The Meme I Couldn’t Resist
[ 12 Comments ] Posted on 06.30.08 under Uncategorized
Copied from Darc’s place. Nod to the others in the meme lineage, which I’m too lazy to recount here.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The Big Read, an initiative by the National Endowment for the Arts, has estimated that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed. How do you do?
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (Finally finished this effer after three attempts.)
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (not all of ‘em)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald (the shame, the shame!)
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons (saw the movie, does that count?)
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov (No, seriously. Never got to it.)
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill
75 Ulysses - James Joyce (God knows I tried several times.)
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom (Oy vey.)
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
That’s it. 34%. There’s no way I’m reading six Dickens books or Four Austin books, no matter how laudable and classic they are held to be. I’m trying to read a little bit of a wider swath of authors. I’ve read Blyton, Marquez, and Joyce, but not the titles listed. A mile wide and an inch deep. That’s me.
Indefinite Hiatus
[ 16 Comments ] Posted on 06.16.08 under Self-flagellation
Hola, my few, my proud, my staunchly loyal Wannabytes.
How the hell are you?
Me? I’m good. Really. Life is good.
Y’all know about blogfade. A blogger just runs out of things to say. They stop posting every day. Then a week goes by without a post. Then a month.
I’ve never been at a loss for a topic. Okay, rarely at a loss for a topic. Who knows how many topics I still have within me? I don’t know where they come from. To be fair, I used to have blog topics like “9 Things You Should Know Before Querying an Agent!” Now my blog topics are “101 Women I’d Like to Boink.”
(”It’s a coffee table book!”)
In it’s heyday, Dwight’s Manifesto had 100 unique visitors every day. Now we’re eeking by on impulse power. Perhaps 30 to 40 unique hits every 24 hours. I’m not tired of talking, but the blogreading public is weary of what I’m selling. Perhaps it’s time for a makeover.
I took some vacation over the 2007 holiday break. I lost half my readers in ten days of not posting. Half of my regulars broke their Dwight habit and never returned. I went back and reread the posts before and after that break in case I’d said something political or offensive. I can’t find anything; nothing more offensive than I usually am.
I still follow all the agent blogs religiously. I don’t comment much any more. After finally landing an agent, I lost some of my passion for the wannabe issues which are important to an unagented writer. I was never one to look behind me. Now I look for guidance from midlist author blogs, like those of Lorraine and Melissa. Having largely checked-out of the commenting writer community, I’m not sparking much new interest in the homestead blog.
It’s you. It’s the same wonderful folks day after day. Week after week.
I appreciate you all. I truly do.
Because the last hiatus did my numbers such good, it only makes no perfect sense that I do it again. I’m not going away. I’m still going to be a regular visitor to all my favorite blogs. I’m merely taking off a month from posting. Do some more soul searching. Try to decide if it’s worth the effort of the seconds minutes hours I spend every day copying and pasting Wikipedia content pondering and carefully researching every post.
I’m writing again. Back to regular 3000 word days instead of hunt-and-peck twos and fews. When boys fight, the ratio of circling to punching is easily ten-to-one. My writing discipline is a lot like a street fight. There’s a lot of jab feints. A lot of talk. A lot of sizing up. But when I commit to the first real punch melee, I’m in it until I win it or I get my skull pummeled. Little else matters when I’m in my zone.
Rather than hit the Delete Blog button again, I’ll give myself a month to decide what I’m going to do in the long term.
The blog is on hiatus until July 14, 2008. If I have important information to pass along about my novel or my life, I certainly won’t hesitate to post it when it’s relevant.
See ya soon all around the blogosphere.
Old Words, New Words, or Little Subtitle I Like to Call…
[ 6 Comments ] Posted on 06.13.08 under Unhinged Ranting
WHEN DID WIKIPEDIA GET SO EFFING FASCIST???
Seriously, people? What ever happened to the democratic ideal of an open source interface where new ideas and concepts could be cataloged and debated over the clarifying Bunsen burner of educated public discourse?
I’m not asking “How dare they edit my vandalism!” or “How dare someone disagree with me and redact my edits?” or “How dare they question the verisimilitude of the reference I provided!” or “How dare they delete my crackpot conspiracy theory?”
I’m talking about new content. I’m talking about the deputized douchebags who seem to think the threshold for “What is worthy new content?” comes down to their gatekeeper whims of the moment and a reflexive wiggle of a macro delete key. Maybe they should read their own Wiki on the Stanford Prison experiment. Absolute power corrupts.
There was a time years ago when I had written/rewritten about a third of the J.D. Salinger page. Ten years later, I think perhaps half a sentence of mine remains. That’s fine. That’s cool. That’s progress.
Then I got in a pissing match with Doug Harper, founder of the Online Etymological Dictionary and a major self-important tool with an ego bigger than my Uncle Schlomo’s goiter. Doug copied the etymology site out of other reference books and referenced nothing to any source, yet Doug will be the first to tell you what a brilliant scholar he is, and how his opinion bends reality once Zarathustra blesses us with his wisdom.
You’re still dead wrong about pud, Doug. Wrong on nine different levels.
But the Wiki debate over the etymology of pud was rendered moot when some other douchebag decided that pud wasn’t a word that needed to be on Wikipedia. They moved it, reclassified it, and disambiguated it. Then some pud deleted the entry altogether. Not because the word was obscene or offensive. It just wasn’t important enough.
So now if somebody says, “What the hell is a pud, anyway? I’ll check Wikipedia.” No entry. The ultimate resource for everything? Mmm. Not so much.
Then I put together the page for Professor Kropp a year and a half ago. That page is perpetually under threat of deletion, not because I can’t source my references, but because I can’t source my references to other URLs. Professor Kropp’s heyday was the mid-eighties. There was no Internet. There were no online book reviews back then. My stack of newspaper clippings is some kind of Wikipedia anachronism. If it isn’t already in html, it isn’t real.
Yesterday it was “Smexxors.” A nice utility word. Used by a small circle of romance and erotica writers. It was an appropriate bit of argot, useful shorthand for writers talking Craft with writers. I didn’t invent it. I referenced Lilith Saintcrow who may or may not have coined the term.
Ten. Seconds.
I clicked the save button, and before I could click and load a new browser window to track down another reference link it had been deleted by a Canadian video game programmer who is supposed to be deputized to edit music posts.
If I’m lying I am effing dying. Ten seconds. Deputy Douchebag couldn’t have even Googled the search term in the time it took him to delete it. I can’t believe a sentient human being could even have read the entire frickin’ paragraph in those ten seconds. Gone. Not important enough for Wikipedia. Handy writing argot deemed not important by a Canuck joystick whacker. And so it goes.
Mort Walker coined a slew of humorous terms for the visual memes you see in comic strip panels. Plewds, Grawlixes, and Briffits. This silly made-up argot is deemed worthy. Smexxors… not so much.
A couple weeks ago Skippy, Master of the Seven-Finger Strike of Uncontrolled Flatulence, asked me if I knew the word for the study of sermons. Sermonology? The Interwebs were absolutely clueless. Thinking in terms of Latin derivatives, I was guessing either predikology or predicailogy. While neither of us could find a suitable word by praying to the Google Gods, I did stumble across the name of Dr. Siegfried Wenzel of the University of North Carolina. Dr. Wenzel has written several textbooks on the study of ancient sermons. For all practical purposes, Dr. Siegfried Wenzel is the foremost authority on studying sermons.
I emailed Dr. Wenzel.
He emailed back almost immediately.
The answer: “homiletics” or “homiletology.”
GREAT! WOW! Hey, maybe I should share this knowledge with the world. Where should I go to catalog a missing phrase as coined and endorsed by the leading scholar on the subject? Hmmmm.
Wonder if it would last a full ten seconds on Wikipedia before an unemployed Home Economics teacher in Bumfuk Australia decided it wasn’t worthy content?
All this rant reflamed today with a new Snopes entry on the preferred etymology of Card Sharp over Card Shark. Well, at least I can count on Snopes.
A Hose by Any Other Name…
[ 6 Comments ] Posted on 06.12.08 under Craft Thursday
I’ve danced around the erotica issue before. My YA novel (making the rounds to publishers in the 212, supposedly) has a couple of sex scenes. One of them is the embarrassed, fumbling accounting by a brutally honest 14 year old boy and the other scene is in a metastory he writes (aped from his mom’s Jackie Collins paperbacks).
Both scenes are too cute-by-half.
The awkward stickiness of the fumbling first sex depiction is blunted by the flour dusting of comedy in which it’s rolled.
The supposedly “graphic” sex scene in the metastory is really just another comic device. It’s a fourteen year old kid’s interpretation of bodice-ripper sex, complete with all its clichés.
Lately I’ve been facing down the daunting task of comedy-free erotica. The new novel has a pretty high smut component. I’ve spent untold hours watching the cursor blink, debating between arty smexXors and graphic smexXors. If it was merely a case of “tease and close the door” I’d be just as happy to stick with arty smexXors; maleness, manhoods, and glistening sexs.
I feel like such a fraud writing graphic sex scenes. I’m so much more Josh Grobin than I am Antonio Bandaras.
Apparently I’m in good company. Even seasoned romance authors admit to being uncomfortable writing smut scenes.
Romance writer Lilith Saintcrow (Saintcrow? C’mon!) says:
“…the best writing comes from what you’re afraid of. So your heart is in your mouth and you’re terrified? Good. Use that. You’re hearing the little voice saying “so-and-so would be so DISAPPOINTED in you for writing this”? That “this is true but you shouldn’t say it”?
Good. That’s ROCKET fuel. Some of the best writing comes when we’re staring at that sort of fear and using it as a spur. Go ahead and break boundaries. Write what makes you afraid and uncomfortable. Look that demon right in the face and call it by its name. And later, when you’re sweat-soaked and shaking, and your reader looks through it and says, “Damn, that’s some good writing. Where’d that come from?” you can say, “Aw, shucks, tweren’t nothin’.” Don’t stop writing a smexxor scene, or any other scene, because you’re afraid. That fear is a sign that there is a rich vein of experience and emotion to be mined. Get your pick and shovel and get to it.”
In the end, I decided to treat the arc of erotic writing much like the sex act itself. There’s a foreplay stage where the smexXor euphemisms are gentle, playful, and meant to convey that blend of promise and uncertainty that piques the reader’s id. But at some point, satisfaction can only come from the friction of those hard, Germanic consonants against the soft, pliable vortex of the reader’s imagination.
Tease too much without putting out and you’re going to be the kind of writer whose books get left at home on a Saturday night. At some point, a writer of erotica has gotta put out or shut up.
Another technique I’m working on is what I call “The Cuddle.” It’s putting a lot of thought into the tone of the scene that follows the erotica scene. I don’t have comedy to fall back on in this novel, so I like to follow the smut with some really telling slice of characterization; something that explores the rare bits of humanity in a cast of dark and devious characters.
Lord knows I’m open for suggestions. Any tips on writing erotica? Word choice? Technique? Favorite smexXors?
Because You Asked About the Line Between Memoirist and Comedian*
[ 5 Comments ] Posted on 06.11.08 under Literati Wednesday
I had a coworker/friend with a rigid moral code, even though she professed no faith. In fact she was agnostic, pushing atheist. She was Mrs. Boycott. She boycotted everything. Any time she experienced bad customer service, she wouldn’t boycott the Subway Sandwich shop with the mouthbreather sandwich artist with dirty fingernails. She’d put the entire Subway chain on her boycott list. She boycotted frickin’ CHEESE because she discovered you can’t make it without rennet, and she wasn’t going to be party to killin’ baby cows, no sir!
On one hand I admired her resolve. On the other hand, she was a royal pain in the ass. Try going out to lunch with your department when someone in the car has a reason to refuse to eat at every restaurant in a six mile radius of the office. …And had to eat someplace where she could get a meal that contained neither meat (militant Vegan) nor cheese. Sheesh.
Mrs. Boycott was a huge David Sedaris fan. She crowded into the tiny lecture room of the last independent bookseller in our city to hear him read the last time he was on book tour, 2000. She stood in line for three hours to get her book signed by Mr. Sedaris.
“So how’d the reading go?” I asked Mrs. Boycott at work the next day.
“Terrible! Just terrible! I’m boycotting David Sedaris from now on.”
“What happened?”
“Look,” she said, cracking the binding on a copy of Me Talk Pretty One Day and pressing it into my face in the manner of a three-year-old. “Look what that asshole wrote in my book! My twenty-four dollar book. Look!”
I looked.
Kim,
What would Jesus do?
David Sedaris
Okay, so I thought it was funny on about nine different levels. She thought David was proselytizing to her. If you know anything about David Sedaris, this of course is patently absurd. He had given her a little unique pearl and — like the base Indian – she had cast it away.
David Sedaris is an American humorist, essayist, and memoirist who built a cult following based not so much on his writing per se as his droll public readings of said writings. He has a unique voice. He has impeccable timing. And yes, he’s a damn good comic writer to boot.
That said, he may or may not be to your tastes. He’s openly homosexual, and brutally revealing about his personal life and the lives of his family and friends and boyfriend. He’s a touch fey. And, much to my personal dismay, his comedy is meant to appeal to the Garbage Pail Kids generation behind me who thinks poop, farts, barf, and bodily fluids are a hysterical vein to be mined for yucks.
He certainly has his critics. After the James Frey affair, David inherited his own Inspector Javier in the form of critic Alex Heard of The New Republic, researching all his books looking for alleged facts that never happened. He found a few. The kernel of truth in most of Sedaris’s stories proved bigger than the embellishments.
But there were some completely fabricated memoirs as well. And to Heard’s “A HA!” moment? Sedaris shrugs. He points out that he personally changed the boiler plate page of his recent books to designate the genre classification as: “non-fictionish.”
This week’s Entertainment Weekly was not kind in their review of Sedaris’s latest book, asking “What happens when a memoirist finally runs out of funny life experiences?”
Hmmm. That’s a good question. What would Jesus do?
The embellishments don’t bother me. I’m in it for the stand up comedy component of his work. I can’t read his stories without hearing Sedaris’s voice and visualizing him standing at a lighted lectern on a darkened stage. I don’t want to know if all Bill Cosby’s stories are gospel. Nor Spalding Gray. Then again, I was never that upset about Frey’s escapade either. I called out Augusten Borroughs’ Running With Scissors after the first fifty pages. I’m on record as saying “Augusten Borroughs is a memoirist like K-Fed is black!”™
Just entertain me. Like Fox Mulder, I want to believe.
Here’s a link to a Sedaris podcast. I didn’t check. I hope it’s the one where he’s on the train in France and the American tourists are talking about his B.O. because they assume he can’t understand English.
*Nod to Howard Nemerov