Writing

Be kind to obscure novelists week

This entry was posted in Writing and tagged books on by

It’s safe to say I’m an obscure novelist. I know lots of other obscure novelists and even a few you’ve likely heard of. When they’re friends, I try to make them a little less obscure. It doesn’t take a lot of effort. Authors love reviews, but a full review isn’t necessary. Any mention helps if it isn’t too negative.

If you have a blog or use social media, mentioning the books you’ve read lately helps the authors. Dan Brown may not care, but it can make a significant difference to someone who’s hoping to hit a thousand sales. If you use sites like LibraryThing and Goodreads, follow the authors you know and rate their books. If they run a promotion, let your friends know about it.

You might even learn something about your friends’ interests and knowledge from the books they’ve written.

To put my keyboard where my mouth is, here are some novels by authors I know who are less than famous:
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Spotting fake videos 1

This entry was posted in Techniques Writing and tagged fact checking research video on by

Writing about the Russian invasion of Ukraine means taking arms against a sea of misinformation. The Russian government is lying on an astonishing scale, but we can’t always trust information from the Ukrainian side either. In war, there’s always a tendency to paint the enemy in the worst light possible, and sometimes that includes making up facts. In the modern era, it includes faking videos.

Distinguishing authentic videos, which present what they claim they do, from fakes isn’t easy. These are some of the fakers’ tricks:
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Working with the Smashwords Meatgrinder

This entry was posted in My writing Techniques and tagged books smashwords software on by

Smashwords was once a leading distributor of e-books. I still use it, since I don’t care to give Amazon an exclusive on my work and Smashwords offers a good deal. Smashwords lets me distribute to several other outlets. It’s become obvious, though, that it’s fallen behind technologically.

Compare the process of uploading books. When I uploaded Spells of War to Amazon KDP, I was asked for a DOCX file. There was little trouble exporting one from LibreOffice and uploading it. The one issue was that even though the file had its own table of contents, KDP wanted to generate its own. I deleted the existing table of contents and let the server generate one. It wasn’t immediately obvious how to position it after the title page (you drag it in the list of elements), but I figured it out pretty quickly.

Smashwords has an old piece of software, called “Meatgrinder,” to turn a DOC (not DOCX) file into various e-book formats. When I uploaded my file, it gave me several cryptic error messages. They all pertained to indented quotations in the book, and they all referred to the intermediate HTML which Meatgrinder created. Specifically, they told me that HTML tags, such as blockquote, weren’t properly nested. I didn’t create those tags; Meatgrinder did. It was telling me about its own errors and expecting me to fix them!

Something similar had happened with The Magic Battery, but I couldn’t remember how I solved the problem then. This time, I changed the style of all the quotes to Text Body and then applied styling to adjust their indentation. This is the wrong way to style a book robustly, but it got Meatgrinder to accept the file. Soon Smashwords should let me distribute the book to other channels. At the moment it’s pending review.

I’d like Smashwords to stay around so that Amazon has competition, but I can see problems like this discouraging self-publishing authors.

Update: I just came across an announcement that Draft2Digital is acquiring Smashwords. Mergers always raise questions and concerns, but the announcement says Smashwords authors and publishers will get access to “simpler publishing tools,” so there’s reason for optimism. I’ll try to keep up with the news on this development.

New York Times: Imagine books without their authors

This entry was posted in Commentary Writing and tagged writing on by

“All you want is production without men who’re able to produce, isn’t it?”

In Atlas Shrugged, Henry Rearden asks this of a gang of politicians and bureaucrats trying to foist an insane scheme on him. Some people say Rand created a caricature. But recently, the New York Times made the erasure of creators explicit with an ad presenting “imagining Harry Potter without its creator” in a positive light. Perhaps the Times people think books are created by a “Fiat Librum” spell requiring no work. (“Fiat Librum” is probably bad Latin. Wizarding Word magic is built on bad Latin.) It’s magical thinking.

The suggestion is reminiscent of Barack Obama’s “You didn’t built that.” Denying credit to creators relieves the beneficiaries of any sense that they owe them anything, even acknowledgement.
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SFWA makes the right decision 1

This entry was posted in Commentary Writing and tagged fandom Russia science fiction Ukraine on by

Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) has declined to cut off ties with the Russian speculative fiction community. This has prompted an outraged post by Borys Sydiuk, a Ukrainian fan. SFWA’s position, as quoted in the post, is:

The SFWA Board of Directors met this last week to discuss and carefully review your missive. SFWA’s mission is to support, advocate for, and educate creators in the science fiction and fantasy genres across the world. We do this regardless of the actions of their governments. Because our mission is tied to our incorporation and status as a charitable organization, we cannot participate or support any kind of boycott.

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Writing about Ukraine

This entry was posted in Writer ethics Writing and tagged Russia Ukraine writing on by

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has us all very concerned, and anyone who writes about it for publication needs to write responsibly. Here are a few thoughts on the subject. I’m addressing writers in the USA; most of it applies everywhere, but I’m writing with Americans in mind.

Beyond assuming that you agree the invasion is outrageous, I’m not saying what position you should take. (If you don’t think it’s outrageous, you aren’t in my target audience.) These are general points regardless of what you think people should do.
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Kyiv or Kiev?

This entry was posted in Writing and tagged language usage on by

With the Russian invasion of Ukraine (not “the Ukraine”) dominating the news, many of us have noticed for the first time that most reports now call its capital Kyiv rather than Kiev. I wondered when this shift happened and why, and exactly how the name should be pronounced.

Ukraine flagKiev comes from the Russian name for the city, Kyiv from its Ukrainian name. Both Russian and Ukrainian use the Cyrillic alphabet, so any version of the name in the Roman alphabet is a transliteration. With the current situation, using “Kyiv” is especially satisfying, since it rejects Russia’s claim to the nation. (So far, thankfully, I haven’t seen any claims that criticizing Russia is “red scare racist.”) We can safely say it’s the new standard spelling. For similar reasons, we now talk about “Ukraine” rather than “the Ukraine.” The latter suggests a region rather than a nation. A few other countries have a definite article in front of their names, but they’re ones where the name is a phrase (e.g., “the Netherlands,” “the United States”).
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Writers: Know the tools of your trade

This entry was posted in Techniques Writing and tagged grammar writing on by

No one would try to be a carpenter without knowing how to use a hammer and saw. No one would claim to be a software developer without the ability to write syntactically correct code that (usually) does what it’s supposed to. But it’s astonishing how many people on writers’ forums show a basic lack of ability to use their language.

As a writer, you should understand spelling, verb tenses, sentence structure, agreement, and so on. You should have a good vocabulary and know what the right word is. You can break the rules when it’s appropriate, but you should know when you’re breaking them and why. You should know the difference between “rein” and “reign,” between “lose” and “loose.”

Grammar checkers won’t save a bad writer. The best of them are excessively nitpicking, ridiculously permissive, or both in turns. They’re valuable for catching mistakes, but you have to know which of their recommendations are valid.
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Prescriptivism vs. descriptivism

This entry was posted in Techniques Writing and tagged usage writing on by

Attitudes toward changes in a language range between two poles. The prescriptivist says words have fixed definitions, and using them in ways that aren’t in the dictionary is misuse. The descriptivist says that words mean whatever people choose them to mean. Few people take a pure position at one end or the other. Prescriptivists face the fact that dictionaries change. Descriptivists can’t treat every neologism they hear as part of the language if they expect people to understand each other. The debate is over how much legitimacy a word needs before it’s considered standard. Words pass through the stage of slang or jargon before they reach full citizenship. Some words don’t go beyond that status, and they don’t have to. Professions need their jargon and subcultures need their slang, and they don’t have to impose it on the whole linguistic community.

Linguistic change isn’t something that a mysterious Sprachgeist causes. It’s the product of the users’ choices. Prescriptivists exert a drag on changes, and that can be good. If the language changes too fast, it becomes less precise. No one’s sure whether a word means what it always meant or it’s become something else. New words are necessary to convey new concepts, but they should prove their worth before getting wide adoption. Some words, like “nice,” have changed so many times that no one’s sure what they mean, except by context and tone of voice.
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Amazon KDP arbitrarily excluding authors?

This entry was posted in Writing Writing as business and tagged Amazon KDP Kindle on by

A File 770 article asserts that “several indie romance authors recently found themselves banned by Kindle Direct Publishing with no real explanation.” I have no independent confirmation of this, but the article is worth a look.

I use Smashwords as my primary self-publishing outlet. This locks me out of some nice features I could get by giving exclusive publication rights to KDP, but I don’t care to be locked in like that.