Tag Archives: fiction editor

Editing/writing life, Social comment, Technology

The state of the AI from an editor’s perspective

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As a believer in labeling one’s biases and then letting rip, let us begin with mine:

I despise AI. There is nothing I like about it. I don’t like the data centers, I don’t like the plutocracy behind them, and I don’t like the pliant municipalities who just bend over and drop trou for plutocracy. Not even at bayonet point could you get me to use AI to write my words for me. I take delight in watching it display the mindless trends that are its tells, sneering at its never-life.

I’m a snob. I would rather read the tortured constructions and bad spelling of the world’s worst real writer than technically correct AI.

In the many cases in which AI use is simply laziness, what my mind says is: It was so much easier than using your actual mind, wasn’t it?Today, Konrad Kujau wouldn’t have to author a phony Hitler memoir ms; he’d just feed the question to an AI and out would come the Dolfiness.

AI is here to stay, unless (as I hope) the proliferation of AI-genned content becomes recursive in that its outputs get stupider and stupider as it is increasingly its own unvetted (except by itself!) source material. It already generates fictitious references. I do not see evidence that it employs discernment on its sourcing. I think if enough QAnuts published enough wackiness, and at least made some effort at originality while not labeling themselves openly, AI would refer to them as if they were Stephen Hawking, or E.F. Hutton (ask your grandparents).

With those understandings, let’s talk about where this phenomenon is. AI goes beyond what I’m describing, of course; it can do at least something that looks like editing. In time it will probably be capable of more, unless it worsens its trend of eating its own children.

It is not that new, as far as I can see; it’s just more interactive. In essence, it’s the modern evolution of Altavista (ask your parents) or Google. What is a search engine algorithm but a form of AI? Is a word processor’s grammar check and spell check not some form of AI? Some games pit the player against relatively decent AI, which computer game designers have been trying to improve for decades. In the old Steel Panthers days, we’d sometimes delegate a trial setup to computer control just to get its sense of the position. (Andy Gailey will never see this, but those words began as his, and so was the idea. And unlike ChatGPT, he’s a person.) What’s new is that one can get it to do the work of writers and editors, at least in some ways. It takes a pretty sophisticated reader to tell it apart, which eliminates the vast majority of the modern US public.

My theory about the impact on my profession is that it will have the greatest impact on the people who don’t hire someone like me, and the people that they do hire. Consider: One is a stereotypically lazy ‘nap-my-way-through-college’ student who takes one look at the concepts of research and composition and replies: “Oh hell no. That’s actual work. I’d rather get AI to do it for me, then I’ll go through and edit out some of it so the prof can’t tell.” After muddling though, the alumnus* learned almost nothing about writing. Except, perhaps, that which would be learned by reading a few syntactically correct history papers (which isn’t enough; try reading voraciously from ages 3 to 22 if you want it by osmosis and Kodak childhood memory). Now he’s stuck. Take away his AI and his literacy is spavined.

*I think women are less prone to let a dumb computer program supply their words, probably because on balance the evidence indicates they’re slightly brighter than we are, and because I believe they are less interested in letting a computer talk over them than they are even in letting men talk over them.

So Slacker Alum, living with his parents because getting jobs is hard and might even require him to leave the house, has always had some ideas for novels. He starts having AI write the story for him, and in the process he at least becomes better at using AI. His AI novel is no worse garbage than a fair percentage of the self-published material out there, and not a little of the trad-pubbed. Does he hire an editor? Not a real one; that would take money. If he had money, he wouldn’t be doing any of this. He either hires one of the self-anointed Starving English BA Editors who thinks s/he’s qualified, or he accepts the AI editing and congratulates himself on creating moneymaking content while maintaining his slacker image. Either way, he was never going to hire me. He’s not my market and I’m not his. The Starving English BA Editors are already doing it for almost nothing because of $250K in student loans, which means they must have the money. Their sad revenue streams are likely to take hits.

I’m not mocking the plight of today’s 20something, attempting to navigate a world in which their elders ate up the whole buffet. (I’ve been cussing those elders for it since our twenties during the Reagan administration. They ignored me. Still do.) I’m only mocking the lazy ones with low to no standards or pride, or who assert for themselves unreasonable qualifications. I am making the point that for those who want to loaf their way by, and who feel better about doing that and then playing Galaxy of Mortal Annihilationcraft: Total & Utter Eternal Damnation & Destruction all day, AI is not merely the crutch. It is more the self-driving vehicle.

Would I use AI to help me edit material people paid me to work on? You can guess that answer. I doubt that anyone who does would ever admit it, so you can believe me or not. Those who know me well have no trouble taking it at face value. But in case anyone needs to hear it, I would sooner make homebrew napalm and drop flaming globs of it on my body.

Would I reject working on a novel partly or wholly written by AI? It’s unlikely I will ever see one, because those who don’t want to write (but want the appearance of having done so) are unlikely to want to spend money. A part of me can see that. To them, what the AI wrote is grammatically okay, and isn’t that the only use for a damn editor anyway? I’m not going to pierce that perception and won’t try. It’s unlikely they understand the breadth of my work, but that’s okay; in most cases I think they’d be shocked to hear that it costs more than $300 to “put an edit on it.” (That could be one of the most unpalatable and ignorant turns of phrase I ever encounter. Take it from me: Anyone using it knows little about actual editing.) Thus, I’m not their target vendor and I’m not that vendor’s competition. You all have fun.

Is there a place for AI in the work of writers I respect? That depends on what they are writing about. In non-fiction, such as (stop laughing) business reporting, I can see at least reasons to think of letting it handle a first draft. I think this because business reporting is not a passion project, and the live workforce every year is demanded to do more–with less people, in less time, for less compensation. A first draft can also be edited, reviewed, and its odder fancies corrected by someone who could have written that were they given the time to do so. There is a canyon separating those who can’t actually do it themselves in a competent way, and those who could but for life circumstances (deadlines, kids, delusional boss) eroding their time and mindshare. Those who could have done it themselves can certainly spot and correct flawed material. I get it.

As for ‘lancers, the market that wants to write its own words and hire a real editor will continue to do so, because it values the journey and the education at least as much as it does the  outcome. Those are my market. Them I can help. They are why I keep doing this.

Am I concerned about AI? I wouldn’t need to be, except for the climate that made it acceptable. I am much more concerned about the decline of literacy, attention spans, and critical thinking in that climate than I am about AI itself.

After all, I obviously didn’t mind it when it was trying to give me stress trying not to get my experienced Panther crews blown to hell in Steel Panthers by US P-47Ds firing 5″ rockets, or when it was helping me look up why my stupid fitness watch wouldn’t pair. I only started taking a leak on it when it started moneylending in my temple. And when that came, it was time to get to work on scourging.

Entertainment and music, Social comment

What’s wrong with America’s Book of Secrets

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These days the fare on satellite TV is so bad I wonder that Waste Management doesn’t start buying them out. My daily routine is to go through specific areas of the guide and see if there’s anything I want to record. Maybe about 3/4 of the time, that’s a “no” (if I’m being fairly restrained) or a “good lord, look at all these oceans of bullshit” (more frequently). Not feeling it.

I’m sensitive to names. One thing that bothers me more than it does the average person is a deliberately misleading or falsely titillating title. All these ‘wars’: Parking Wars. Donut Wars. Dumpster Wars. Kindergarten Wars. (Okay, I made some of them up, but you know they could happen.)

If the title is also imbecilic by nature, that’s even worse. And here we are with this show, which airs on the Ancient Aliens Channel. Or the Pawnshop Channel. Or the Does Real Evidence Confirm my Religion Channel. That’s what a cesspool History has become, and it somewhat reflects the general trend of national mentality in that it’s gotten a lot dumber.

So when I saw America’s Book of Secrets on the ex-History Channel, I gave it a look in spite of the ridiculous name and premise. I feel for the hosts (especially Lance Reddick, who was one hell of an actor), having to play to that notion and act as if he could possibly believe there were such a thing. No one with an MFA from Yale could possibly be that vacuous. (A Yalie Bachelor’s with a Gentleman’s C is quite a different story, as we rather ruinously learned.)

How do I know that? BECAUSE THE VERY CONCEPT IS ABSOLUTELY IMPOSSIBLE. I don’t raise my voice very often, but that question would merit it.

The idea that there is any sort of literary repository where our overlords have gathered together all the hidden truths and naughty deeds doesn’t even give said overlords credit for basic intellect and common sense. For most of my lifetime, at least, that was unfair to them. They might be greedy, they might be evil, they might be enemies of democratic institutions and traditions, but they were never moronic enough to contemplate this. What if it got out? The best way to assure that it did would be to aggregate it all in one easily copied volume. Even if our leaders would be that stupid, the members of our intelligence community would not be.

The closest that happened was probably when the post-Watergate funk led the then-Director of Central Intelligence to order his agency to ralph up every dirty deed they knew about. This report was called the Family Jewels, and it made a nice post-inauguration present for Gerald Ford. Yeah, that was something like a book of secrets, but it wasn’t all the secrets; it was just the ones that involved activity outside the agency’s charter (pandering to the amusing notion that such a charter is ever allowed to get in the way of whatever it is they were told to do). It was a sheaf of paper of some secrets, which is not rare currency around intelligence agencies.

Big deal–well, at the time it really was. A bunch of people lost their innocence and realized that even republics with rules have intelligence agencies that violate those rules daily. Pearls were clutched with a powerful clutching. Deeper thinkers made mental note of the fact that anything the agency’d do to foreigners, it’d gladly do to Americans.

The show itself is rather good, if you can get past the misleading title and its fundamental insult to the intellect. There’s some conspiracy stuff here and there–some pretty silly, some at least not offensive to the intellect–and the hosts keep on mentioning the show’s title (production must be writing the script so that they keep hammering on this dumbth). They explore some interesting (and often horrifying) outcomes, groups, events. Now and then I actually see something that sounds worth the trouble to verify.

So what’s the big deal about a title? Because this is how short attention spans are manipulated. You’ve seen plenty of online news headlines with titles that had little relation to the articles’ content. Do you think that was an accident? Ha. Was it sinister? Only to the degree that you consider clickbait and deliberate misleading to be sinister.

Often such misleading is euphemistic because the reality or association became unsavory. Take The Hemlock Society, which used to advocate for the right to kill oneself. Now it’s ‘rebranded’ as Compassion & Choices, focused on “legislative change” that’s never going to come on the national level. Over time, a different name reprograms the way people look at a thing. The advertising world knows this and does it better than anyone, which is why I avoid every drop of advertising I can. Those I cannot avoid, I mock.

So yeah, I like the show’s content but resent the title. I resent it because it carries the fundamental implication that I’d be idiot enough to believe there were such a thing as America’s book of secrets.

That would be right alongside its Tooth Fairy.

Editing/writing life

A reading holder design for readers like me

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If you are reading this, you probably read real books. If you are at all like me, you don’t like to break the spines or crease the covers of paperbacks. This is all fine, until you are sitting outside on a beautiful day enjoying a book on revolutionary France that weighs about two kilos (all modern books on France seem to weigh about that much). That’s a lot of book for aging arms to hold up. Some elders might find it uncomfortable even with both hands, and then there’s the tendency to lose one’s grip.

After searching high and low for a designed solution, I solved it with my own homebrew design. This is my gift to you.

Needed:

  • Vendor snack tray made of light wood with adjustable strap. I bought one online that was billed as being for theme parties and showed a woman in ballpark vendor drag with a tray full of popcorn bags. Cost about $30–like what you would spend for one large new book.
  • Velcro patches x 4, typically sold in little packets for ~$5
  • Thumbtacks x 4, cost probably $0
  • Hammer (you surely have one)
  • Tape measure (if you’re as fanatical as me about alignment; you surely have one)
  • Strap pad like the ones for seatbelts (optional, cost roughly $10-15)

Method:

  • Sit down and adjust the strap on your neck so that the tray resides where you would like to have the book rest. For me it was about 12″ from my face, so I could read without reading glasses.
  • Take four of the small rough velcro patches (you won’t need the soft fuzzy sides; do as you like with those). Measure the center of one side and stick the four patches where they will press against your clothing. I spread them over about a 6″ area.
  • Put the tray somewhere that you can pound against, like the overhang of a sturdy counter, with the patches up so that the counter backs up the tray’s rim.
  • Since adhesives never hold reliably, knock a thumbtack into each velcro patch. Obviously, excessive force is neither desirable nor needed. My granny could have done this. You got wood rather than plastic so you could do this.
  • Get a big thick book you like, sit down, put it into the tray, and see how you like the fit and feeling. Some people have neck issues (for example, maybe they had spinal cord surgery between C2-C3 with partial vertebrae loss and still get sore muscles; feel free to ask me how I know this) and a heavy book would be hard to support with a strap roped over the back of your neck unless you had a soft pad for it. If so, get the pad mentioned in the ingredients. The only people who can’t really use this are those whose necks simply cannot support the weight of book + tray.
  • Adjust the fit, alignment, and every other factor in play until it comfortably holds a book so that your hand can hold the pages open without effort.
  • Happy reading.

The end result is you’ve got a wooden tray suspended from your neck, held in balance by common sense and kept from moving about by friction from the velcro. If you avoid putting your page-holding hand on the edge of the tray, it’s lighter. There’s room to lay a bookmark, a pen if you like one, or a little reading light if you find that helpful.

  • Cost: $35-45 plus about five minutes of effort.
  • Payback: immediate and lasting. Experiment as you like, use whatever works best for you, and enjoy your books anywhere you sit.
Editing/writing life, Entertainment and music

Names and attachments

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Been watching old episodes of Jon Taffer’s Bar Rescue with my wife. Sometimes it’s pretty entertaining, and it’s a great way to learn about the bar business by seeing how people foul up what they imagined was a self-driving business vehicle.

If you’ve never seen the show, Taffer is a New Yawka who goes about the country helping failing bars and taverns to succeed. Can’t tell whether his antics are playing the stereotype to TV or his real reactions, because reality TV is unreal, but he can have a shouting match one day and come in calm and cool the next segment/day. He often shows a heart of gold, especially when it comes to establishments failing due to external, unavoidable impacts (death, cancer, hurricane, accidental ownership).

He is direct, vocal, and pretty hard to ignore. Good marketing. Worked on us.

His success rate seems to be about 50%. Considering that (taking claims at face value) nearly all of the bars he saves were about to faceplant and take the invested capital with them, that’s big. That means half the people end up paying off lenders, keeping houses, retaining staff. It’s a worthy social consequence. He’s helping the little guys and gals, who sometimes compete with well-funded chains.

After a couple of seasons, I started seeing analogies to my own field. There are key and major differences, starting with the fact that no one is at physical risk from reading a novel (consuming it might be another story). And one trend I have seen in bar owners is smack down the middle of my own experience:

Names.

Taffer usually alters the bar’s name. The bar owner will so often insist on the fig leaf of originality by going right back to the old name not long after Jon’s off to Tucson or Tallahassee. A world-renowned expert just told them they needed a new name, and they said “Meh.”

Not kidding. Of all places, that’s where they dig foxholes and prepare to die for it.

Want to know what’s hard in my line of work: Telling someone that the name they chose for their novel is ridiculous and counterproductive, but without being so blunt and cruel that one guarantees non-listening.

I have yet to figure out a good way to do that, but I can tell you that I find many book titles poorly considered, and I don’t know why they even chose them. For one thing, you don’t have to christen the thing in final form until printing. If you sell it to a publisher, they’ll probably reserve the right to change it. If you take it through  to publication yourself, you have until you push the buttons to set up the listings, post the blog posts,  create the blurb, and so on. You have months or years to think. Until then, a working title will more than suffice.

All right. What if your editor tells you, tactfully or brutally, that your novel’s name is not well chosen?

If you’re like most writers that’s an instant negative reaction. Rarely have I ever gotten the response: “All right. What do you suggest?” I have come to realize that the naming is so personal that nothing I know to say will crack that connection. It’s almost like an addiction, in which the addict must hit bottom before making a priority of seeking help and confronting the misery in order to get life back.

Not faulting anyone for that, either. I get its deeply human and not always practical nature, so this addiction seems to me something to just let go of once the subject is raised and blown off. Otherwise all it’ll do is alienate my client and then my advice will still be dismissed. “He didn’t believe in my work.” “This is the name it’s had in my mind for twenty years, and that’s that.”

What I’m hearing is: “I have to fight you on one key point or I will have surrendered myself. This is the hill I die on.” And a part of me even gets that. I’m the person who would rather have customer service calls take three times as long to get to a person because I refuse, point blank, to have verbal conversations with robots. That admitted (and I do have a purpose to it), they’re dying on a worthless hill.

It’s worthless because a title that doesn’t make sense doesn’t help to sell the book. That’s fine if it’s a vanity project and the au doesn’t expect to recoup the costs of editing. Nothing against vanity projects; in a way, they are very liberating. That said, it’s my job to render the best guidance I can, and if one has a deep need to fight for some aspect of their writing, that’s one of the bad ones.

If you’re a writer, and your editor is trying to tell you that your title is ill-chosen, hopefully at the very least you give it fair consideration.

Homeownership, Social comment, Technology

BegsDoor? LostCatsDoor? or, despairing for America one neighbor at a time on NextDoor

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After our old pal Nirav Tolia moved on from some other gigs like Epinions, he founded a community social networking site called NextDoor. As with Epinions, he understood that a golden secret to a better bottom line was to give the users (aka the product, their participation an incentive to buy the advertising that made the money) cool titles and responsibility, so they would work for free. It’s a smart idea–get someone else to take the punches and shovel the stables for you. Cheap cheep cheap (exactly the way everyone on my local ND demands everything be)!

There are two large issues with NextDoor. Neither is designed to restore any faith in your neighbors.

First relates to the above: community moderation. You can now guess why I’m posting this here and not there; if I posted it on NextDoor, it would violate so many (vague, inconsistently applied) rules they’d probably ban me. It fails to kiss enough asses, and that’s “shaming” on ND. It discusses moderation, and that’s even worse from a moderator’s standpoint. Whatever you discuss, you must not discuss the way what you discuss is moderated.

The second relates to the participants. The more time I spend on ND, the more doomed I realize we are. Everyone wants things for free, or very cheap, but they recoil at themselves working for nearly nothing.  Unless you just lost your cat, there is minimal empathy. Since I already know this, I don’t need a dunker baptism in it. An occasional reminder suffices. It’s not as if my faith in the overall national mentality has any potential to recover, so too much ND is like too long standing at a grave being sad. It won’t bring the deceased back, and at some point it’s not helping even me.

But I’m not going to stand here and curse the darkness. If ND participants are going to continue their very predictable posts that convey to us the very finite ability of our neighbors to think, I will donate my accumulated understanding for the common good. This should be a helpful pick list of post beginnings that ND users could start with, ideally presented on ND when one starts a post.

I despair that ND management would embrace the concept even if they saw this. I get that. They don’t like being reminded that their site is mainly a begging zone, lost cat search grid, and place for people to bleat ineffectually against life’s injustices. Thus, I will put it somewhere that ND people can get at it. If you’re posting on NextDoor and need some help, please review the categories below and see which one might apply to your situation:

  • Stuff Piling Up: I need to get rid of some heavy, unwieldy things. I spent fifty years accumulating stuff my kids don’t want! Will someone just haul them away for free?
  • Fix My Car Cheap: I don’t like taking my car in and paying a professional mechanic. Who will come to my place and fix it for $20?
  • They Can’t Do That–It’s Illegal! It is impossible for anyone to break the law, and the police will enforce all laws, therefore they can’t do that–even though they just did, and the law shows no sign of intervening!
  • Parent For Me: I just learned that there is an adult shop/weed place within half a mile of my child’s school. This should not be possible. Join me in demanding that the whole town should reshape itself so I never have to answer uncomfortable kid questions!
  • I Got to Move It Move It: I just bought a couch. I have no way to bring it home and the store wants an insane amount to deliver it, $75. Who will help deliver it to me for $15? I will need you to bring it in and take it up the stairs because I’m in an iron lung.
  • Cop Invasion: Eight squad cars are in my area tapping their sirens while police officers run around with flashlights and dogs, breaking down fences that delay them. Could there be a crime?
  • To Exclaim Is To Declaim: My period key doesn’t work but my exclamation point key sure does! This is how I really talk! I speak in a series of outbursts! Do not think I’m stupid for this! And no, I’m not on meth!
  • Naïveté Scene:  I just got a text that says it’s from the sheriff’s office saying that I don’t pay them my fine by tomorrow they’re going to come and arrest me. They say I can pay be Veinlow, PayFoul, or one of those crypt things, Batcoin or something. Is this a scam?
  • Need A Unicorn: Please recommend to me a (roofing/plumbing/tree removal/electrical/drywall/etc.) contractor who is wonderful, not busy, and really cheap cheep cheap.
  • Need a Good Mow Job: Need my yard mowed within the hour. Will pay $15, you bring mower. Grass is 18″ deep and please weedwhack and edge. Easy money!
  • No Wild Animals Allowed: I saw a coyote. Save me from being torn to bits! How are they even allowed?
  • Infestment Management: I have ants! Nothing works! I don’t follow the ant bait instructions, and thinking hurts my head. I don’t understand why they just don’t magically die!
  • Pro Bonehead: I want legal advice but would rather not pay for it. Could some rando advise me for free? I will make life decisions based on this!
  • Newsflash—Lock Your Car: I decided to leave my keys in the car and it got stolen. Has anyone seen a white Honda Accord?
  • Neighbors From Hell First Class: My neighbors are rage-filled drug addicts, strident bullies, and complete sociopaths. I asked them nicely to change their whole personal character and they cursed and threatened me. How is this even allowed?
  • Methletes On Patrol: Porch pirates/catalytic converter thieves/recycling bin rummagers/etc. stole my Amazon parcels/cat converter/beer cans/something else. Why isn’t anyone stopping this?
  • Poop Emoji: People let their dogs have bowel movements in my yard. Why?
  • No Knock Warranted: Solicitors/missionaries ignore my NO SOLICITING signs. How is this even legal?
  • Pest Controller, Control Thine Own Self: The _______ pest control people won’t stop knocking! I have a NO SOLICITING sign and they don’t care! I called the deputies and they do nothing!
  • Household Oppression Agency: My homeowners’ association is full of hall monitors and fascist meanies. This should be illegal!
  • Pwoor Pwuppy: Who is setting off fireworks? My Sweet Furbaby is piddling with fear! Why doesn’t someone arrest them?
  • Worst Drivers EV-er: As a professional bully, I cannot believe people refuse to speed up when I tailgate them! Drive at least 10 over the limit at all times and let me drive even faster! The law requires you to help me speed! If I ride your bumper, it’s justice. If you delay me, you’re a vigilante! Got that?
  • Jaded-In-Waiting: Hi everyone! I’m new here and I imagine there’s a community, rather than a bunch of bickering technophobes!
  • Lost PetsDoor: My poor cat/dog/conure/lizard/gibbon/platypus/stegosaurus is lost! I’m heartsick! Help me find him/her/them (in case your pet is transitioning)!
  • Cleanliness Is Next To Miserliness: So I want to hire a house cleaner. Since I have no idea how that business works, I think what I want should cost no more than $25: my bathrooms and kitchen cleaned once a month. I had two services out and they quoted me $125, saying they wouldn’t do it at all unless it was biweekly. Insane! I can’t afford more than $30. Cheap cheap cheep!
  • Comma Comma Chameleon: Imma rite 57 lines like this with no punk chewation to tell u how offal my life is and Imma beg u 4 some commus and peroids plus any pair of graph brakes u arent using would be grate [… … … … etc., etc.] thank u 4 taking time 2 read all this drivle
  • Give To Me Because I’m Broke: I need/want something but can’t pay. Can I have it for nothing?
  • Give To Me Even Though I’m Not Broke: I want/need something but paying would suck. Can I have it for next to nothing?
  • Give To Me Because I Gave Someone Something Once: I haven’t begged for a month! I gave someone an old towel two months back, so don’t shame me! My husband was unjustly fired again (it’s always unjustly; fifth time this year) and my kids don’t have Easter baskets—who will buy us some? Remember, I gave someone an old towel! I’m due! I also want a pumpkin pie from Costco.
  • The Follower: I think that if I just type ‘following’ on someone else’s post, there’s someone who cares. Someone is fascinated to know what I “follow.”

There. If none of these apply, your post will baffle and disconcert regulars because the list accounts for a good 95%+ of what happens on BegsDoor. They won’t know what to do.

Because thinking would hurt.

Editing/writing life

Editorial maverick: my quick bullets of advice for writers

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And not much else. If you want to write, you so signify by writing. Here:

  • Decide on your genre (including a synthesis of genres) and write it on paper where you can see it.
  • There is no such thing as writer’s block. Refuse to give this invented malady power over you.
  • Write every day, something, anything. If need be, write about how you’d rather be doing anything else that day.
  • Never self-edit as you go. Use the comment feature to mark areas for later review.
  • Your biggest enemy is fear of writing garbage. Write anyway.
  • Use good peripherals: quality mouse, large screen, comfortable keyboard.
  • Start your marketing plan, unless it’s a vanity project.
  • Read Stephen King’s On Writing, and learn.
  • Don’t show it to anyone until you’re done. No, not even her.
  • Consider honing your craft by starting with short stories.
  • Back your work up and save frequently, using new filenames.
  • Learn the different editing modes, so that you know more about editing than at least half the “editors” out there.
  • “Write what you know” means to incorporate your knowledge into what you write.
  • When you don’t want to write, admit that to yourself.
  • Never book-format as you write. First finalize the content, then do the pretty stuff.
  • On a first draft, never stress over grammar or spelling. Create. Keep creating.
  • Use change tracking when you revisit the completed ms.
  • Your Faulknerian “darlings” are the things you think are your best quips ever. You’re probably going to be the only believer in those.
  • Read great writers in your genre; learn from them.

 

Human relations, Social comment

D&D’s 50th Anniversary

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This is the point where I’m supposed to talk about how old it makes me feel that my childhood pastimes are celebrating golden anniversaries. The answer there is that I get enough reminders of my age from my knees, shoulders, sleep, restroom visits, and medications that seeing Dungeons & Dragons turn 50 doesn’t move the needle.

I just read an anniversary special magazine about the phenomenon, and while it was surveying a long period of diverse endeavors (games, cinema, etc.), it didn’t really seem to connect with the major factor that made the game impactful. I think no one who wasn’t alive when it came out is really in a position to recognize it. In that case, let me be of service:

D&D SHATTERED LIMITATIONS ON WHAT IT MEANT TO GAME.

Before D&D you had family games like Monopoly, where there were house rule deviations such as Free Parking, and strategy games like the early Avalon Hill releases in their 1960s heyday. Be they short or long, those games all had rules and offered no provision for bending or breaking them. They might be badly written; in Avalon Hill’s case, they might have large loopholes and unanswered cases; but no one was saying ‘just ignore them.’ Play, in other words, had to conform to rules made by someone else far away. No, no one would come and arrest you for breaking them; the hard part for rule benders was obtaining consensus.

And then, when I was about eleven, along came D&D. The publisher was called Tactical Studies Rules; rules were what they did. But unlike other games with big rulebooks, TSR said in essence: ‘The Dungeon Master is the final authority in all rules questions. Oh, and if you don’t like a rule, change it. Do it however you want.’

It is true that D&D opened up the realm for imagination by inviting players to create their own milieus, handing them books of tools to help them–but that’s what everyone already realizes. What not everyone realizes is how norm-shattering it was to tell people it was fine to bend or break the rules if that’s how they liked to play. In an era where one could be paddled for acting up in school, truant officers still existed and people cared whether you attended school, you could flunk and be held back, and varying other constraints limited the actions of a young person, TSR came as your liberator.

In fact, most people mostly played fairly close to the printed rules–but many of them were moved to develop their own systems. And all of it was storytelling, a form of collaborative fantasy novel writing. We didn’t have nanu-nanu or whatever exactly it’s called, but we did have D&D. A setting well guided by an effective DM, attended by players who let their imaginations run loco, meant that we were all learning the art of storytelling whether or not we knew it.

So really, it was that combination. No one had ever before told us to just do it our own way if we disapproved of our orders. Not only would we tell stories of our own, but we would do it with only the limitations imposed by consensus.

TSR battered down the cell walls that contained our creativity, and told us to be free. And that’s the single biggest impact–one that amplified the other and made it more than it might otherwise ever have become.

Book reviews, Editing/writing life

Editorial Maverick: Who are my examples?

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One of the best ways to teach involves good and bad examples. In many cases it’s easiest just to show the client someone who does it better than I do, or at least as well, and recommend they learn from it. Why not share that list?

Tightening: C.J. Cherryh’s fantasy and science fiction, and it’s not  even close. I often say that you could string a bow with her writing. If you are looking to see how someone gets away with the minimum words while presenting great narrative and dialogue, she’s your draft pick. Another author who doesn’t waste words is Tim Cahill (also mentioned below), whose laconic Sconnie style is that of a trained but taciturn journalist.

Dialogue: The art of dialogue takes time to acquire. There is a fine art to the correct density of dialogue tags (“he said”, etc.), how to present emphasis, and so on. The one that stands out to me is the early and middle work by W.E.B. Griffin, before his son’s name went onto the cover (and definitely before post-Junior’s hired pens were hired). You could always tell who was talking, and there were just enough adverbs in the tags (as in not many).

The Moment: If you read much fiction, and even some non-fiction, you have observed that some authors show a powerful sense of the key moment. Most very good storytellers must be cognizant of it, but a few do it with deft gravitas. My money there is on Frank Herbert in his Dune books (not the ones after his death, most of which I strongly suspect were written by ‘lancers).

Third Person Limited Point of View: For those not familiar, this means that the storyteller is inside the protag’s head but doesn’t assume the protag’s identity (which would shift it to first person: to “I” from the 3P “s/he.” All perspective colors our fiction with a basic approach; for example, the most common for first novels is semi-autobiographical 1P, probably because that’s suited to the skill level of most novice novelists. (That sounds waspish, but is not so intended. Let’s be real: there are novices in all fields, and they find certain paths easiest. Thus here.) In any case, my favorite example for 3PL is C.S. Forester, especially the majestic Hornblower novels. A deep dive into a man’s insecurities, disappointments, triumphs, and tragedies, the bohicas and terrors and even joys of military/naval life.

Mastery of English: Winston Churchill, and it’s not even close. Churchill is what I read when I need to be reminded what I am unlikely ever to be. William Manchester (including two of his three volumes about Churchill) is another candidate in a different English dialect.

Urban Paranormal: I admit that I am pretty much over this genre, but keeping an open mind. It’s not that I fundamentally hate it, but rather that it is so often so very badly done. Miniature dragons as part of huge elfy/vampy/wolfy spell battles on the San Francisco waterfront, and the next morning the city wakes up to business as usual? No. One thing I believe is that every fiction author gets one cheat: one step they don’t need to account for or fully explain, one leap of faith. To use that one on the notion that the rest of the world would just keep calm and carry on after zombies came pouring through town–that is not good. Some–and they know who they are–are so fetishistic they have to keep ratcheting up the monstrosity, like a bondage addict who must up-kink in order to keep feeling the thrill. The one who seems at least respectably tethered to the rest of reality is Patricia Briggs with the Mercy Thompson series.

Travel: This is my favorite besides history, so I’m fussy here. For a laconic outlook that reflects his Wisconsin upbringing, anything by Tim Cahill. He has the gift of being funny without appearing to try. For unconventional ways to write about nearly everything, William Least Heat-Moon. One gets the sense that Heat-Moon is simply a deeper and more patient observer than the average person.

Biography: You might not have heard of her, but Fawn Brodie flat killed it. Just five: Joseph Smith, Thaddeus Stevens, Thomas Jefferson, Sir Richard Burton, and (the only one I have yet to read) Richard Nixon. Brodie is that sort of biographer that helps one feel a deeper understanding of the subject’s times, not simply the life.

There’s also a long list of popular authors I consider inept, even unreadable. I’m not going to write a blog post about them because I can’t. Most of you can, but I cannot. I’m in the industry, albeit one of its tiniest lights, and there’s a non-zero chance I could run into someone. Some people have long memories, and I don’t have a need to go out of my way to put myself on the bad side of those long memories for zero benefit. The standards have dropped, and as some of them age, time is unkind to their skillsets.

Anyway, I might not write about that in a concentrated form, but you perhaps have ideas. If you’d like to discuss Popular Writers I Think Are Lousy in the comments, I’m not going to interfere unless it gets out of hand.

Editing/writing life

New release: The Girl in the Rusted Cage, by Mindi Boston

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This women’s fiction novel is recently out. I was line editor, plus a bit more.

Mindi came my way thanks to a kind referral from author Mike Hancock, a fellow traveler from the Epinions days circa 2000. She reached out to me on the Facebook page, told me about her project, and asked whether I’d be interested.

I was. It’s a fictional tale of a pregnant teenage girl failed by nearly every support system that was supposed to step up for her. I don’t know how it feels to be pregnant, but I know how it feels when all the support systems abandon you. Mindi explained that the ms had been years in the making, was still too long even after tearing through it with ruthless trimming, and that she was exhausted. I also know how that feels. Due to the exhaustion, she wasn’t up for developmental editing with a major revisit to the ms. She wanted a line edit (tone, style, consistency), which would be one of the customary options at this point. I agreed to read it and give her my impressions.

There was something of a battler’s spirit about Mindi, that type of person who has dealt with significant adversity (in her case, single motherhood and major health issues; more than enough to know what she was talking about with regard to her fictional protag) but who remains sharp and feisty and a little bit brassy. I knew she would stand her ground on what was important to her, and that was fair. I hoped she would be open to persuasion as to a course of action, and that hope was justified. The ms was in rather good shape, and a line edit was a good solution, but I saw a few areas where some latitude might enable me to make things better.

One of my basic editing philosophies is that we should tailor our approaches to the client’s actual needs, rather than live by slavish conformity to the various editing modes. I view those the way the military views regulations, at least at upper levels: They are for the guidance of the commander, not as shackles. There are times and places to go afield from them. Same with editing, so I suggested to Mindi that we do a line edit with latitude. This would be short of a substantive edit by some distance, but would enable me to fix some flaws that might exceed the purview of line editing.  Mindi’s one of those wonderful clients who doesn’t overcontrol, which is sensible because she could still have rejected any or all of my edits. It’s great to work with someone who will allow you to give all the help you wish.

Her basic writing, dialogue, and timing were quite good compared to most first-time novelists, no doubt reflecting a background in journalism. There was some overuse of similes, and I did a lot with phrase order within sentences. Take that last phrase and adjust the order: I did a lot within sentences with phrase order. You can see why that would suck, which is why I wrote the original in the phrase order shown. For one thing, the within then with looks bad; with then within flows better. For another, since the first prepositional phrase would tend to be the more pertinent here, we’d rather tell them we did it with phrase order rather than that we did it within sentences. All the latter says is that we didn’t swap them around between sentences, which is kind of assumed but not bad to clarify. As I reflect, I could probably have yanked ‘within sentences’ altogether.

If you ever wanted to know how line editing feels, imagine over 100,000 words of such considerations, one by one.

Anyway, I worked my way through the story. Mindi’s vivid descriptive talents were a joy, and she rarely overdid them much. A few redundancies, popped in a few segment breaks within chapters and combined some others, otherwise tried my best to bring her novel nearer its potential.

Mindi and I both went through some life turbulence during the process. I started doing more tech editing, and was dealing with back, wrist, and neck pain issues; I ultimately had to have a mass removed from my spinal cord. Her basement flooded. I worked on it in grabbed hours here and there, half hours sometimes, trying to stay within the budget range.

She wanted to try her best at the trad-pub route, and I supported this while advising her that there were a lot of reasons many writers have stopped bothering adding their mss to the infamous slush piles. After investing a great deal of time and effort in a valiant attempt, she went the self-publishing route. I maintain that we learn a lot about our projects by trying to market them and seeing what happens, and I think the experience will help Mindi be her own marketer.

At the last moment, she decided on a major change. We worked through that, and now it’s time. I believe that this will be inspirational to everyone who has experienced, or cares about someone who has experienced domestic violence. I grew up with it and felt the authenticity in every word–and I’ve never even been pregnant. Well recommended.