Techniques

Villains

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Villains make stories exciting. They add an element of danger, giving the hero an adversary to overcome and the reader someone to hate. But who exactly counts as a villain? Is it any character who does bad things? This question came up in my mind when discussing the question of whether the opera Carmen has a villain. Is it Don Jose? He murders the protagonist. Is it Carmen? She leaves a trail of ruin, but that’s not her intention. Here I’ll put a few thoughts together.

First try: A proper villain does bad things with bad intentions. But do the intentions have to be bad? The classic example of the righteous villain is Javert in Les Miserables. Throughout the novel, he pursues Jean Valjean in the belief that he’s hunting down a dangerous criminal. He can’t grasp that Valjean has greatly changed, and when the truth hits him … well, that’s a spoiler. Is he a villain? Gottesmann in my The Magic Battery is similar, and I had Javert in mind when I created him. He thinks that letting just anybody use magic is too dangerous to allow, and he won’t allow the conviction of an innocent person, but his campaign kills a lot of people.
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The craft of children’s books

This entry was posted in Techniques Writing as business and tagged books publishing writing on by

I just learned that my friend Debbie Ohi, a writer and illustrator of children’s books, has a Substack. Even though I never plan to write a children’s book, I was fascinated by her article on understanding picture book format and construction. I’d never realized there were such strict page requirements. If you’re thinking of getting into this field or know someone who is, you should find her articles very interesting.

More words that don’t mean what people think they mean 1

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The other day I was talking with a friend about words that people use in ways that show they don’t understand their meaning. I’ve talked about some before, such as “phobia” and “exponential.” Here are some more.

Inigo Montoya with text: You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means.ballistic: A ballistic course is one followed by an object that isn’t under acceleration except by gravity. The laws of physics say it follows a parabola, moving horizontally at a constant rate and being vertically affected by a constant force (assuming it doesn’t go so high that gravity significantly weakens). Someone who “goes ballistic” is enraged and suddenly follows a different course. A truly ballistic person would coast along and follow a smooth course, eventually coming back down to earth.

quantum: Quantum effects occur at a sub-microscopic scale. A quantum leap, properly, is the smallest change a particle or system can undergo, yet people use “quantum leap” to mean a huge, sudden change.
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It’s not what you say…

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

“It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it.” A book I picked up today in the library reminded me of that saying. It’s The Reformation, a part of the “Turning Points in World History” series. The book consists of essays by different authors. One of them, “The History and Premises of Protestantism” by Hans J. Hillerbrand, includes a half-hearted apology for John Calvin. Other parts of the book are more straightforward about his career of persecuting heretics, but Hillerbrand’s careful phrasing struck me. I’m thinking of these two quotes, found in the same paragraph:
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More linguistic griping

This entry was posted in Commentary Techniques and tagged grammar language usage on by

Just some more miscellaneous complaints about how people abuse the English language. I’ll avoid ones I’ve already written about, and hopefully the items here aren’t the ones you usually see. To vary things a bit, I’ll include some alleged corrections which I disagree with.

“Free reign.” The term “free rein” means lack of restriction, letting someone do what they want. If it’s applied to a government official or agency running wild, “free reign” could make sense, but in general it’s wrong.

“LOL.” Laughing out loud is appropriate when something is funny or ridiculous, but too many people on the Internet stick it onto everything they say. For some, it’s a cheap way to score a point. Some people seem to think it softens what they say. It doesn’t.

“Illegal” as a noun. People do illegal things. There is no such thing, at least in the United States, as a person whose existence is illegal.

“Begging the question.” I’m losing this battle, but I’ll keep fighting it. Begging the question is the fallacy of assuming the point which is to be proven. Example: “The Bible is true because it says so in the Bible.” People often use it to mean something like “leading to the question.” Granted, expressions shift in meaning, but “begging the question” as a term for a fallacy conveys a precise, useful meaning that shouldn’t be watered down.

“Ad hominem.” While we’re on the subject of logical fallacies, here’s another one whose name is often misused. An ad hominem argument attacks the person making a statement rather than its facts or reasoning. We often see it used for insults in general. An ad hominem argument doesn’t have to be insulting; an example of an ad hominem argument could be “X isn’t European and has never been to Europe, therefore his statement about Europe is wrong.” (Technically, this item is about abusing the Latin language.)
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Six blunders to avoid when writing about computers 1

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

Computers are everywhere, yet writers of scripts for movies and TV constantly get them wrong. Ludicrously wrong. Good written fiction, especially science fiction, does better, but writers of all kinds need to be careful. You can depart from the real world if you like, but you have to know what you’re doing. Make sure the reader knows it’s intentional.

Here are six ways writers can mess up. Not all of them are completely impossible, but if you use any of them, you at least need to make the scenario plausible.
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Writing German words in English text

This entry was posted in Techniques Writing and tagged German language technology writing on by

English-language articles sometimes need to use foreign words. Most languages require more characters than the 26 letters of the English-language alphabet that ASCII supports. This shouldn’t be hard, since Unicode provides characters for almost every important language in the world. When you sit down to enter foreign words at your computer, though, you run into issues.

I’ll talk here about German text, since it’s the language I know best next to English.
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Dissecting clickbait stories

This entry was posted in Techniques Writing and tagged Internet research technology writing on by

When you report or comment on a news story, the first step is to understand what it says. Low-quality websites have ways of appearing to say more than they do. They aim to create a panic and attract links. A careful reading may show there isn’t much substance to what happened.

Let’s look at a Daily Mail article claiming that an application called “New Profile Pic” “hoovers up your details.” A careful reading shows that doesn’t mean much.
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Spotting fake videos 1

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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.