Quotulatiousness

March 30, 2011

The author’s guide to dealing with criticism

Filed under: Books, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:59

In short, watch how author Jacqueline Howett responds to a review with (pretty mild) critical comments, then don’t do this:

Jacqueline Howett said…

You obviously didn’t read the second clean copy I requested you download that was also reformatted, so this is a very unfair review. My Amazon readers/reviewers give it 5 stars and 4 stars and they say they really enjoyed The Greek Seaman and thought it was well written. Maybe its just my style and being English is what you don’t get. Sorry it wasn’t your cup of tea, but I think I will stick to my five star and four star reviews thanks.

She then reposts three Amazon reviews in the comment thread.

BooksAndPals said…

In response to the many comments from Ms Howett:

I received the email on 2/7 asking that I download the a new copy of the book, which I did. I verified in my library software (Calibre) that this was the version I had and read. However her note above as well as the email mentioned formatting. At least when I talk about formatting I’m referring to issues of conversion from the source (a Word .doc file or whatever) into an eBook so the text flows correctly on the Kindle and so on. I say no issues I would attribute to formatting.

I have doubts that Ms. Howett being English is the reason for my reaction to her writing although I can’t discount it entirely. I can say that in the last year I’ve read and in many cases reviewed on this blog books by natives of England, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and multiple European countries where English is not the primary language. Some have been full of country specific slang. In none of these cases has this been an issue for me. I do mention these things in the FYI section of my reviews because it is an issue for some people.

I’ll also point out that in the first two chapters alone I found in excess of twenty errors that ideally would have been caught in editing and proofing. Some were minor, but all have the potential of disrupting an enjoyable reading experience, depending on the specific reader and their sensitivity to such things.

Here are a couple sample sentences from the first two chapters that gave me pause and are representative of what I found difficult while reading.

“She carried her stocky build carefully back down the stairs.”

“Don and Katy watched hypnotically Gino place more coffees out at another table with supreme balance.”

I understand what both are probably saying. I do question the sentence construction.

However, I should point out that the review does say the story, which is the most important part of a book, is good. The effort of extracting the story through the errors and, at least to me, sometimes convoluted sounding language, made doing so much too difficult, IMO.

I would encourage anyone who thinks the story sounds interesting to sample the book. Read the first few chapters and decide for yourself.

Jacqueline Howett said…

My writing is just fine!

You did not download the fresh copy…. you did not. No way!

As to annoymous

Al was given the option of a free copy from smashwords the following day to download in any format he preffered.

Look AL, I’m not in the mood for playing snake with you, what I read above has no flaws. My writing is fine. You were told to download a new copy for format problems the very next day while they were free at Smashwords, so you could choose any format you wanted to read it in and if their were any spelling mistakes they were corrected. Simply remove this review as it is in error with you not downloading the fresh copy i insisted. Why review my book after being told to do this, and more annoying why have you never ever responded to any of my e-mails?

And please follow up now from e-mail.

This is not only discusting and unprofessional on your part, but you really don’t fool me AL.

Who are you any way? Really who are you?

What do we know about you?

You never downloaded another copy you liar!

You never ever returned to me an e-mail

Besides if you want to throw crap at authors you should first ask their permission if they want it stuck up on the internet via e-mail. That debate is high among authors.

Your the target not me!

Now get this review off here!

And it gets much, much worse . . .

January 16, 2011

Hey, aspiring fiction writers! Don’t enter this contest!

Filed under: Randomness — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:02

John Scalzi does you a big favour by pointing out how insane you’d need to be to want to enter this writing contest:

. . . from an outfit called First One Digital Publishing. Why? Because it costs $149 to enter, and because of this little gem in the contest fine print:

All submissions become sole property of Sponsor and will not be acknowledged or returned. By submitting an entry, all entrants grant Sponsor the absolute and unconditional right and authority to copy, edit, publish, promote, broadcast, or otherwise use, in whole or in part, their entries, in perpetuity, in any manner without further permission, notice or compensation. Entries that contain copyrighted material must include a release from the copyright holder.

So, to be clear: These people want you to sign away all the rights you have to your own work — and they want you to pay them to do it. That’s just very special.

You pay them to enter. You sign away all your rights to the work you submit (they can do whatever they like with it, including publishing it themselves). They agree to judge your work, but do not guarantee that any prizes will actually be awarded. Oh, and in submitting your piece, you also agree that you have no legal claim against them. Just breathtaking in its audacity.

November 18, 2010

QotD: On the quality of writing, mediated through technology

Filed under: Humour, Media, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:45

I own a computer. I don’t use the Internet very much. I’m not a technophobe. It just doesn’t help me very much. Writing is a slow and a difficult process mentally. How you physically render the words onto a screen or a page doesn’t help you. I’ll give you this example. When words had to be carved into stone, with a chisel, you got the Ten Commandments. When the quill pen had been invented and you had to chase a goose around the yard and sharpen the pen and boil some ink and so on, you got Shakespeare. When the fountain pen came along, you got Henry James. When the typewriter came along, you got Jack Kerouac. And now that we have the computer, we have Facebook. Are you seeing a trend here?

P.J. O’Rourke, “Very Little That Gets Blogged Is Of Very Much Worth”, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 2010-11-18

November 16, 2010

The plagiarism market

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:59

If what “Ed Dante” writes is true, lots of writers are missing out on a rich — unethical — opportunity:

I’ve written toward a master’s degree in cognitive psychology, a Ph.D. in sociology, and a handful of postgraduate credits in international diplomacy. I’ve worked on bachelor’s degrees in hospitality, business administration, and accounting. I’ve written for courses in history, cinema, labor relations, pharmacology, theology, sports management, maritime security, airline services, sustainability, municipal budgeting, marketing, philosophy, ethics, Eastern religion, postmodern architecture, anthropology, literature, and public administration. I’ve attended three dozen online universities. I’ve completed 12 graduate theses of 50 pages or more. All for someone else. …

You would be amazed by the incompetence of your students’ writing. I have seen the word “desperate” misspelled every way you can imagine. And these students truly are desperate. They couldn’t write a convincing grocery list, yet they are in graduate school. They really need help. They need help learning and, separately, they need help passing their courses. But they aren’t getting it.

For those of you who have ever mentored a student through the writing of a dissertation, served on a thesis-review committee, or guided a graduate student through a formal research process, I have a question: Do you ever wonder how a student who struggles to formulate complete sentences in conversation manages to produce marginally competent research? How does that student get by you? …

Of course, I know you are aware that cheating occurs. But you have no idea how deeply this kind of cheating penetrates the academic system, much less how to stop it. Last summer The New York Times reported that 61 percent of undergraduates have admitted to some form of cheating on assignments and exams. Yet there is little discussion about custom papers and how they differ from more-detectable forms of plagiarism, or about why students cheat in the first place.

Read the whole thing.

November 4, 2010

Chutzpah, or the new Cook’s Source plagiarism service now open

Filed under: Food, Law, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:19

Did you know that the internet is not public domain? The editors at Cook’s Source apparently thought it was, because they printed an article without the permission of the original author, and then told her that she should be happy they didn’t bill her for editing it. (It’s an article on medieval cooking, with original spelling preserved from the source texts: of course it would look weird to a modern eye.)

The exchanges between the original author and the editor make for amusing reading:

After the first couple of emails, the editor of Cooks Source asked me what I wanted — I responded that I wanted an apology on Facebook, a printed apology in the magazine and $130 donation (which turns out to be about $0.10 per word of the original article) to be given to the Columbia School of Journalism.

What I got instead was this (I am just quoting a piece of it here:)

“Yes Monica, I have been doing this for 3 decades, having been an editor at The Voice, Housitonic Home and Connecticut Woman Magazine. I do know about copyright laws. It was “my bad” indeed, and, as the magazine is put together in long sessions, tired eyes and minds somethings forget to do these things.

But honestly Monica, the web is considered “public domain” and you should be happy we just didn’t “lift” your whole article and put someone else’s name on it! It happens a lot, clearly more than you are aware of, especially on college campuses, and the workplace. If you took offence and are unhappy, I am sorry, but you as a professional should know that the article we used written by you was in very bad need of editing, and is much better now than was originally. Now it will work well for your portfolio. For that reason, I have a bit of a difficult time with your requests for monetary gain, albeit for such a fine (and very wealthy!) institution. We put some time into rewrites, you should compensate me! I never charge young writers for advice or rewriting poorly written pieces, and have many who write for me… ALWAYS for free!”

H/T to John Scalzi for the link.

October 27, 2010

The surplus of “steampunk” in SF

Filed under: Books, History, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:31

I have to admit that “steampunk” never really made it onto my regular reading list. I rather like some of the artwork and created artifacts, but the actual stories don’t grab me. Charles Stross isn’t a fan, either:

I am becoming annoyed by the current glut of Steampunk that is being foisted on the SF-reading public via the likes of Tor.com and io9.

It’s not that I actively dislike steampunk, and indeed I have fond memories of the likes of K. W. Jeter’s “Infernal Devices”, Tim Powers’ “The Anubis Gates”, the works of James Blaylock, and other features of the 1980s steampunk scene. I don’t have that much to say against the aesthetic and costumery other than, gosh, that must be rather hot and hard to perambulate in. (I will confess to being a big fan of Phil and Kaja Foglio’s Girl Genius.) It’s just that there’s too damn much of it about right now, and furthermore, it’s in danger of vanishing up its own arse due to second artist effect. (The first artist sees a landscape and paints what they see; the second artist sees the first artist’s work and paints that, instead of a real landscape.)

We’ve been at this point before with other sub-genres, with cyberpunk and, more recently, paranormal romance fang fuckers bodice rippers with vamp- Sparkly Vampyres in Lurve: it’s poised on the edge of over-exposure. Maybe it’s on its way to becoming a new sub-genre, or even a new shelf category in the bookstores. But in the meantime, it’s over-blown. The category is filling up with trashy, derivative junk and also with good authors who damn well ought to know better than to jump on a bandwagon. (Take it from one whose first novel got the ‘S’-word pinned on it — singularity — back when that was hot: if you’re lucky, your career will last long enough that you live to regret it.) Harumph, young folks today, get off my lawn ….

October 20, 2010

The daily Orwell

Filed under: Books, Britain, History, WW2 — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 13:09

A few years back, on the old blog, I mentioned that the Orwell Trust was publishing George Orwell’s diary in blog form. It’s now up to October 1940:

19.10.40
The unspeakable depression of lighting the fires every morning with papers of a year ago, and getting glimpses of optimistic headlines as they go up in smoke.

October 14, 2010

Old stereotypes still thrive in niche ecologies

Filed under: Humour, Randomness — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:49

An exchange that wouldn’t have been at all surprising in, say, 1950:

"Jo,
As much as I appreciate your reply, I think this manuscript is perahps [sic] too heavy for you.
Don't get me wrong, I am not remeaning [sic] your professionalism, it's just VERY profound and maybe too much for a female to edit.
A delicate mind I do not want editing this.
Best regards,
Etc"

Jo Caird called on deep reserves of patience to respond:

"Dear Etc,
Thanks for your prompt reply.
Thanks too for your candid (not to mention eloquently expressed - although I believe the word you were looking for was 'demeaning', not 'remeaning') appraisal of my intellectual and professional capabilities. It's reassuring to me, as a 'female' (again, I believe you mean 'woman') of delicate sensibilities and feeble judgement, to know that considerate gentlemen such as yourself exist to protect me from that which I lack the depth of character to understand.
As to how you've assessed that I am too weak-minded to work on, or even indeed to read, your manuscript, given that we have never met, or even spoken on the phone, I can only speculate. I wish you, in any case, all the best with it.
Have a lovely weekend.
Kind regards,
Jo"

H/T to Tim Harford for the link.

October 9, 2010

I know what they meant to say

Filed under: Cancon, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:19

The original wording:

Then the corrected version:

October 7, 2010

QotD: The dangers of being a novelist

Filed under: Books, Humour, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:30

I’m in the middle of starting a new novel right now, and the bad thing about that strange phase of existence is that everything you see and hear somehow relates, in the wankmulch your brain has become, to that novel. Even a shopping list becomes a mass of notation and connective lines — because you’re convinced that the six things on it reveal something phenomenal about the world and your place in it, and there’s a place in the novel where you can shove all that in.

Deep down, there’s a little James Joyce homunculus in our hearts, presumably chatting up a saucy-looking ventricle and asking it if it shags, and also spreading the beautifully toxic notion that his book Ulysses actually contains all of Dublin in it and, should it ever be destroyed, a new Dublin could be generated from it like a backup copy, if needs be. And so we peer around at everything, to see if we can image it on a hard drive of a book, ghosting the real world.

Also it’s important to note that when writers — or at least I — get into this condition, we talk very fast and make not a lot of sense.

Warren Ellis, “Ghosting the real world”, Wired (UK), 2010-10-07

July 28, 2010

“If you take hyphens seriously, you will surely go mad.”

Filed under: Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 17:17

If you’re not a bit of a word geek, you can safely skip this post. “Johnson” looks at the role of the copy editor:

Having recently had my forthcoming book copy-edited, I jumped right on the link (at Andrew Sullivan) to read Lori Fradkin’s “What It’s Really Like To Be A Copy Editor”. I’d struggled for hours with my manuscript, wondering what to stet and what not to stet, marvelling both at my copy editor’s care and at the confusion she introduced in places. So I was eager to see what Ms Fradkin had to say about the other side of this relationship.

But the experience isn’t quite what he hopes: Ms Fradkin is inclined to a “because the dictionary says so” approach that “Johnson” finds overly restrictive.

This is not to say “everything is right” and to get back into the tired prescriptivist-descriptivist debate. A debate about hyphens or compounds should have something useful to say about language itself. For example, The Economist hyphenates compounds when they are used as modifiers: interest-rate hikes, balance-of-payments crises, and so forth. These aren’t hyphenated when used as nouns. (“Interest rates must go up.”) I like this hyphenation. It helps prevent so-called garden-path misanalysis, by letting the reader know that even though he’s seeing two nouns in a row, they should be understood as a compound modifier, and another noun is coming up. In other words, if someone asked me why I hyphenate “interest-rate hikes”, this is what I’d tell them, and not “Because the style book says so.” The latter answer is worse than wrong; it’s not interesting.

In some cases I might disagree with our style book. I obey it nonetheless, because rulings, even when arbitrary, keep a style consistent, so readers aren’t finding “Web sites” here and “websites” there in the same article. Readers expect and enjoy uniformity as a mark of quality.

July 25, 2010

QotD: Writing

Filed under: Humour, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 16:30

Writing is a slow and a difficult process mentally. How you physically render the words onto a screen or a page doesn’t help you. I’ll give you this example. When words had to be carved into stone, with a chisel, you got the Ten Commandments. When the quill pen had been invented and you had to chase a goose around the yard and sharpen the pen and boil some ink and so on, you got Shakespeare. When the fountain pen came along, you got Henry James. When the typewriter came along, you got Jack Kerouac. And now that we have the computer, we have Facebook. Are you seeing a trend here?

P.J. O’Rourke, “P.J. O’Rourke: ‘Very Little That Gets Blogged Is Of Very Much Worth'”, John Brown’s Notes and Essays, 2010-07-23

May 25, 2010

The dangers of writing near-future SF

Filed under: Books, Britain, Media, Politics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:17

Charles Stross gets sandbagged by the unforeseen:

Back in mid-2008 I mentioned that what I thought was a futuristic-circa-2023 technology for the next novel was too damn close. Slightly more recently, in Living through interesting times, I mentioned that it was becoming near-as-dammit impossible to write near-future SF; I was sore because Bernie Madoff had stolen the plot of my next novel.

Well, I picked myself up, dusted myself down, re-framed the novel in question, and I’m currently about 80% of the way through writing it when it all happened again. First of all, Lothian and Borders Police actually established a recognizable-as-the-embryonic-form version of the unit that one of my protagonists, circa 2023, manages. (Only I got the staffing level and departmental mission statement slightly off-whack …) Next, there’s just been another revolution in Kyrgyzstan (a country which, for reasons I’m not going to discuss here, plays a significant role in “Rule 34”).

But the worst thing? I’ve been sandbagged by an unanticipated event.

Of course, it’s quite understandable — after all these years, who knew there even was a “libertarian arm of the Conservative party” to mess up Charlie’s plot of the near-future?

April 29, 2010

Parents, don’t let your kids grow up to be fiction authors

Filed under: Economics, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:26

Charles Stross lays out the miserable truth about the practical issues when you try to write fiction for a living:

Most people have a very romanticized view of what it is that authors do. Firstly, there’s a widespread perception that the workload involved is relatively easy — in modern western nations, the level of functional literacy is high enough that a majority of the population can read a book, and write (at least to the extent of thumbing a 160-character text message on their phone). Because there is no obvious barrier to entry as with music (where proficiency with musical instruments clearly takes practice), most people assume that writing a novel is like writing a text message — you put one word in front of another until you’re done. The skills of fiction composition are largely invisible, until you try to actually do it. Secondly, many people harbour peculiar ideas about how much money there is in commercial publishing — and when disabused of the idea that selling a first novel is a road to riches, they assume it’s because the evil publishers are conspiring to keep all the money to themselves (rather than the unpalatable truth — publishing commercial fiction is hard work for little reward). Finally, there’s the Lifestyle chimera.

In short: it’s actually work to write for a living. The pay sucks for the vast majority of fiction writers. You face all the risks of a start-up business, but the potential pay-off is lottery-odds unlikely to come your way. Unlike other work, creative writing can’t be done (for most authors) in a predictable regular way:

Putting words in a row is wearying work. When they’re flowing fast, I can sometimes reach a dizzying peak output of 2000 words per hour for a couple of hours — not in fiction, but in a blog entry or a non-fiction essay. I’ve occasionally had death march sessions in which I pumped out as much as 10,000 words in a day. But such Stakhanovite output isn’t sustainable; a 10,000 word day is usually followed by a three-day-weekend to recover from it. A more realistic target for a full-time professional writer is 500-1000 words of finished prose per workday, corresponding to about 1-2 hours of writing, 2-4 hours of polishing, and another couple of hours of thinking about what they want to say, and how to say it. Like anyone else, they need weekends and vacation weeks and time to do the housekeeping. 1000 words per day for a 250-day working year (50 weeks of 5 days a week) works out at 250,000 words per year — or two 320 page novels.

There’s one SF/Fantasy author who seems to publish a new book every month, but he’s extremely unusual. For most authors, one or two books per year is pretty good output.

April 12, 2010

QotD: A new award

Filed under: Media, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:14

Nothing punctures a swollen ego so neatly as public mockery. Anti- awards like the Rotten Tomatoes and Golden Raspberry Awards for awful films, for example, perform a useful service. They keep celebrities humble and they give ordinary folks vicarious power to punish the inferior efforts of vain and stupid people who have come to believe they are special.

There should be just such an award for journalists who mangle the rules of composition. I am thinking in particular of opinion writers who are so determined to chivvy the reader into accepting a conclusion for which no evidence is available that they attempt to disguise their lack of acumen with really rotten imagery, similes, metaphors and symbolism.

I would call this anti-award the “Dowdy” in “honour” of Maureen Dowd, who would be named its inaugural recipient for creating the Worst Simile of the Year, a simile that binds together her April 11 New York Times column about the Catholic Church pedophile scandals, “Worlds Without Women.”

Barbara Kay, “Saudi Arabia is not a men’s club”, National Post, 2010-04-12

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