Editors and Their Faults?
How much responsibility does an editor have when it comes to the condition of the work they are choosing to publish?Serious question. What do you all out there think? For some context: I am currently reading a novel that has a lot of mistakes that not only should never have been written, but should have been picked up by the editor, the writer, and the copywriter. There were POV violations all over the place, flat characters, character development issues and contradictions, and even a sentence in the book where a huge line of zeros randomly appears in the middle of a word. The last I might be willing to pass to printing error, but that’s pushing it. So, how much of that should have been addressed by the editor before the book went to the press? Do you personally expect more from an editor? (Don’t click the read more, there isn’t any more after this)
Literary Critics Are Morons
What exactly is it about the literary academia that makes literature, in its most basic form, even more inaccessible by the general populace? I’ll tell you. Critics are morons. Now, what I mean by this is not that they are just stupid in how they choose good books, but rather that they have no understanding whatsoever what the rest of the country, and most of the world, find to be valuable literature.Most of us, as in humans, are not literature majors. Taking that into account we have to assume that most of us also are not necessarily prone to having enormous vocabularies or be adept in reading complex, convoluted sentences, the likes of which seem to be prevalent in literary criticism. This is my problem with the literary academia. There is considerable concern over the future of literature and concern in that people, in general and in the majority, are not reading, are not interested, and seemingly don’t care. The problem is the literary academia.I recently was reading one of my literary criticism books for one of my classes and I was marveling over the fact that the way it is written would pretty much put off almost everyone else. The sentences were long, filled with words that most people wouldn’t know anyway, and utterly complex. This is not unusual in literary criticism, in fact, it’s pretty much the norm. Who exactly reads these books? I certainly don’t do it for fun. Why? Because I’m not interested in long-winded, boring analyses (yes, that’s the plural). What I’m interested in is the criticism of whatever it is the author is talking about. But the literary world has no concept of market. They cling desperately to books they should clearly let die and completely disregard the books that the overwhelming majority of people favor as something not even literature.But who is right?You are. You, the people. You drive the market, and clearly what you are interested in is one thing, while the literary academia is interested in other. They desperately want you to respect books that you have no interest in, and rather than making them easily accessible, they create a mess of confusing books and articles that further drive you away. Most of us would rather read a really entertaining *insert popular author here* book rather than trying to wade our way through something dull and contrived.Making things even worse, they give awards to books that most people will never touch, and avoid adding credibility to those books which clearly have a place and importance in our society and culture. Look at Harry Potter. The world seems to have embraced it, but still the literary academia refuses to grant it the position in the literary world that it damn well deserves simply because it’s a novel of common themes in a fantastic setting.To add some credibility to this, I am going to ask you a question. Do not do a Google search for it, and certainly don’t look it up in a book. Answer honestly. How many of you can name 5 Nobel prize winners for literature?I can name two: Gunter Grass and Andre Gide. I can only name them because I happen to be reading both authors this semester for my lit classes. Otherwise, I couldn’t name any others.Now I ask this, how many of you can name 5 books that were made into movies?Probably all of you can, or at least come close to it. Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Children of Men, Great Expectations, The Importance of Being Earnest, etc.How many of you can name 5 books that were best sellser?Probably all of you. Da Vinci Code, Harry Potter, anything by Stephen King, etc.See what I mean? When will we see one of these great novels that the majority of readers have enjoyed given the respect it deserves? I expect never, because like a stubborn old man, the literary academia is clinging desperately to old values and old ideas that have been lost to the winds of time.Think about this…it might make your head hurt with annoyance.
SFWA: My Thoughts
Alright, so it’s probably somewhat old news, but so be it. I feel like putting my thoughts out there. I’m sure some of you have already heard about SFWA’s little blunder in regards to www.scribd.com. For those that haven’t, here is a very brief run down of what happened: Some members of SFWA reported finding their material posted on Scribd and other similar sites to the SFWA e-Piracy Commitee and complained about the infringement. SFWA responded and sent a notice to the sites responsible and requested they take the material off else legal action be taken. The sites responded by doing exactly that (at least in the instance of Scribd, since this is where it all explodes from). Cory Doctorow had a fit, here, because his work was taken off even though he never gave SFWA authorization to remove it (because he had not authorized SFWA to act as his copyright agent, to put it simply), and apparently this has happened to several other authors. SFWA publicly apologized, here, for the incident. Of course the good Mr. Scalzi has already discussed the topic here. But, we’re not here about what Scalzi thinks, we’re here about… My thoughts:No offense to Scalzi. It’s a genius, but yeah.So what do I think about it?Well, to be honest, SFWA should be thankful that really bad legal action hasn’t been taken against them. Maybe there has and it’s behind the scenes, but they clearly made a mistake that no organization with that much respect should have.I do think the apology says a lot about the state of things, though. The organization was quick to acknowledge their mistakes, something that certain politicians might never have done, and issued apologies not only to the public but to the individual authors. SFWA has ever right to protect authors they are authorized to represent, obviously, and they did do exactly what they should have done when they received the notice by removing many works that never should have been on Scribd and other sites to begin with. This is not Scribd’s fault. If you look all over the net you can find pretty much anything anyway, so it’s no surprise that a site like Scribd unintentionally let some stuff slip under the radar.So SFWA really handled the issue poorly. They went ballistic when they should have looked at it rationally. Would it have been hard for the SFWA people to sit down and look at the list of alleged infringements to figure out which authors they were authorized protect? Nope. Probably would have taken 5 minutes with today’s database technology. And in that instant they could have looked at all the other names and perhaps made a judgment call and sent emails instead of running out and demanding things be pulled down.SFWA didn’t do that, unfortunately. So, poor judgment call on their part, but thankfully they acknowledged their stupid mistake and made efforts to fix things. That takes some balls, in my opinion.
New Design and Writing
Some of you who visit here may have noticed that the look of my blog has changed. This is only the start of the changes for it. I’ve decided to stick with Blogger for now. I imagine that while WordPress might have some amazing features, such features will end up being a part of Blogger anyway, and the idea that I can edit and change just about anything for free on Blogger is more important to me than having some of the neat features of WordPress under restriction.First and foremost, what do you think thus far? I’ve added the left hand sidebar and was trying to figure out how to add another bar so that the left is identical to the right. This was hopefully to reduce the length of all the information so it is a little more accessible for people. Does it look okay? I don’t want it to be incredibly cluttered and hopefully it isn’t that way. The idea is so that things look a little smoother without a bunch of annoying buttons and junk or an endless sidebar.What other improvements might you be interested in seeing? I’m contemplating trying to replace the current banner with something a little more flashy. Nothing spectacular, but certainly something that might be a little more ‘me’ in regards to the blog and what I’m using this blog for. I have an idea how to put it up there, but it will take me quite some time to come up with something that I actually like to put there. I’m not great with Photoshop so either I will have to learn some tricks or have to make due with what I know. Most of my experience with Photoshop is generally randomness that becomes art, or in the instance of some of my space ‘paintings’ some predefined methods that I fiddled with to get different effects. I would use those methods except this blog isn’t really an SF blog and I don’t know if space type stuff would be good for it. But, we’ll see. Now, currently I’m not writing anything. Mostly I’m editing and critiquing. I have several stories that are in need of some final edits and several that are going to some groups I’m a part of for crits. I have a lot of ideas mulling around in my head and I think before I start really digging in The Spellweaver of Dern, I want to get some other stuff on the page first. My goal is to start The Spellweaver of Dern around Christmas. The problem with starting sooner is that I want to be properly prepared with the story this time. WISB is going to have to go through some extensive edits, which means in the next month or so all the chapters will be pulled off. Those that are reading it may of course send me emails asking about the project, etc. WISB is not in a perfect state at the moment, obviously, but I intend to make it much better.So, for now I’m working on other projects. Never fear, much will be done for the world in the satin bag. We’ll meet James again, and Pea, Triska, Darl, Iliad, and of course Laura. We’ll see a little more of this Captain Norp fellow and actually find out what and who he is, and more about who Darl is will be revealed. There will be many surprises and many things will be answered. The Lean will show up again, because the Lean must. I have to think a lot on this to figure out the best way to present all these things. The book may or may not be considerably longer than WISB. I don’t know yet. That depends on where the characters take me.So, stay tuned to the blog, because other stuff will be discussed!
Point of View Gone Haywire
It has been coming to my attention more and more lately that it is becoming acceptable in the literary world to completely ignore all the little rules that have been laid down in regards to POV. Why has this become a good thing to do? I don’t get it. One of the biggest rules of writing, well, perhaps not a rule but a big know-how, is not to switch tenses. Not only am I seeing this in young writers–which is probably rather common–but also in professional, published literature. A novel I recently reviewed went from first person past to first person present, and even dared to go from first person past to third person past in the middle of a chapter. What exactly is spawning this sudden change? It’s destroying literature I think. Has anyone else discovered this issue in any particular books they’ve seen?
The Proverbial Million Words
I heard Tobias Buckell say in an interview at Adventures in Sci Fi Publishing that most writers need to write a good one million words of crap before coming up with anything publishable. Obviously this isn’t always the case, but it got me thinking of how many words I have written. My total?276,377 words! Is that a lot? Granted, I’ve written loads more short stories than novel attempts, but that means I’m a little over a quarter of the way to that million. Is that a good thing? I don’t know. Perhaps I’ll break the mold with some short stories, but perhaps those aren’t generally counted and Tobias was referring to novels, which would make sense. What about your word counts? Count everything that is fiction! All of it, even unfinished stuff!