words

Books!

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Two recent books:

First, Joker by Brian Azzarello. This is the first version of Heath Ledger’s take on the Joker to appear in comics (that I know about, anyway–I only read trades). It’s a creepier, uglier Joker (just look at that cover), but I don’t know if it’s all that much scarier than previous versions. It recasts him as more of a gangster than comic book villain, but what should I expect from a crime writer? Aside from the bullshit setup, it’s solid work and interesting stuff (I found I couldn’t put it down), but when I reached the end I found myself vaguely dissatisfied.

Second, there are a lot of books out there about Winning A For-Real Fight, and many of them are filled with specific tactics and annoying macho puffery. Well, Rory Miller had been a martial arts student for many years before becoming a casino bouncer and then a prison guard. He had a “fight-a-day” job in which he tried to apply the lessons learned in the dojo to real-life violence.

The result of those lessons are here, in Meditations on Violence: A Comparison of Martial Arts Training & Real World Violence, which I read because of a recommendation by David Hines. Miller talks very clearly about the way violence takes place–the context of it, the execution, the mental state a person enters when they’re attacked, the mental state of the person doing the attacking. He also talks about the way certain martial arts training is pure fantasy and how dangerous it can be.

Even more interesting is one topic he touches on several times: self-imposed limits–people who believe they don’t have permission to behave rudely to alarming behavior. People who believe they could never win a fight. People who feel they must respond to a challenge to their authority. People who want to appease authority figures. People who think fighting will be like sparring.

As an author who writes about violence, the clear descriptions of the mental and emotional states reinforced and deepened my understanding of the processes of physical conflict. I’m also grateful for the way he talks about breaking through artificial limits, which I’m going to apply to my life globally. There are so many ways I box myself in because of what I believe about myself…

This isn’t the time for that discussion, though. It’s something to think about and you might find it useful, too.

Anyway, I’m not interested in martial arts training (I’ve tried it more than once and it’s not for me) and I thought this was a fascinating, thoughtful book. I didn’t agree with everything here, but this is rich, fertile soil.

Highly recommended. Thank you, David.

In happier news:

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NY Times columnist and Pulitzer-winning economist Paul Krugman praises Charles Stross’s novels.

I hope this brings him a couple thousand new readers.

Talk about terrible titles…

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David Hines recently recommended a book called Meditations on Violence: a Comparison of Martial Arts Training & Real World Violence, and of course I snapped it up.

I’ve barely started it, but one of the early points the author makes is that too many people are willing to discount their own personal experience because it does not jibe with what a self-appointed expert tells them. One of the author’s fellow prison guards, a man who had a great deal of practical experience in fighting, did exactly this during a class of martial arts techniques.

My first reaction was: People don’t really do this, do th– And then I thought about Absolute Write.

The AW forums have see a regular traffic of newbie writers asking permission to do the most basic things. “Can I have an protagonist do unlikable things?” “Can I have an unhappy ending?” “Can I write this book in third-person present tense?” “Can I write a love story where the couple breaks up at the end?”

Frankly, that stuff drove me crazy. I wanted to say “Pick up a book! Read it! Does it work? Can you make it work? Why are you asking permission?”

And it would turn out that some person on some message board somewhere said books need happy endings, or maybe an agent wrote a blog post expressing their personal dislike of present tense. And none of that should dictate what a person can or should do.

Of course, the hard part in all of this is examining my own assumptions.

As an aside: today is the first day all week that I hit my daily word count goal. Yeesh. Tomorrow will be better, I hope.

“a holocaust of prose”

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seen via Justine Larbalestier:

The Worst Review Ever, a blog where writers, actors, musicians, etc, can submit the worst review they’ve ever received. Personally, I think some of these are extraordinarily cruel (Hello, “a candy-coated turd”), but I’ve been known to hate on a book or two in my time.

I do disagree with Justine Larbalestier when she says its “awesome” that people react so intensely to her books. When I have a powerful negative response to a book, it’s not because of its engaging qualities, any more than Charles Manson should feel warm and snuggly inside because he’s evoked strong feelings from me.

Hey, authors, have anything you want to send?

International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Wretch Day

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This year, I’m posting a screenplay.

Five years ago, a friend and I decided to make our own ultra-low budget horror movie. Our plan was that we’d make a solid story and people would overlook whatever shortcomings our budget brought us.

It’s called The Dead Feed (pdf file – html file — the pdf is easier to read, but I know some people hate that format) and it’s not a standard hungry zombie movie.

And! As I give away my writing for free, I also link to a roundtable of sf/f book reviewers on the recent changes to newspaper book reviews and book review sections. Check it out.

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Today, I pored over Everyone Loves Blue Dog, and accomplished nothing. Also, the book my wife gave me to read couldn’t be renewed. I had to strip out all her bookmarks and slip it into the conveyor belt at the library.

As for the LiveJournal feed for Nathan Bransford’s blog, it turns out that Mr. Bransford himself ask that it be suspended. I have no idea why; LJ syndication is just another kind of RSS, but whatever. No more “This Week in Publishing” I guess.

At work, I discovered that the intranet policy book pages I’d spent a good part of last week working on were completely useless now. The manager copy and pasted them into .mht files elsewhere on the network, breaking all the links. There were good reasons to move them to another part of the network–our system is criminally slow–but damn.

Finally, do you know what my company and I both pay, per month, for the basic health insurance my wife, son and I have? Not just what I contribute, but everything?

Over $1,600. Per month.

We need reform in this country, and we need it now.

Links! The Top 16 Worst Movie Quotes to Utter During Sex. Is it wrong of me to laugh so hard at this?

Next, another amazing animation, this one done with stop-motion. Sorta. Check it out.

Finally, tweenbots, a video art project via Jay Lake. His link described it as teh cute, but I think that misses the point. The really, really cool thing about this is that the robot is a cute, nearly helpless little thing that relies on complete strangers to help it get where it needs to go. Even if you can’t watch the video at that page, the write up is fascinating.

It seems that a lot of my posts lately have been straight link farms. I feel boring. Is there something I should post about? Something I said I would talk about but haven’t? Let me know.

It’s that time of year again (5 links)

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The stellar bluejays and hummingbirds are back. To celebrate, here are some links.

A pretty cool book trailer for A Madness of Angels. Check it out.

Writers get so much respect: here’s a job opening for a screenwriter/office assistant. Because what you really want for your films is a writer who can answer phones in a professional manner.

How professional athletes lose all their money. I’m so going to use this in my current book.

Amazon rank. Hey, folks. If you’re looking for a good alternative to Amazon.com, consider Indiebound.org. They’re an online ordering system for a network of independent bookstores. When you order a book from them, the sale goes to an independent near you. And it’s not just books, either.

Finally, the Kinda Sutra. A short, partially-animated film about the screwed-up ways people are taught about sex. I think it’s SFW, but you might have different situation.

State of the Writer (and the writing, too)

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Taxes are done. Yesterday, I emptied most of our CD to cover the check (which is why I opened that CD in the first place) but it’s not going to be a hardship. We’ve been socking it away, just the way the internet recommends.

Page proofs are done. I actually finished them yesterday morning, and spent today’s writing time scanning the corrected pages and backing them up. If something goes wrong with the usps, I’ll have pages to resend or email. Paranoid? Moi?

Tomorrow I start back in on Everyone Loves Blue Dog, and I have to admit I had a little epiphany about one of the notes I’ve been getting. There’s a secondary character who’s not as… vivid as some of the others, and folks keep asking me to bring her out more.

For me, the problem is that she’s a reserved person and a bit of a cipher–she changes her outward personality to match the situation, and she doesn’t want to be too noticeable.

Earlier this week, I had a revelation while I was reading Bill Martell’s blog Sex in a Submarine (which is not a take on the SNAKES ON A PLANE film from a couple years back–the name of the blog comes from an entirely different clusterfuck). Bill writes low-budget movies, and one thing he’s always talking about is the pressure of getting a recognizable name for the front of the DVD box. It’s very difficult to market a movie without one.

What Bill does (and he talks about this often) is create a “confined cameo.” It’s a role for a name actor to play, with several scenes spread across the movie, but which all take place in a single location. So you have a general giving orders back at the command center, or the sexy barista at the corner coffee shop. Or whatever. The name actor has several scenes, but they can all be shot in a day or two because they’re all on the same set.

And while that keeps the price for that actor down, it doesn’t guarantee you’ll sign them. For that, you have to also make sure that it’s a juicy role. The actors are looking for ways to show their range and their skills.

I feel a little like a dummy. I spent so long studying screenwriting as a way to tell stories, but I never tried to translate this lesson from that form to fiction. Obviously, the character everyone wants to be stronger doesn’t need a confined cameo, but she does deserve a juicy, personality-defining scene–something that would startle and excite an actor reading for the part.

Now I just have to come up with one.

Finally, folks may have heard that Amazon.com has decided to stop listing certain “adult” materials on their best-seller lists, and the means to read that end was that they would no longer show sales rankings.

And one of the ways they defined “adult” was “gay.” Even YA novels with gay characters were too “adult” to be listed.

How could they be so stupid, you ask? I have no clue. See this post by an author affected by the change to read Amazon.com’s response, and Dear Author weighs in on the romance writers who’ve been affected, and finally here’s the start of a link farm to check out.

Query/Agent Fail (long)

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So many people have spent the last two weeks talking about queryfail and agentfail that I can’t bear to ignore it any longer.

If you want a little background , Making Light has a fine linkfarm on queryfail right here. As for agentfail, it took place right here.

Prefer a short summary? Several agents spent one day on Twitter posting all the queries they received that were full of fail, in one way or another. Snark was involved.

Many writers got pissed off and promised various kinds of retaliation, such as not querying those agents ever again. In response, we had agentfail, a post on the Bookends blog where writers could gripe about everything they hate about agents.

And man, it goes on and on. Over 300 posts right now.

Now, I don’t have much to say about queryfail. Is it a good idea for professionals to gripe publicly and sarcastically about the awful business solicitations they receive? Maybe not. But they did, and for everyone out there trying to create a solid query letter, it was an opportunity to learn something. Maybe a painful something, but still.

The agentfail comment section, though, is a disaster. I simply do not understand why writers gripe about the way agents reject them. So many people seem to think (at this point I’m basically rewriting a comment I made on Justine Larbalestier’s blog) they are the customers in this relationship.

“Too impersonal!” “I didn’t hear back quickly enough!” “I heard back too quickly–she didn’t spend enough time on me!” “I wanted more help!” “I never heard back!”

Sometimes I just want to blow an air horn and, in the ensuing quiet, explain that writers are not the customers. They’re artists/craftspeople with something to sell.

It’s really not complicated. A query letter is a sales document–an attempt to interest a book lover in your book. If the answer is “No,” then that’s the answer. Venting about it online certainly isn;t going to get you closer to a “Yes.”

But I understand that it hurts. Rejection sucks. I’ve been furious, despondent and… actually, furious and despondent pretty much covers it. Here’s the thing, though: I can control everything that happens right up to the point I drop a story or query letter into a mail box. I can’t control what an agent is going to say or do. I can’t force them to like my work. All I can do is work like crazy to write something they can’t resist.

And that’s what I wish more people would focus on. Put your energy and attention into the things you can control–your writing and your behavior. Brush off, as best you can, the things you can’t control. In fact, it’s damn useful to pretend those things you can’t control don’t even exist.

Inborn talent? Doesn’t exist. Agent’s sour stomach when she reads your query? Doesn’t exist. Market failures or saturation? Doesn’t exist. Luck? Doesn’t exist. All that exists is what you can do and what you can learn.

And there’s a lot to learn, because it turns out that almost everything those people were complaining about have perfectly reasonable justifications.

For instance: Ginger Clark explains why she only responds to queries she’s interested in. I mean… Cripes, reading that makes me a little sick inside. Seriously. One thing I’ve spent a lot of energy on was the idea that my personal emotional responses to the world are the “correct” ones–in other words, that people should be upset by the things that upset me, or they should shrug off the things I shrug off.

That’s taken me some time, but calling an agent an asshole because she rejected your query is inexcusable. Worse, it’s poison–for you, for the agent, and for everyone else trying to break in.

And the wannabe who struck an agent off her query list because she blogs about her dog (and other personal topics)? Get some perspective. Just because a person is an agent doesn’t mean they don’t have lives of their own. Remember when you were a kid and you ran into one of your teachers at a movie theater or summer fair? Remember how weird it was to see them outside the context you were accustomed to? Yeah. Take a hint from that memory.

So, don’t act like a customer. Don’t freak out about things you can’t control. Learn everything you can about the business. Treat every rejection as a goad to improve your work. Nurse your wounds in private (meaning: with your loved ones).

Jeez, that’s kinda long. I probably should cut it down or something, but my lunch break is over.

Five Linkies make a Linky post (plus)

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First! Affordable off-site backup for all of your files. We have many, many gigs worth of photos, so I’ll be signing up for this after we get our taxes squared away.

Second! Bert and Ernie go brutal! Aren’t you glad I didn’t embed that? Anyway, I loled. Be sure to watch to the end. And you can find the name of that song if you click the “more info” link.

Third! writes a guest post at Victoria Mixon’s blog about what really matters when you’re trying to write for publication.

Fourth! Sarah Monette comments on a review of the fourth and final book of her Doctrine of Labyrinthe series that criticized it for not making sense if the reader hasn’t read the previous books. Be sure to check out the comment thread from editor about the appeal of different kinds of series, why marketing puts a notice on a book indicating it’s part of a series (or doesn’t put one on), who the publishers consider their true customer, reader preferences, and more. Also, talks a little about PW reviews, who they’re meant for and what certain passages mean.

I’ll admit that I bounced off the first book in that series, but I loved The Bone Key. I’m sorry to hear that Ace hasn’t offered her another contract, but I’m sure she’ll get snapped up somewhere else.

Finally… Fifth! Beaker is, unquestionably, the greatest of all the Muppets, (yes, that is a truth that can not be questioned!) but what semi-celebrity does he most look and sound like? Find out for yourself. Aren’t you glad I didn’t embed that, too?

And, in non-link-related info, taxes are almost done. Ugh. So annoying. And yeah, we’ll have a bigger bill than I’m used to, but we’re prepared for it. Next year, I’m going to go with a pro; Turbo Tax doesn’t cut it.