Impossible Writing Prompt: Create a Believable Character Evil Enough to Pull Off the Writer House Hoax

Posted on July 27, 2011 by José Iriarte

I’ve seen several mentions this week, mostly over Twitter, of the vile hoax played by an individual posing as Jodi Reamer from Writers House. It sounded pretty crappy, but I didn’t go clicking on links to find out more about the story. I wasn’t positive what the angle was on this scam, but ripoffs and frauds abound, and I didn’t perceive any reason for me to be worried about it.

I’m a regular reader of Writer Beware! though, and last night I came across Victoria Strauss’s writeup of the whole ordeal here.

And I am just dumbstruck.

I’m not as good a writer as I like to think, because I’m at a loss for words. I mean, I have plenty of cliché words. Words like “cruel,” “disgusting,” “horrible,” and so forth. Words that tell how I feel but are inadequate to show it.

According the the screenshots and transcripts over at Writer Beware, the perpetrator claims to be a teenager. Some folks in the comments cast doubt on that, because the perpetrator shows sophisticated knowledge in several ways: using the name of a real agent at a phenomenal agency, dropping names of real genre editors at real houses, knowing about selling a book at auction, and so forth. On the other hand, this hoax reminds me of some of the more disgusting high school hoaxes I’ve heard of–the ones that tend to make national news when they end in tragedy.

Teen or not, there is no excuse for this action, but I’d like to hope the person who did it is still relatively early in the process of finding his or her moral center. Aaronni’s blog identifies her as a college senior, so it’s not too farfetched to suppose she knows some people in that age range and that one of them may be jealous and/or vengeful. I did things when I was much younger that horrify me now, and I’d like to hope that the perpetrator of this scam grows enough to one day look back and be horrified as well.

Because otherwise what we have here is a sociopath.

Even though Aaronni is an internet stranger to me, I found myself having an emotional reaction† as I read her story. Because I know, as many of you reading this do, how much of ourselves we aspiring writers invest in that dream. I know how many years I spent sending stories out into the world without anybody who wasn’t a friend or relative having a single nice thing to say about them. I know what it’s like to have enough rejections to wallpaper a room. I know what it’s like to finally start to see some trickle of a sign that you may have what it takes–some personal feedback, some agents who come close, some promising personal interactions, some contest wins. And yes, I know what it’s like to finally get The Call from an agent. To know that somebody who’s not invested in your self-esteem feels strongly enough about your work to be willing to invest her professional time and resources on it.

And when I imagine having thought I’d reached that point and having it turn out to be fake . . .

Like I said, I’m not a good enough writer to convey that. Maybe I need to challenge myself to write a character that evil, because it never would have occurred to me to create someone that wantonly cruel, that personally destructive.

I’ve got to hope this person didn’t know how very meaningful this button he or she pushed was. That when this person figures it out, he or she will want to crawl into a hole and bring the hole in after him- or herself, like in a Bugs Bunny cartoon.

There’s almost no chance the perpetrator of this hoax will ever read my blog post about it, and if you’re reading this you’ve probably heard about this from somewhere else, so I can’t claim to be warning anybody either. But this created such a strong emotional response in me that I had to write about it. That’s just what I do.

† That’s the manly way to admit I choked up, right?

Posted in rants, writing | 2 Comments

Best Books on Writing

Posted on July 26, 2011 by José Iriarte

Image by Sanja Gjenero

At writers’ group tonight*, the topic of books on craft came up. Always happy to hear myself talk, I began to expound on which books had worked for me, when our group leader suggested I share the list online instead.

Okay, I get it. “Shut up, Joe.” 😉

As I got ready to type up my list, I thought, ZOMG! Blog post! So I’m putting my thoughts here in my blog, and would love to hear where you agree or disagree, and what you think I missed.

Some people downplay the value of reading about craft at all, and I can understand why. So many aspects of craft are intangible, and the majority of the books on craft I’ve read have ranged from one bad extreme to another: there are the books that want to boil those intangibles down to a formula, and the books that are so vague as to be useless. But one of the things I learned along the way–more on this in another post–is that having a solid grasp of grammar and writing conventions and a facility with language is a long way from being able to write working fiction. While language is the tool we use, storytelling is a craft and an art unto itself, with its own techniques, cadences, and “rules.” It took me a long time to learn this was so, and I spent a lot of it banging my head against a wall, writing stories that failed and not knowing why, and eventually concluding that writing salable fiction was simply beyond me. Now I know it wasn’t beyond me; I just had an incomplete set of tools.

What follows is a list of books that provided some of the tools I was missing. I wish I’d found them all sooner. I wish I’d gotten good, solid recommendations at the beginning, and not had to stumble on these books, one by one, over the course of many years. No book is an end-all and be-all, and I think guidelines are meant to be transcended. But I don’t think you can transcend what you don’t know. So here are the basics:

  • How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy, by Orson Scott Card. This was the first writing book that really worked for me, and in my opinion it’s just a great writing book, period, regardless of what genre you write in. The strengths of this book, I think, are in idea generation and story structure, more so than in actual wordcraft. I’ve heard varying quotes–with varying numbers–to the effect that there are only so many different plots. Card highlights four specific plot types–the Milieu Story, the Idea Story, the Character Story, and the Event Story–and talks about how to structure each kind. He also emphasized, for me, the importance of something changing, and the importance of stakes. As for ideas, I just found them firing across my brain as I read this book. This book made me feel more creative.
  • Techniques of the Selling Writer, by Dwight V. Swain. You can hardly find a published novelist who is not familiar with this book, and yet it’s incredibly hard to find. All I can guess is that the books that have mass appeal aren’t necessarily the ones that give you the facts. Some wannabe writers don’t want advice that results in hard work; they want books that are more about the dream. This book is the nitty gritty: Swain talks about how to keep the story moving by alternating between “scenes” and “sequels”: passages where a protagonist works toward a goal, usually to be thwarted, interspersed with passages in which time is constricted showing the process by which the protagonist decides what to do next. This was the first place where I saw the importance of the characters’ goals emphasized. “Show, don’t tell” can be oversimplistic advice; my take on Swain’s advice is you show the actions that drive the story forward, and fast-forward through the parts that don’t. Also, when it comes to wordcraft, Swain’s book is the first place I ever encountered the advice to root out “to be” verbs.
  • Goal, Motivation, and Conflict, by Debra Dixon. I pal around with a lot of romance writers. For one thing, no group of writers is more generous when it comes to helping out newbies who are trying to learn the craft. Write it down: nobody. Other groups talk about “paying it forward,” but romance writers actually do it. And damn near every romance writer knows about GMC, but again, it’s really hard to actually find the book anywhere. What’s up with that? GMC is about making your characters more fully fleshed out. Real characters do things because they’re trying to further their physical or emotional goals, not because it helps you the writer get from point A to point B. (I use different words for the same thing in my pre-writing because it’s too easy to get mixed up down the line otherwise. I call it Goal, Why, and But, but it’s the same thing.) Personally, I feel like I do a good enough job with my main character, but where this book really helps me is helping me avoid dropping the ball when it comes to my secondary ones. Just this week I was struggling with a character in my WIP. I didn’t know why she was helping my protagonist, other than because I wanted her to. The principles in this book helped me realize I’d created a satellite, not a character. She needed to have her own reasons for acting, and until I knew what those were, she wasn’t going to be anything but a cardboard cut-out.
  • The Dreaded Synopsis, but Elizabeth Sinclair. Think of this as a sister book to GMC. It’s definitely written with the latter book in mind, and it mainly expounds on those principles to help you write a synopsis for an agent or publisher. Now I don’t buy into the amount of stress most aspiring writers put into the whole synopsis thing. Almost none of the agents I queried asked for a synopsis, and I was never made to feel that my synopsis stood between me and the next step. Still, I found this book useful because my current writing process is to write from the big picture to the little picture. I write a logline, a pitch, and a synopsis before I write the manuscript. My reasoning is that if I can’t coherently explain my plot, that probably points to problems in the story–to a plot that’s not as tight as it could be. These tools are all about character goals and inciting incident. If I can’t find these things, I have a problem. I think this is true whether you’re a plotter or a pantser, but the reason I’m a plotter is I’d rather not waste time writing some rambly thing and then having to fix it later. I’d rather have those pieces in place. Sinclair’s book was invaluable when it came to writing that synopsis, which I think makes my novel stronger, so that’s why I include it here.
  • Writing the Breakout Novel, by Donald Maass. With a title like that, it’s easy to think this is a guide to pandering to the common tastes, but really it’s about making your stories deeper and more compelling. It’s about plumbing the emotional depths until you come up with a story that resonates more with the reader. It’s a book on the art of storytelling, and I don’t think it’s for a beginner. This is for writers who already have the basic tools of the craft, and want to learn how to make their stories stick with people. But while I’m including it here, I actually found the more useful tome to be . . .
  • Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook, by Donald Maass. The original book is the one that inspires you to make your stories deeper. This is the book that takes away your excuses not to. I’ve attended Maass’s Breakout Novel workshop in person, and if it’s possible to walk away from that without being inspired and knowing a bunch of specific ways to make your novel better, I certainly didn’t see it happen. Without exception, every single person I spoke to was blown away and inspired. We writers can be as cynical as anybody else, but I didn’t encounter cynicism after the workshop I attended. For me, it felt like somebody opened up a firehose of creativity in my brain, and the biggest challenge was keeping up. The workbook contains the specific writing exercises Maass challenged us with, collected in a book where you can take your time going through them and not feel rushed. I use this book when I already pretty much know what my story is about and what’s going to happen, to ratchet it up further.

So there you have it. If you think a book on writing will help you and you’re looking around for the right one, give some healthy consideration to these six choices.

Having said that, it’s worth noting that there is a ton of amazing writing advice available online, for free. I had thought to talk about some of my favorite writer sites, but this rundown is long enough, which makes that topic good fodder for another post, another day.

What are your favorite writing books? Do you second any of mine? Are there others I missed?

 

 

Posted in writing | 7 Comments

The Archetype of the Tortured Artist

Posted on July 25, 2011 by José Iriarte

Image courtesy of NRK P3, CC BY-NC-SA 3.0

I wasn’t particularly familiar with Amy Winehouse before her death. I knew the name, and I had the general impression that a lot of the people I respect admired her art and her intelligence. My days of keeping up with what’s new in the music industry are behind me, though, so I can’t claim to be a fan, or even name any of her songs.

This post isn’t about her, then, but about the thoughts that went through my mind as I read about her tragic life in the wake of her death.

As I read about the signs of destruction leading up to Winehouse’s death, I thought about a pervasive archetype in art: that of the tortured genius. I know a lot of arty people, and I know a lot of broken people, and the overlap between the categories is huge. I know people who revel in their brokenness, who say, for instance, that the most sensitive people tend to suffer from depression and mental illness–with the corresponding implication that if you’re not suffering, it’s because you’re not sufficiently sensitive, in the artistic sense. I know people who seem to believe that being arty causes one to be depressive.

I tend think there’s some confirmation bias at work here. For people who view the world this way, every time they find out about some artist’s tortured background, they say, Ah hah! There’s another bit of evidence! If they’ve not heard that an artist struggles with depression or self-destructive behavior or whatever, though, they don’t make a note of it. There isn’t a check box for “happy artist”; there are check boxes for “unhappy artist” and “we don’t know yet.”

It wouldn’t utterly surprise me if there were some correlation between mental illness and artistic inclination though. Maybe self expression holds an attraction for the same kinds of people that are commonly afflicted with depression or other disorders. Even so, I wouldn’t buy that one is a prerequisite for the other.

Or there may be another factor. Maybe it’s not that broken people are more artistic, or that artistic people are more broken, but that broken people are more driven to achieve the outward trappings of success in any field. I actually think there’s something to this. In educational psychology we learn about something called an “external locus of control,” but I think some people have an external locus of approval. I think some people have such a difficult time loving themselves or seeing themselves as worthwhile that they need the esteem of others and tangible accomplishments to feel like they’re worth a damn.

In any case, I believe often what you do with a truth is more important than its actual veracity. Even if there is a correlation, it’s no reason to wallow in dysfunction, to celebrate it like it’s some sort of badge of legitimacy as an artist.

Posted in artist's life, close to home | 6 Comments

Heavenly Pizza

Posted on July 24, 2011 by José Iriarte

Photo by Moi Cody

I have an unhealthy appetite for pizza. For me, it’s always been the perfect food. I’m not sure why a pizza is intrinsically more appetizing than a burger, or steak, pasta, or pretty much anything else; it just is. When I was in graduate school, one of my jobs was at a Pizza Inn. I made pizzas, delivered them, and managed the buffet table. I’d never want to have that job again, but mostly that’s just about living on little more than minimum wage. On the upside, I ate pizza for one meal a day practically every day (and sometimes more than one meal a day), paid for almost none of those meals, and was still in the best shape of my life. (Being on my feet all the time maybe had something to do with it. Or being twenty-three.) My friends were certain this would kill my love of pizza, but it never did.

Guess it’s a good thing I didn’t work in an ice-cream parlor.

When I left grad school and returned to Miami, a buddy and I set out on a mission to eat at every pizzeria in town, searching for “mystic pizza.” I don’t think either one of us had seen the Julia Roberts movie, but the phrase had slipped into our zeitgeist, and on some level it seemed to feel like naming the thing had to call it into existence.

We weren’t so much looking for perfect pizza, though, as we were for a perfect pizzeria. A great pizza in a great setting.

This was before internet-as-we-know-it, so our brilliant methodology consisted of ripping the “Pizza” pages out of the yellow pages, keeping them folded up in my car, and crossing off each restaurant we visited, mostly in alphabetical order.

In hindsight, we really had no conception of how many pizzerias there were in Miami. I met Lisa and got married long before we made it even a quarter of the way through the list, and suddenly I didn’t seem to have time anymore for making our way through all two-hundred or whatever pizzerias in greater Miami.

We never did find that perfect pizzeria. We found a lot of places that did one or two things right but fell short of the mark elsewhere, and one pizzeria that was memorably bad: Rey’s Pizzeria. Rey’s is a Miami chain that’s open twenty-four hours (or at least, it was back then) and purports to serve “Cuban-style pizza.” Now I’m Cuban-American, and to me that phrase is without meaning. Apparently, though, Cuban-style pizza is nausea-inducing, with god-knows-what variety of cheese on top of a slab of (round) bread at least two inches thick, that was shown a picture of some sauce on its way from the prep table to the oven. Served in a dining room with all the charisma of a K-Mart.

It’s disappointing, though, that we couldn’t find even one place that made exactly what we were looking for. Different people’s ideas of perfection would of course look nothing alike, but I don’t think we were asking for anything all that crazy. You’d think we’d have found it just once.

Here’s what we were looking for in our mystic pizzeria:

  • New York style pizza. This is the One True Pizza. We would brook no false pizzas before it.
  • The pizzeria must not be part of a chain. It could be a local chain, because a really excellent place is likely to be successful and open one or two other locations. But if your manager can’t rattle off the locations of all your other restaurants, then you’re too big.
  • Fresh dough mixed on the premises.
  • Not stingy with the toppings–particularly not the sauce. In my experience, it’s the sauce where most pizzeria employees tend to skimp. After you spread the sauce around but before you put the cheese down, the pizza should be red-orange in color. If it’s closer to pink, you’re doing it wrong.
  • This is pretty much already covered in bullet number one, but a pizza must be round. Also, it must be cut in an asterisk-like pattern, so that each slice has a bit of crust.
  • The pizzeria must have excellent garlic knots, or, in a pinch, Italian-bread-style garlic bread oozing with cheese.
  • The pizzeria must serve beer. It doesn’t have to be good beer, but beer is a staple.
  • The pizzeria must be comfortable in decor, not trendy. Bricks should be in evidence, or, failing that, wood paneling. A television or a juke box are both okay.
  • A staff that’s treated well enough to be reasonably stable–if I’m a regular, it ought to be possible to get to know my server, and maybe some of the other staff too.
  • One or two (preferably classic) arcade games by the door are okay, though certainly not required or even encouraged. However, more than this is too many, and skee-ball is right out! Mystic Pizza isn’t a freaking Chuck E. Cheese’s!

What’s your perfect pizzeria like? Have you found it? Do you have some other food that you like way more than a sane person should?

Posted in food | 4 Comments

Online Argument Fatigue

Posted on July 23, 2011 by José Iriarte

If you’re not familiar with this XKCD strip, then you’re probably not geeky enough to be in my target audience. 😉

Just tonight* I was having a “Someone is wrong on the internet!” moment of my own. It was all I could do not to reach through Twitter and bop that person with the Mallet of Truth, but I held off for a variety of reasons.

One is I didn’t get on Twitter to get into fights or to stop people from being Wrong. People are Wrong much closer to home, and I really don’t need to pay for a fast internet connection to find them.

Another is I seem to have Online Argument Fatigue (OAF). As I noted elsewhere, I was on the internet way earlier than most people. (Dammit, where’d I leave my can of Pabst Blue Ribbon?!) I’ve already addressed most of the world’s misconceptions in excruciating detail, in well-though-out forum posts with links to various reputable sites. And now new people come along, with the incredible tackiness to not have known me when I was in my wisdom-dispensing heyday, and want to spew the same stupid ideas I already put to rest? Aw hell no. Let’s just not and say we did. A simple You’re wrong will have to suffice.

I still have the knee-jerk tendency to point out to people the sad error of their ways. What I lack is the follow-through. The desire to spend hours fielding all their wrong-headed retorts. So I generally just leave the field to them, but then, as Randall Munroe’s comic notes, they persist in their wrongness. Perhaps more tragically, they’re left with the absurd notion that their specious arguments carried the day, that they “won.”

Image by Michael Keen, CC by-NC-ND 2.0

And the sad little secret last reason: what evidence do I have that will convince these online doofuses, and how much of it can I examine myself? Put more succinctly, how do I know what I know?

These days, we don’t just disagree on how to interpret basic facts, we disagree on what those facts are. And our sellers of information have picked up on this and now sell us the information, the commodity, that we want to receive from them. So you can watch the news network that provides you with the truth you want to hear, and you can fight to have your children (and other people’s) provided with textbooks that reflect the reality you believe in.

And I’m no different, except that the things I believe in are true, while the things I disagree with are asinine.

Much of our modern reality seems to have spun into a strange zone where almost no lay-person can evaluate the truth of any claim, because you need a ton of specialized education before you know enough to even have a well-considered opinion. And so, for all the sources I can cite to support my beliefs, all my statements really come down to is “I find my sources more credible than I find yours.”

I’m not expressing some sort of ambivalence when it comes to reality here. I know what I believe:

While I can’t go back in time and grill the “founding fathers” about their specific intent, I believe that our country is or should be founded on the principle of preserving the most rights for the most people–and that this means we need reasons more compelling for abridging those rights than the strictures of any particular religion.

While I’m not an expert in every science–or hell, in any of them–I believe in the scientific method. I don’t mean some bogus list of five or seven steps or whatever, but the approach to knowledge that says you do your best to look at the data and create a belief system that represents it, and not the other way around. And I believe that the purpose of science class in school is to teach this way of approaching questions of fact. (In fact, I believe that every academic discipline exists to teach a way of solving problems and answering questions, and not [primarily] a body of knowledge.)

I guess for me these are philosophical truths more than specific historical or scientific ones.

You can feel free to post where you disagree with me, but I won’t bother arguing with you. You’re wrong, but I’ve got OAF.

Posted in assorted nerdom, rants, this I believe | 3 Comments

The Obligatory Space Shuttle Post

Posted on July 21, 2011 by José Iriarte

Image courtesy of Chris Christner, CC by-NC-SA 2.0

I was in third grade when the Space Shuttle Columbia took its maiden flight into space. I remember getting up early to watch the launch on our big old oak cabinet TV that took minutes to warm up and showed images in color, but with a greenish tinge. I also remember watching the landing in my school cafeteria a couple days later.

Since then, the shuttle has been a peripheral part of my life. I never got to watch a launch live at the Cape, but as a sci-fi-obsessed kid growing up in the same state as most of the launches, I was always aware of the program.

Like every other American of my generation, I can remember precisely where I was and what was going on when I learned that Challenger had exploded.  I was in ninth grade, lunch was all but over, and I was waiting in the hall outside my godawful Spanish class. Some kid came up and said the Challenger had exploded. How on earth did he find out, in that pre-internet, pre-smartphone age? I was pretty sure he was BS-ing us. I guess that’s my default response to tragic news: I replied with disbelief when I heard about the terrorist attacks on 9/11, and again when I heard about the Columbia’s disintegration.

In 2001 we moved from Miami to Central Florida. Barely a week after we closed on our house, while we were in the process of unloading a U-Haul, as a matter of fact, we heard a loud boom that we thought was one of the circuits in the house blowing. We spent several frantic hours searching for the source of the explosion, only to find out the next day what we’d heard: the sonic booms of reentry. Since then we’ve probably been treated to the sound about five dozen times, usually at inconvenient hours like shortly after dawn.

In 2002, NASA seemed to feel that enough time had passed since 1986 to restart its various citizen-in-space programs. I was nominated that year for the renewed Teacher in Space program. It was a hell of a longshot, but I never got the chance. The next February, I was awakened on a Saturday morning by a phone call from my father, telling me the Columbia had disintegrated.

Living in Central Florida, I got to watch a lot of the shuttles go up, though I never went out to the Cape. Even out where we lived you could see the shuttle climb, a little white wedge trailing smoke if it was daytime and fire if it was night. I took a whole classful of kids out to watch STS-107 go up, none of us knowing those astronauts would never make it back. I also watched STS-128 go up, the only night launch I ever watched. I actually saw this one from all the way out in Ocala–from a pool hall, if you can believe it–but you could still see it clearly. It trailed bright flames behind it, like the most amazing firework you ever saw, or like that star graphic from the “The More You Know” PSAs. I also watched the final mission go up, for the few seconds that it peeked out between the clouds.

For all that I may be over-romanticizing my memories of the shuttle program, a dash of reality is in order. The space shuttle program was a dead end, suited only to be a small part of a more ambitious space program that never materialized. I’ve seen a lot of talk about an era of space exploration ending. The shuttle performed no space exploration. It was a vehicle not capable of going beyond Low Earth Orbit. It was about as much exploration as a seven-year-old walking to the end of the block over and over again, sometimes with binoculars.

An era of space exploration ended, yes, but it ended long before this final flight. I’m sad to see the apparent direction we’re going–depending on other countries to get our astronauts into space, or back to disposable vehicles. For all the grandiose talk about a lunar base or about a manned trip to Mars, we don’t appear to be a society that can pull it off.

Over the years, I’ve heard a lot of people grouse at the money spent on the space program. This always struck me as an ignorant position. The space program launched tons of spin-off technology that made life better on Earth–everything from better solar cells to sports bras, of all things. Beyond that–and this is the point where my opinion gets dismissed as that of someone who’s read too much science fiction–I believe it’s necessary to our survival as a species for us to work toward one day being able to permanently live off Earth.

So I’m sad to see the shuttle program go. Not because it was a ringing success–it wasn’t. But because it was the best we had.

Posted in tech geek | Leave a comment

Bookvenirs

Posted on July 21, 2011 by José Iriarte

Tonight* a bunch of us writerly types were sitting around with some adult beverages, talking about writing, reading, and books in general, when the topic of used books came up.

I’ve never lived anywhere where I haven’t visited every used book store in a hundred mile radius. These days almost all of my books are bought new, but I still like to hit the used book stores (and thrift stores) for out-of-print books, for hardcovers of books I loved in paperback, and for books to stock my classroom library with.

But in the midst of our discussion of the economic viability of used book stores, we the conversation glanced upon the notion of collecting books–as in, what for?

Once upon a time I used to reread my favorite books with some frequency. I’ve read most of Heinlein’s books a couple of times, and Door Into Summer, in particular, maybe four times. (Yes, there’s all sorts of creepy vibes in that book that I see now, but as a kid myself, they were invisible to me.) I can’t begin to count how many times I’ve read Ender’s Game. Another one of the most re-read books from my teen years is Piers Anthony’s On A Pale Horse.

Even as I gradually fell out of the habit of rereading favorite books, I still reread the early books in any series I loved when later books came out. I think I have to credit Big Fat Fantasies That Go On For A Dozen Books for breaking me of that.

As it stands now, it’s probably been over five years since I’ve reread a book, and I have no particular inclination to reread anything else–mostly because my to-be-read pile is taller than I am. By a lot.

So why keep all those books?

Even if I felt like going back and rereading some books, would I reread all of them, or just a few favorites? Is there any doubt in my mind which books I would likely never bother with again?

I do occasionally pull out a book as a sort of reference. I scan my shelves and note which publishers release the largest number of my favorite titles. Or I look at a book that accomplished something I’m struggling at and look at how the author did it†.

I also like to get books autographed, but again, certainly not all of them, right?

Ooh, I’ve got another one! It’s nice to be able to lend somebody a book at the drop of a hat. “Why I’ve got just the thing for you–here!” Cause yeah, that happens a lot.

All those reasons have some tiny nugget of validity, but I have to admit the single biggest reason is that they’re “bookvenirs.” I’ve traveled down this or that road, lived the life of this or that character, and, while I don’t have the T-shirt to prove it, I’ve got the book. Most of those books serve little more purpose than a tchotchke I might buy in Mexico to remember my trip. And at the end of the day, that actually seems kind of shallow, doesn’t it? Who am I reading for? Who am I trying to impress?

Maybe some day I’ll jump on the e-reader bandwagon and stop being such a packrat. So far, my e-reading tendencies skew precisely the opposite of most people: Report after report shows that e-book sales are up for fiction but not for non-fiction, but for me it’s the other way around. When I have a reference type book–especially that ambrosia of aspiring writers, the book on writing, with the latest magic bullet to make your writing awesome and your career take off–I figure I want it near the computer for when I’m working. What could be nearer the computer than in it? When it comes to fiction, though, so far I haven’t gotten past my love affair with actual paper and ink books. Maybe I’ll join the digital age when a Nook (or whatever) gets cheap enough for me to feel it’s worth buying.

In the meantime, look upon my library, ye mighty, and despair!

†Much like what The Intern is doing with The Hunger Games. Go read this post, if you’re a writer. It’s fantastic!

Posted in bookish life | 8 Comments

The KidLit Dead Pool

Posted on July 20, 2011 by José Iriarte

I read a lot of Young Adult and Middle Grade fiction. The official reason is because I write Young Adult/Middle Grade fiction, and it’s vital to read in the field you want to publish in. The unofficial reason is because there’s some darn good storytelling in those books. I feel like younger readers are less jaded, less burdened with silly rules (I’m looking at you, mundane sci-fi fans), less impressed with literary showoffery, and more focused on simply having a good story told well. (On a tangential note, I feel similarly about minority literature and literature from groups that feel disenfranchised from mainstream literary culture–they haven’t abandoned narrative. This very nearly was the topic of my master’s thesis.)

You can see the book I’m currently reading in the widget on the right. It was suggested to me as a possible comp title for my novel Vanishing Act, and I wanted to see just how comparable it was. The image is kind of small, but you can clearly see a silvery-gray circle in the lower left part of the title, which leads me to a prediction. I am almost precisely halfway through the book, and I’m all but certain that somebody’s got to die. All I’m trying to figure out is whether it will be the baby sister, the title character, or the girl next door. Because killing somebody and breaking the protagonist’s heart is the KidLit equivalent of being literary, and an award on the cover of a book is the sign that a Kidlit book is literary.

Don’t believe me?

Spoiler: Here are some examples off the top of me and Lisa's heads: SelectShow

Do you have examples that I missed?

TVTropes even has a name for this phenomenon: Death by Newbery

So why do authors of literary fiction for young readers hate kids, anyway?

P.S. Don’t go spoiling Skellig for me; I’ll be done with it in a day or so anyway. (I’ll go ahead and spoil Vanishing Act for you: nobody dies, so there will be no medals on the cover of this book. 😉 )

Posted in bookish life | 8 Comments

Readers Without Borders

Posted on July 19, 2011 by José Iriarte

Photo by Gerard's World, CC by-NC-ND 2.0

Today* I heard the news that last ditch efforts to find a buyer to keep the Borders chain open had failed, and that, pending judge approval, the chain could begin liquidating its remaining stores by the end of this week, and be but a memory by the end of September.

I know how this news makes me feel, but I don’t know for sure what it portends. The conventional wisdom is that it signals the death of all brick-and-mortar bookstores; perhaps it’s indicative of the eventual death of paper books. Maybe the death of reading. I’m not so sure any of that’s true. Have we ever, as an economy, been able to support more than a couple big box book chains? And to what extent is the reputed mismanagement of Borders a statement on some other chain’s future?

For most of my life** the early part of my life, these enormous stores didn’t exist–at least, not near me. It was right around the beginning of the 1990s, before I’d ever heard of Barnes and Noble or Borders, that a BookStop opened near my house. It was the biggest bookstore I’d ever seen, and it had the best prices, too!

I now realize that the fantastic prices the large conglomerates can offer come by way of a monkey’s paw. The little stores can’t match the buying power of the big guys, so they can’t match their prices. Then the little stores go out of business and the big guys grow ever more powerful. But this was one of many things I didn’t understand, and as a college student, I was just thrilled to be able to buy more books.

BookStop was quickly replaced by BookStar, which, as far as I could tell, was the same chain with a new name. When BookStar was replaced by Barnes & Noble, I was leery at first of this green, hoity-toity upstart. Until they doubled the size of what was already a mind-bogglingly big bookstore.

I’ve read a ton of people blogging elegiacally about how well-organized Borders was in its heyday, how knowledgable the staff was, and how responsive the chain was to its customers. I never really knew that Borders. Based on little more than the sources of these posts, I suspect this may have been a northeastern thing, and that by the time the chain spread into South Florida, it was more or less a clone of Barnes & Noble. I considered Borders to be Barnes and Noble’s stuffier cousin with taller bookshelves, but was grateful for its existence nonetheless because their genre selection had subtle differences, and so my own options were amplified.

In the years since, we haven’t just lost most of our independent bookstores. Mall bookstores have also more or less become a thing of the past. Barnes and Noble has opened some new stores around me, while others have folded, but Books-A-Millions seem to be sprouting like dandelions. Why would somebody be opening new box stores if the market’s so terrible? Maybe the market’s not quite as terrible as we think.

And what about how this affects writers? I’ve seen so many takes on what the changes in the book industry mean for writers. That it’s a terrible thing because the big houses have less money to spend and are looking for sure winners. That it’s a wonderful thing because electronic publishing is knocking down the barriers to publishing for everyone. That it’s a terrible thing because, while more people may get published, the idea of making enough from your sales to make a living is dying by the wayside. It’s enough to make my head spin. Is this an evil omen? An expected casualty of a positive shift?

Beats me, so I have no choice but to fall back on simpler metrics. I’ll now have one fewer option when it comes to buying books.

That can’t be anything but a bad thing.

* I don’t reckon days the way most people do. By my way of thinking, a day begins when I get out of bed, and ends when I get back into it. The clock is an irrelevant modern contrivance.

** Crap. It just dawned on me that I’m older than I realized.

Posted in bookish life | 7 Comments

Warming Up My Pipes

Posted on July 18, 2011 by José Iriarte

I’ve decided to take a cruise in the next few months–of course I’m not telling you when!–and I’m already engaging in my favorite pre-cruise form of daydreaming: selecting my karaoke song list.

I know: nerdy, right?

Photo by Blazej Pachut

It gets a bad rap, but I admit it: I love karaoke. I’ve always loved to sing. When I’m healthy and hitting my notes, there is almost nothing more enjoyable. When I was a kid, I used to get a lot of praise for my singing and feature prominently in school choruses and such. Then I had the misfortune to spend six years in an überconservative all-boys school with absolutely zero arts program. No visual arts, no creative writing, no band, no chorus, and no drama apart from a single semester course that finally attracted enough of an enrollment to actually be offered my senior year. While there, I got the message loud and clear that singing was a good way to contract Teh Gay, and that this was a bad thing, and I was effectively silenced. I think anybody who knew me as a fifth- or sixth-grader would be stunned to learn that I virtually never sang where anybody could hear me from seventh grade through well into my twenties.

Somewhere along the way I forgot that I’d actually been good at singing once. I have this memory from college that still makes me cringe with how pathetically afraid I’d become. I went to Memphis, Tennessee with my school’s HSA for a conference, and a bunch of us went to Graceland and toured Elvis’s home. There, one of us–not me!–thought it would be a good idea to get several of us guys in one of those touristy recording booth things to record a rendition of some Elvis song–I can’t remember which. One of the guys was quite confident in his singing; I actually can’t say if it was deserved confidence or not. Anyway, I was so terrified of singing that I silently lip-synched while we all murdered this poor song. And at one point the leader of this escapade complained that one of us was singing off-key in his ear, and I was so certain of my lack of singing ability that I was sure he would think it was me somehow, even though I wasn’t actually singing at all!

I never actually stopped loving to sing, though. I just got in the habit of doing it in the car, or along in my apartment, or anywhere I could sing without being heard.

I think one of the clearest signs to me that my wife and I were meant to be together was that I was comfortable enough around her to let her hear me singing, even pretty early on in our courtship. It wasn’t something I ever though about consciously. I just felt so un-self-conscious that my usual inclination to repress my tendency to sing never came up.

My wife had a background in music, having majored for a time in voice and having sung opera. She could have destroyed what little confidence I had by confirming my worst fears, by laughing at me or saying I was terrible. But instead I heard her tell a mutual friend that I was actually a damn good singer.

My wife’s not the sort of person to give insincere praise; when she tells you something is good, you absolutely know she means it. So gradually I began to regain some of my lost confidence and take chances singing in front of people. I had my first taste of karaoke–without the lip-synching–on our honeymoon cruise. It wasn’t an altogether perfect experience; there were a couple of jackasses in the audience with a laser pointer who thought it’d be fun to harrass the singers–the last thing I needed. Still, I didn’t embarrass myself, and I didn’t walk away too terrified to repeat the experience.

As the years passed I tested myself on stage again and again, with slightly less trepidation and slightly more success each time. I began to learn that there were some songs an audience would simply listen politely to, and there were others that they would applaud enthusiastically for. And bit by bit, success begat more success. The times when the audience would react enthusiastically began to outnumber the times when they were quieter, and I even got that ultimate of all karaoke compliments a few times: being asked to sing by a total stranger, or being surprised with a request to join somebody in a duet. I began to feel like I was actually good at singing in front of a crowd, and I began to crave that experience more and more.

I don’t really have stage fright anymore. Or, perhaps more accurately, I have just the right amount of stage fright: enough so that the adrenaline flows, enough so that I feel excited and alive, but not enough to paralyze me. It’s my own self-produced drug-cocktail and high.

For a few years–until petty interpersonal politics and infighting ruined a good thing–I got my fix pretty regularly by singing in musicals for my local community theater. I think I still like karaoke better, though. I don’t look like anybody’s idea of a leading man, but in karaoke everybody who wants to can get their solos, their moments in the spotlight. I especially like it on a cruise ship, where each trip I get to unleash my repertoire on people who haven’t already heard me sing the same tunes over and over again.

I wonder what connection this has to the other passions in my life. I think singing in front of people makes you vulnerable in a way that few other activities in our society do. Writing makes you vulnerable too, though. People will look at your writing and judge your intelligence, sophistication, and creativity; they’ll look at the things your characters say and do and the message they believe they see and judge your moral fiber. Early in my attempts to find publication, there’s no doubt I gave up too quickly. Did learning to stand up and face scrutiny on stage make facing rejection on paper easier?

Coming at this from another angle, there’s no doubt that the more I felt like I was good at something, the better I got. Does this apply to teaching maybe? Or to writing? Success breeds success, no doubt. But what constitutes success, anyway? How much comes from without, and how much from within?

No lofty answers here; just legitimate questions. In the meantime, I have a few new songs to try out.

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