chance to redeem his honor by performing the seppuku suicide ritual, offering the dagger bestowed to him by Harada.<br /><p></p> Shonen, of course, refuses.<br /><p></p> The brothers, equal in skill and dexterity, engage in a swordfight on the rain-slicked deck of the yacht. Shonen manages to disarm Shiro, but as he lunges to deliver the death blow, he is mortally wounded by the dagger meant for Shiro. The knowledge of his impending death restores Shonen's honor, and he implores Shiro with his last breath to act as witness to his seppuku. Shiro agrees.<br /><p></p> His brother's honorable end serves a dual purpose: Shiro's task is complete, and his familial obligation to the Harada clan is absolved. Disgusted with Harada's actions and his treatment of those in his service, Shiro informs his shujin of his intent to join Angel and House Phoenix. Though Harada is enraged by his decision, he can do nothing to stop him.<br /><p></p> At last, Shiro is free to live his life by his code, and to retain the strength of his honor. <p></p> </blockquote> <p style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /></p> <p style="font-family: times new roman;">Hmmmmmm.<br /></p> <p style="font-family: times new roman;">Let's take a look at an extract - Shiro's been in the hospital after a beating from one Captain Wolff, but he's back at his day job now.<br /></p> <p style="font-family: times new roman;"></p><blockquote style="font-family: trebuchet ms;">One month after his release from the hospital found Shiro behind an austere mahogany desk in the fifteenth-floor office he shared with his mentor. Behind him, a window stretched the length of the wall, offering a panoramic view of lower Manhattan made dreary with a morning fog that refused to lift. Before him lay a case file on a patient with a bizarre and inexplicable fear of shoes, who had begun treatment sometime during his three-month absence. </blockquote><br /><p></p> <p style="font-family: times new roman;">Hold up. Shiro is a psychiatrist with a fifteenth-floor Manhattan office? Does that not conflict with his activities in the murky world of devilish chop-socky?<br /></p> <p style="font-family: times new roman;"></p> <blockquote style="font-family: trebuchet ms;"> But Shiro barely saw the words on the pages. His mind insisted on returning to the conversation he had the previous evening with Harada-sama. The one in which his shujin informed him that he would be on the fight roster for tonight--and then all but called him a coward when he insisted he was not ready.<br /><p></p> Intellectually he knew the reasoning was sound. It was the same remedy as the one for falling off a horse: Get up. Try again. But the part of him that was Akuma--his fighting name, the Japanese word for devil--carried vivid memories of anguish and humiliation. The images filled him with dread that his sense of duty could not penetrate.<br /><p></p> For the first time in his life, he was not looking forward to a fight.<br /><p></p> Shiro bent back to his work, then glanced up a moment later as the office door opened to admit a shadow in the guise of a man. <span style="color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">[literally: a shadow disguised as a man. Really?]</span> The age of the gaunt, angular East Indian who approached the desk was indeterminable, for though his nearly unlined face pegged him in the summer of his life, the plait of silver-steel hair that hung beyond his waist suggested otherwise. The hooded eyes that saw everything and gave away nothing, a startling stormcloud gray out of place against dusky brown skin, glittered with untold knowledge.<br /><p></p> All things twisted and cunning and dark, every nuance of humanity that transcended the bounds of normalcy and entered the realm of madness, could be defined in one word: Jenner. <p></p> </blockquote> <p style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /></p> <p style="font-family: times new roman;">Crikey. SW might be laying Jenner on a bit thick here. He's got the waist-length plait of silver-steel hair, the stormcloud-grey-hooded-untold-knowledge-glittering eyes, plus he's the embodiment of all things twisted, cunning, dark etc.<br /></p> <p style="font-family: times new roman;"></p><blockquote style="font-family: trebuchet ms;">The elder psychiatrist approached the desk and tapped a finger on the open file. "Any new developments?"</blockquote><br /><p></p> <p style="font-family: times new roman;">He's a psychiatrist TOO? Curioser and curioser.<br /></p> <p style="font-family: times new roman;"></p> <blockquote style="font-family: trebuchet ms;"> Reluctantly Shiro shook his head, avoiding his sensei's gaze. Talk of the shadow organization to which they both belonged was forbidden at the office.<br /><p></p> "Shiro."<br /><p></p> The single sharp word was a command that could not be disobeyed. Shiro lifted his eyes to behold the thunderous frown and the piercing scrutiny that was Jenner's trademark--an expression that never failed to wither the soul of its recipient. <p></p> </blockquote> <p style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /></p> <p style="font-family: times new roman;">Definitely too thick. Trademark, piercing, soul-withering scrutiny is too thick.<br /></p> <p style="font-family: times new roman;"></p> <blockquote style="font-family: trebuchet ms;"> The look lasted a long minute, <span style="color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">[literally?]</span> and then Jenner folded his arm<span style="color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">[s?]</span> and his features softened somewhat. "I see your thoughts are elsewhere today."<br /><p></p> Shiro nodded, letting his stricken gaze speak for him. <p></p> </blockquote> <p style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /></p> <p style="font-family: times new roman;">We've got some 'telling' here, in a bad way. Enough just to have Shiro gaze at him, I think.<br /></p> <p style="font-family: times new roman;"></p> <blockquote style="font-family: trebuchet ms;"> Striding around the desk to stand at the window, Jenner surveyed the sprawl of the city below in silence. At length he said, "I have an errand for you."<br /><p></p> "Oh?" Surprised at his mentor's sudden mood shift, he turned to regard the man at the window.<br /><p></p> "Yes. And this is something I believe better suited to your current frame of mind."<br /><p></p> "All right." Pushing his chair away from the desk, Shiro stood and brushed a stray lock of dyed blond hair from his forehead. "What is it?" <p></p> </blockquote> <p style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /></p> <p style="font-family: times new roman;">Sorry. I can't get past the whole office-job thing. Shiro is not only a no-holds-barred killer chop-socky enforcer, he's also a psychiatrist with a blonde dye-job. Could Shiro's, or for that matter Jenner's, patients place a lot of trust in these menacing/outre-looking people?<br /></p> <p style="font-family: times new roman;">More effective to have them look just like typical Japanese/E Indian salarymen - in William Gibson's cyberspace thrillers, for example, the cloned ninja killers look just like that, which makes them all the more believeable as assassins and makes it more shocking when they slice someone in half.</p> <p style="font-family: times new roman;"></p> <blockquote style="font-family: trebuchet ms;"> "I need you to visit my new associate, to find out what you can about this--" He stopped, making an obvious effort to rein in a swell of frustration. "This business venture he is so determined to undertake."<br /><p></p> Shiro grinned in spite of himself. Jenner was sending him to Angel's gym. Though the younger man's decision to open the place displeased Jenner to no end, he had no choice in the matter; he had agreed to act as Angel's lieutenant. <p></p> </blockquote> <p style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /></p> <p style="font-family: times new roman;">Who had agreed to act in this way? Not quite picking up on the politics or background. It's difficult to get this in here without a plain old infodump, or worse an 'as you know, Bob' conversation, so maybe this isn't the place. The exact ramifications of this request could be worked out somewhere else where it'd be more natural.<br /></p> <p style="font-family: times new roman;">Maybe, in fact, this scene is the wrong way to put across any of the information the reader needs to know - it's basically just two guys talking in a room to move the plot along.<br /></p> <p style="font-family: times new roman;"></p> <blockquote style="font-family: trebuchet ms;"> Besides, Shiro had not seen Angel since the week before his release--and he missed his friend.<br /><p></p> "It would be my pleasure, sensei," Shiro said.<br /><p></p> Jenner's upper lip curled in disgust. "Of course it would. Now go," he said, motioning with impatience toward the door. "I expect a full report before tonight's activities."<br /><p></p> Offering a slight bow of acknowledgement, Shiro left the office with Jenner's ardent condemnation cautioning him that he may not like what he would find. <p></p> </blockquote> <p style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /></p> <p style="font-family: times new roman;">Kind of clunky.<br /></p> <p style="font-family: times new roman;">I have my doubts as to whether this is going to work. The setup is cartoonish in a way that would work nicely for a fun B-movie (or even more successfully for a comic book), but will be very hard to pull off in prose. The fight scenes will be a particular problem. I'm thinking now of memorably good hand-to-hand or sword fights in novels and not coming up with many.<br /></p> <p style="font-family: times new roman;">The world of the book is larger-than-life - the secret fighting clans, run by bizarre people who also hold down professional jobs - and a thriller does tend to depend on some hooks into reality. At some point, you have to draw the line between what is familiar and what is excitingly exotic, but here the line is too far on one side.<br /></p> <p style="font-family: times new roman;">Good thrillers often work because they present a simple situation. A few examples: the classic McGuffin plot, where some object is being sought after by lots of bad guys, and the one good guy has to come up with it. Or the <span style="font-style: italic;">Fugitive </span>plot where the hero is himself being pursued by all concerned and has to clear his name. You set up some simple rules in those such as This Falcon Statue is Incredibly Valuable or The Cops Will Put Kimble Away If They Catch Him and That's Bad. The reader can pretty much fill in the rest of the world from their own experience; and the more claustrophobic the bind that the hero is in, the more tense and exciting it is.<br /></p> <p style="font-family: times new roman;">In this synopsis, I will have to be told all of the rules, and they're quite complicated, involving the politics of a clan system I have no experience of, bushido etc... I worry that as much time will be spent explaining plot points as is spent actually showing us the action of the plot. It's going to be difficult to be excited about Shiro contorting himself to jump through the various hoops because I can't really put myself in his place.<br /></p> <p style="font-family: times new roman;">As far as the prose goes, it oscillates between being quite a flat narrative style and rather overdone detail and imagery. I see a lot of manuscripts in this particular voice and I wish I could describe it better. It just doesn't excite the ear very much and you only tend to notice it when it occasionally slips into bathos or clunkiness. Needs to be listened to carefully. </p> <p style="font-family: times new roman;">A difficult sell, then, I'm afraid.</p>Torgohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07220712985495316924noreply@blogger.com22tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15121606.post-1131064843238773622005-11-04T00:33:00.000+00:002005-11-04T00:41:08.326+00:00Update<span style="font-family: times new roman;">The writing thing is dragging on. I'm going to be pretty busy for at least another week now.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;">On the other hand, there's Honest Critiques to do - thanks for all your comments and links on the Bookner post, much appreciated! - and I'll post one or two new things tomorrow night.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;">Have a nice evening, everyone, and I'll be back tomorrow. By the way, have you seen </span><a style="font-family: times new roman;" href="http://theblackforge.net/">this</a><span style="font-family: times new roman;">? I remember it from the Commodore 64, and the Java version is just as compelling and thought-provoking...</span>Torgohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07220712985495316924noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15121606.post-1130814679539635422005-11-01T03:07:00.000+00:002005-11-01T17:44:06.486+00:00Everybody be cool, this is a colloquy<span style="font-family:times new roman;">If you've been reading Miss Snark recently, you might have come across postings about Bookner, a new website which aims to "evaluate the worth of manuscripts for the benefit of the publishing industry". The idea is essentially that writers upload their manuscripts to a central server for peer review by the community there, thus ranking submissions, which can then be cherry-picked by publishers. "It is hoped that Bookner will allow a not inconsiderable quantity of good material, which is currently falling between the cracks, to find a worldwide audience."<br /></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">What's wrong with traditional methods of spotting talent? According to the website, the status quo is slow, ambiguous (little feedback), laborious for the writer, and redundant (duplication of effort by readers).<br /></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Bookner tells us a story about publishing; on the front page, under the heading 'trash your assumptions', there are two narratives posted to show you the difference between myth and real life.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">In 'Myth', a literary agent spots a great MS, has a deep and meaningful conversation about it with the author, instantly sells it to an editor, and the writer lives happily and successfully ever after. In 'Reality', the writer is rejected by almost 150 different literay agents, before finally, after various reminders, memory lapses and episodes of incompetence, she sells her book to the agent. The agent sells the book as something completely different to what the writer intended, but nevertheless the writer lives happily and successfully ever after.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">What I don't get, first off, with these stories, is that both end up with the writer lighting Cuban cigars with $50 bills in their Dom-Perignon-filled hot-tub. Now, we know that doesn't happen. Not everyone makes it. The point of the stories seems to be just the 'unnecessary' effort involved in selling the book, and the attitudes of the literary agent ('mythical' aesthetes vs 'real' shysters.) </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Instead, Bookner's community of writerly sages will take the commercial and time pressure off literary agents and publishers, whereupon we will all be free to be the kindly aesthetes of legend.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Let me tell you something about 'Myth' and 'Reality': they're both bullshit. </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">The underlying assumption seems to be that the processes by which the vast majority of publishers acquire their books are designed and operated by slack-jawed cretins. Furthermore, these poor fools have never investigated their own broken policies, whether from the point of view of simple curiosity, or indeed from a desire for competitive advantage. Agents don't bother to read submissions or to follow up properly on their interest; editors allow themselves to be sold books they have not read, but which they can sell with phenomenal effectiveness. </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">In fact, the characters in 'Myth' - the wise literary agent, the enthusiastic editor - are much closer to the truth than the clueless dunces in 'Reality'. Literary agents and publishers, who in the main have top-class judgement, are continually on the lookout for new talent, and are excited to find something saleable. The point is that it has to be better than what's already on the list. If I already publish ten excellent, commercial writers, you have to be slightly more excellent to get signed. If I am worried that I don't have a good mystery writer, then I'm on the lookout for that new person. And if they're unpublished, they come ten times cheaper than someone who has twenty books under their belt.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Bookner says:<br /><blockquote style="font-family: trebuchet ms;">neither publishers nor literary agents are interested in discovering new writers, because unpublished writers are an unknown risk. </blockquote></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Nonsense. The risk is assessed on a case-by-case basis by the system Bookner regards as broken. Unpublished writers are published all the time. The worst outcome for the publisher is known absolutely, and is far from catastrophic, given the initial outlay. The best outcome for a book is predicted, with good success rates, by experienced publishers. This is how publishers make a living.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><blockquote>Hence we have a surreal situation where it is easier for a pro wrestler to publish a book than a writer. </blockquote></span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Yes, of course it is. Millions of people are prepared to buy books by celebrities, and the publishing industry supplies those, subsidising some more literary works and contributing to the growth of the industry. </span><br /><blockquote style="font-family: trebuchet ms;"><br />As a result, the writer - someone who is good at putting thoughts into words and spinning a good yarn in printed form - is in danger of extinction.</blockquote><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">No, the writer isn't. Honestly. I see them every day. They look fine. They continue to write and publish books. We all continue to make money.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Given that - which, let's be honest, seems to be the message of 'Reality' as well as 'Myth' - the main complaint is that the submissions system is 'labyrinthine' and impersonal. I do not recognise the picture painted by Bookner. </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">BOOKNER</span>: It takes forever to get a manuscript read.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">TORGO</span>: Yes, because of the volume of submissions, and because they do in fact get read.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">BOOKNER</span>: No, they don't. Editors and agents barely look at manuscripts.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">TORGO</span>: You think we're inundating ourselves with slush for our health? What are we, crazy? Why don't we just throw the mail sacks straight in the incinerator? We read as much of a manuscript as we can stand. As we can <span style="font-style: italic;">physically stand</span>.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">BOOKNER</span>: Aha! Well, Bookner will take the strain off you. It is normal in any economy to have people specialize into certain disciplines, and outsource as much work as possible.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">TORGO</span>: I don't think I want my judgement outsourced to an online critique group with a mysterious ranking algorithm.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">BOOKNER</span>: But who better to evaluate manuscripts than writers?</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">TORGO</span>: Almost anyone else in the world. If the manuscripts in my slushpile were rated by all the authors in that pile, a tremendous amount of crap would rise to the top. The twenty percent or so of all the children's stories that are tedious, 'empowering' Ugly Duckling stories, for example. Or the ones written by people with tin ears. Or the really mad ones, as they are a significant subset. So anyone, really, but luckily there are people who specialize in doing this for a living, and they're called publishers and literary agents.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">BOOKNER</span>: But you never give any feedback - how is the writer supposed to know if they have any chance?</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">TORGO</span>: Look, it isn't our responsibility to give free critiques on your work. A person would have to be crazy to try something like that. We have neither the time nor, occasionally, anything to say that isn't actually abusive. </span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">BOOKNER</span>: Abusive, eh? Admit it - secretly you hate writers, and enjoy making them jump through arbitrary hoops.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">TORGO</span>: Well, that's a slightly more flattering description than the one where we're all moronic incompetents. Actually the hoops are not arbitrary, nor are they onerous. Submission guidelines are clear and usually pretty forgiving of minor transgressions - if we can read it without going blind, we'll read as much as we can. Just don't send in your novel inscribed with a burnt matchstick on the back of a cereal packet and then whine about how the rules are so unfair and shouldn't apply to you because you're special.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">BOOKNER</span>: But we can save all that duplicated effort - sending queries to all those literary agents and editors, who then all read the same thing!</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">TORGO</span>: It saves the author a few stamps, granted, because the MS can be read off the net. But firstly, I don't trust your Bookner Ranking. I have no idea of what the algorithm is or how it's supposed to work its magic; the magic it's working is in some way involving slush-pile authors, who are not necessarily exemplars of commercial or literary wisdom. So I'll end up digging through the slush pile in any case, when I have a perfectly good one in the office at the moment. Secondly, as an author who is part of the Bookner community, I have to invest time in reading slush myself to rate it, which I could otherwise spend writing a second novel; what I should really be doing when I have my first one under consideration.<br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">BOOKNER</span>: </span></span><span><span><span style="font-family: times new roman;">You have hordes of agents reading the same query, because writers send out queries indiscriminately. This is a massive waste of time. Why would hundreds of agents have to do the same chore?</span><br /> <span style="font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">TORGO</span>: Er... they're in <span style="font-style: italic;">competition </span>with each other? And writers who query indiscriminately are making unnecessary work for themselves.</span><br /></span></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">BOOKNER</span>: You can't deny that the submissions process is long-winded and labour-intensive.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">TORGO</span>: No, I can't. </span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">BOOKNER</span>: And why should writers have to do all that hard work? You don't have chefs carrying their creations to diners; waiters do that. You don't have architects laying bricks; builders do that. You don't have pilots selling airline tickets; travel agents do that.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">TORGO</span>: So the idea is that writers should not have to sully their hands with these tedious tasks? The sort of thing that mere builders waste their petty lives on? (Mrs Torgo is in the construction trade, you know.) Sure, that'd be nice, but in a highly competitive market, with so many good books being published, you need to work a little to sell your book. Actually, you don't have to work nearly as hard as publishing companies do to sell your book on to shelves in bookshops, or as hard as literary agents do to sell it to editors. You just have to do your research, send a really good book out there, and get on with a second novel. </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Torgo will be back this week. Thanks for your patience.<br /><br />ADDENDUM: Of course, I didn't really interview Mr Bookner for this - but many of his words above are as they appear on the website. I would say I'd been 'fair and balanced', but Fox News would probably sue the tar out of me.<br /><br />If I seem a little annoyed on this subject, it's not because of any inherent 'negativism' on my part. It's really because I get ticked off when people with no real experience of publishing pop up and tell me why what I do every day is really stupid and unhelpful (eg. PublishAmerica) or make up stories about me and my colleagues that are wildly inaccurate.<br /></span>Torgohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07220712985495316924noreply@blogger.com19tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15121606.post-1129236451957031302005-10-13T21:22:00.000+01:002005-10-13T21:49:32.656+01:00Hiatus<span style="font-family:times new roman;">Hello everyone,</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">I'm over the 'flu, which is nice. It's rampaging around the office - coughing, stuffy people everwhere. However, I'm not posting for a bit.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">We have a book scheduled for next year that absolutely can't be late. It needs to go out to repro (i.e., text and design all done prior to proofing) in about a month's time. Unfortunately, the editor who was writing the text is leaving, with about 50 pages still to do. I got asked today if I could step in, drop everything else, and write the remainder of the text within the next two weeks. It's not quite </span><a style="font-family: times new roman;" href="http://www.nanowrimo.org/">NaNoWriMo</a><span style="font-family:times new roman;">, but it's close...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">So, I'm sorry, but I'll have to put the site on hold until it's done. Apologies to everyone who's waiting.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">When I'm back, I'm going to bump a few people up the list who are regular readers and commenters on the site, as otherwise I wouldn't get to them for a while and it seems fairer to them.<br /><br />In the meantime, why not check out some of the <a href="http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/">free </a><a href="http://www.scifi.com/scifiction/archive.html">Science Fiction</a> <a href="http://www.accelerando.org/">currently available</a> <a href="http://www.lcrw.net/fictionplus/link-handbag.htm">on</a> <a href="http://www.lcrw.net/kellylink/sth/index.htm">the web</a>? Or read <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/039306011X/">the best historical fiction ever</a> ... some <a href="http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/authors/Daniel_Pennac.htm">really good</a> <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/057119639X/">detective stories</a> ... or something <a href="http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/perecg/laviemde.htm">more literary</a>?<br /><br />See you soon!<br /></span>Torgohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07220712985495316924noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15121606.post-1128885069967891972005-10-09T20:05:00.000+01:002005-10-09T20:11:09.986+01:00Touched by Mucus<span style="font-family: times new roman;">Eeew. I have the 'flu. As a man, I believe it's my prerogative to have the 'flu, rather than what the so-called Western medical establishment would have me believe, which I'm guessing would be a head cold. Mountebanks, the lot of them.</span><br /> <br /> <span style="font-family: times new roman;">While I'm still struggling to fight off the Avian Death Flu, please stand by. </span>Torgohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07220712985495316924noreply@blogger.com19