Life's quite a ride

The importance of support

2008-02-23T08:07:00.003-05:00

As writers, we are necessarily loners. We have to be. It's not only the creating part that requires solitude but also the sheer time it takes to put those ideas on paper and then finesse those words into a story. I'd wager to say that most writers prefer their own characters to real people.

What's not to like? They come from your own mind, you're their God, even though if you've done your job well they develop a will of their own and often drive the story instead of you. Every character you invent, even the very evil ones, come from a small part of your psyche, even if you couldn't imagine doing one thing in real life those characters are doing.

Real people, well they're... real. Unreadable. Uninventable. Uncontrollable. That's tough for a writer who's used to control his or her world.

I've never been good in social situations, and up until a few years ago had difficulty getting past extreme shyness. What people took as standoffishness was simply pure terror. I've worked hard at overcoming that, with mitigated success. I also live in a different culture than I grew up in and sometimes I just don't get it. Them.

But there are also times when I feel lost and completely alone in a world (the writing world) where it is almost impossible to succeed in, and I end up sitting at my computer thinking "what the fuck am I doing this for"? Problem is, I can't see myself having a regular nine-to-five job (been there, done that, got the t-shirt and the burnout), so what else is there?

To me, that's where the Internet comes in. It has been, truly, a miracle for me. I belong to several groups, some with similar interests, some out of whimsy, some out of reaching out to different people. There's LiveJournal and Facebook, but there's also my Publishers Yahoo! Group and my SF Canada group. These groups provide me with contact from across the world, give me different perspectives on things because of culture, age, geographical differences.

So if I need to whine (very unattractive, I know) or ask for advice or information, there are dozens of people there to help. They may not replace physical contact, and I often need that from the few friends I have in my town, but they can be there at the touch of a button.

This week I was in a fug and needed a pep talk. I approached a fellow SFer through email and asked him for advice. He doesn't know me, in the sense that we've only communicated through our SF Canada group, but he very generously took the time to respond and give me a boost. He not only gave me a pep talk but gave me some very concrete suggestions that have perked me tremendously.

So if you're a lone writer out there and you feel alone in the wilderness, think about the various means you can communicate through the Internet. You'll often get support without criticism and generosity and kindness you wouldn't encounter on your street.

Read an ebook week 2008

2008-02-17T07:42:00.007-05:00

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact Information:
Rita Toews

(204) 661-2734
r.toews@shaw.ca

website: http://www.domokos.com/readebookweek.html

How "Green" is Your Reading Material?

"Carbon Footprint", "Environmentally Friendly" and "Green". Have you considered these words when it comes to your reading material?

We're encouraged to buy, use and dispose with the environment in mind. While it's easy to recognize the negative impact of excess packaging and chemical content in many of the products we purchase, it's not so easy when it comes to books, magazines and newspapers.

We do have alternatives other than paper for our reading material. Many books, newspapers and magazines are created electronically. No trees are cut to produce them. No ink is used to put the words on the page. No fossil fuel is used to run presses or trucks to move them around the country. Heated storage facilities are not required to warehouse e-books until they are shipped to bookstores.

March 2nd-8th, 2008 is Read An E-Book Week.
E-books are delivered to the end user electronically. They are read on electronic devices such as the new Sony portable reader or Amazon's Kindle. They are destroyed with the push of a delete button, without ever taking up room in a landfill.

It takes 24 trees to produce a ton of printing paper, the type normally used for books, 12 trees are harvested for a ton of newsprint. Up to 35% of books printed for consumers (down from nearly 60% several years ago) are never read. They are used for window dressing in book stores, and eventually returned to the publisher for disposal in landfills. Given that a mature tree can produce as much oxygen in a season as 10 people inhale in a year, a serious alternative to paper books, magazines and newspapers needs to be considered. That alternative is e-books.

Before purchasing your next paper book, magazine or newspaper, consider your carbon footprint commitment. Read electronically.

Read An E-Book Week, March 9-15, 2008

Found me again

2008-02-11T09:31:00.000-05:00

Some of you may have read my posts on the withdrawal symptoms I suffered from Effexor . Some also commented they were experiencing similar problems. Some emailed me personally to tell me they'd tried to get off Effexor several times and gave up because the withdrawal symptoms were so severe they couldn't function.

I was lucky to have the luxury of working at home and having no other responsibility than myself -- my husband can take care of himself -- and when I was disabled I could zombie-out and let the world go by. Not everyone is capable of doing that.

I've been off Effexor since September 2007 and I can pretty much say I went through hell. And you know what? If I had to do it over again, I'd go off the drug in a minute. Once I went off it and read about the symptoms (especially the brain zaps, but also the muscle cramps, the constant nausea, the diarrhea), I was reluctant to go back to my doctor because I knew what he was going to do: put me back on it. A few times before, when I'd talk to him about feeling "not right", he'd up my dosage, telling me I "wasn't there yet". I ended up taking the maximum dosage, 300mg, and still feeling lousy. That's when I decided that, although Effexor did help me when I needed it 6 years ago, it wasn't what I needed anymore. Unfortunately, although my doctor agreed that I should go off the medication, I wasn't as certain about his ability to listen to my symptoms and believe them, especially after I'd read so many people saying their doctors discounted their symptoms as being "in their heads" (well, duh). So I decided to tough it out and found some ways of alleviating the worst.

But what is this feeling of feeling "not right" when I was on Effexor? I could function well, no more panic attacks, anxiety, or blues attacks. I could write, got involved in all sorts of internet groups, volunteered. Yet, I didn't feel like me. There was a kind of buffer, something between me and the world that made me feel off all the time. I started not to care about a lot of things, from personal relationships to my personal hygiene. Oh, it wasn't drastic, but there was a constant lassitude that made me become more and more passive, or slow. The sleeping problems, the insomnia, for which I'd originally started taking Effexor, were still present: now I needed another pill, Desyrel, to counteract the other effects so I could sleep. I'd wake up groggy and not really rested.

Ironically, I was beginning to see myself as more depressed and dissatisfied while I was on Effexor than I was before I started taking it. Since I stopped taking the drug, my, I'm finding myself again. My brain is sharp like it hasn't been in a long time. I've returned to some of my old activities, like cross-stitching and painting, that I'd stopped doing because my hands were constantly shaking. The world around me is more vivid. I laugh more.

I'm not there yet, and sure, there are parts of my old self I would've probably hoped not to see again. I'm moodier and more sensitive, and I haven't completely chased the diminished energy levels I suffered while on Effexor. I still get muscle cramps and severe tinnitus, and sometimes still brain zaps. I've gained 12 pounds -- exploded, really, and I can put that directly at the drug's door (it acts on the brain's norepinephrine, so it's like quitting smoking).

But I'm getting there. I like myself better. I found myself again, the person I knew, with all her faults, quirks, and weirdnesses. Like any 12-step program, one day at a time. That's all I'm looking at.

The rush is on

2008-02-04T21:51:00.000-05:00

My second novel, "The Wildcat's Victory", was released on Thursday. It was scheduled for January and just made it under the wire. It's on Double Dragon's site right now and should be out in POD on Amazon by the end of the week. I should post the links when I get them.

I have a virtual book tour booked for March and am just starting to get things done in preparation. Then, my editor has a blog tour going right now for her YA fantasy and I'm preparing a blog interview for her -- maybe we could do one here. (?? Dom?) I don't know if they sell a lot of books, but the cross linking should drive a lot more traffic. I'm also supposed to start a new blog for my blog tour -- with some promotional coaching. I may shift everything to it if it gets better traffic than my other two sites -- keeping to two blogs, it and this. I've decided to suspend my rant blog and post on a discussion group instead -- Canadian Content.

Another couple of jobs showed up this last week. I was already secretary of a local constituency association and the treasurer is moving away -- so I took that over temporarily because of the election. Election being the next job, the writ was dropped today. Will be doing my bit to get rid of the second worst government in North America -- the Alberta Tories.

The Wildcat's Victory --
http://www.double-dragon-ebooks.com/single.php?ISBN=1-55404-538-X

Bad books: they piss me off

2008-01-31T06:35:00.000-05:00

As a writer, I'm naturally critical of other writers. It's a "déformation professionnelle," a result of what I do. A lot of the times I'm awed and humbled by the talent, imagination, creativity and skill of the writers I read.

Lately, however, I've been annoyed by the quality, or lack thereof, of some of the books I've read. Devil May Cry, by Sherrilynn Kenyon, is a case in point. This book is so bad I can't even push myself to finish it. I don't have the stomach for it.

I'm not really a fan of paranormal romance --usually vampires who reform because of a "pure" woman-- but I thought I'd pick up Kenyon's eleventh Dark-Hunter Novel since I'd read and heard that the series had gathered a cult following. Her blurb states that Kenyon "has more than ten million copies of her books in print in twenty-six countries," so I thought okay, this might be worth a try. BIG mistake.

What's to like about this book? The setting? There's none, really, except for a casino in Vegas or the occasional visit to Mount Olympus. The characters? The female protagonist is a mix of Goody-two-shoes and kick-ass bitch (when the story needs it) and the male protagonist is a bitter, hard, distrustful, deep-in-his-soul-hurt ex-god who melts in love with miss Goody-two-shoes in about five minutes. The story? They are fighting an invincible force of demons -- except when they kick the demons' asses-- who will inherit the earth if they're not stopped.

Add to that teleportation, pitiful sex scenes, healing powers, and a bitch-goddess-who-must-not-be -killed, and you have Devil May Cry.

Oh, and did I mention the writing? It's so bad it's an insult to readers everywhere. Unless it's an indication of the expectations of readers out there, which depresses me no end.

But in case you don't believe me, here are a few extracts that might convince you:

"Sin smiled in spite of himself. Her humor should irritate him, but instead he found it a refreshing relief from the seriousness of the situation. Honestly, he couldn't remember any time in his life he'd enjoyed more than this time with her. And all things considered, this had to be the worst part of his existence, since they were only days away from Armageeddon."

"any time in his life"? This ex-god is about nine thousand years old. He's just realized his twin has become a super-vampire monster, his mother is imprisoned lest she destroys the entire world, and the girl's mother is the one who stole his godhood. Hmmm.

"She stuck her tongue out at him in a playful gesture that somehow managed to be adorable on her.

What was wrong with him?

"Just be a spoilsport, why don't you?"

He supposed he was. He wanted to be playful like her, but he wasn't. A the end of the day, he was all about doom and gloom and he couldn't help wondering what his brother was up to.[...]

"...I can't let the Dimme out and I can't allow Kessar to win in this. Whatever it takes. Whoever I have to sacrifice. I will do what I have to to keep them away from the innocent."

She couldn't imagine the strength inside him that would allow him to carry out such a thing. She laid her head on his chest and held him close as she tried to fathom the source of his courage [...] He was incredible."

Had enough yet? I have. Even with that kind of writing, if the story were compelling, I'd keep reading. But it's not. After 150 pages, the action hasn't started yet.

Am I too critical? Don't think so. Getting published, let alone read, is so incredibly hard. There are hundreds --heck, thousands-- of writers who are struggling with awesome material and not getting anywhere because publishers prefer a good bet like Kenyon. I find it more than frustrating that this kind of stuff is getting published while other more deserving authors are bypassed because they're unknowns.

The conclusion in all that? Cult following, my keister. It's "we made money from the first five, so let's farm out more. The suckers will buy them."

Consider this a wake-up call. Censure? Readers are subjected to it every day by these publishers' bad, bad choices.

The importance of taking notes

2008-01-28T06:40:00.001-05:00

I have, in previous posts, stressed the importance not of being Ernest but of writing every day. Last week I was reminded of something else very important when you're writing a novel: taking notes.

See, if you spend all your time writing and you're immersed in it every day several hours a day, every detail is immediate and alive for you. The reality, however, is that life interferes, just as with my buying/selling a house saga.

Which means that I forget. My new story happens on a planet way off the beaten path and it not only has a different climate and geography it also has a different flora and fauna, a dialect close to scandinavian, different names, etc.

Then there are details of what my characters look like, said at certain points in their journey, decided, wanted to do, have done, when and where.

When did the lawyerly man visit Nor'Winds? Was it the second or third day of Sarena's arrival at the ranch? What as the name of her tranek again? What's the name of that root they use to make cloth? What is the color of Alysisa's eyes?

Going back into the story to remind yourself can be a big waste of your writing time. A bigger waste of time than jotting down as you go along the decisions, big and small, you make.

Aha, you'll say, but if you'd written and outline and sketched out your characters before you started writing, you wouldn't have to take those notes.

Possibly. On the other hand, an outline is exactly that: a preliminary draft or plan. It is subject to change, and probably will change considerably, as you begin to write your story. I may have thought my main character would behave in such a way or make that decision but suddenly it doesn't make sense. He's taking his own life in hand and goes... that way. Or I may decide that I don't like the glacial age I placed my story into and change it to the desert. Or my main characters now hate each other instead of falling in love.

Worse, halfway into writing the first draft I may decide that my protagonist couldn't have made that particular decision so I change the outcome. I can't afford, however, going back to that specific decision and edit it because if I do that, I'll enter editing instead of writing mode (more on that) and won't finish the story.

How's a girl to remember all these changes and shifts in direction? Throughout the years, I've developed some loosely structured categories. I fill them up as I go along. I'll also often make a sketch of the house or place where my character(s) live so I can refer to it. Here are some of the categories I use during my first draft:

Characters: Every person that enters and exits my story goes in there. I'll enter as much detail as possible on them, and not only physical characteristics but who they work for or what they do, what their nickname is, what the relationship with my main characters is, etc.
Features of the story: From the name of the flowers that bloom for one day on Samhain to the number of legs a tranek has, to the orientation of the protagonist's house or the street it is on, any detail that I may have to remember later on and reuse.
Scenes/details to remember: whether my protagonist is contemplating his second sunrise on his new home planet while he's making a life-changing decision or whether one of my secondary characters decides to go into Charlie's for a pint, if these scenes will have a sequel later on, I jot them down.
Changes: I don't like my main characters hair color, or I've decided that she would never act a certain way, I'll jot it down. It'll get changed in the second pass.

So there you have it. Taking notes will not only save you time, but will help you on those subsequent drafts you'll be writing.

What, you thought only one kick at the can was enough? Think again. More on that in a future post.

Post-partum?

2008-01-25T13:34:00.000-05:00

I haven’t been able to settle myself and write – even critique others’ writing, since I finished the edit changes of my new novel and sent the file off to my editor on Monday. Not having heard back from either editor or publisher that they received everything A-okay, as we used to say, is also putting me on edge. This blog entry is a tentative move toward clearing out the cobwebs of ensnarements past and setting out on new paths.

Perhaps the editing wouldn’t have been as traumatic if I’d not had to fight with software for a week. My editor uses Track Changer in Microsoft Word. Being a purist with a strong distaste for corporate sharp practices, I use Word Perfect. I also run a much older version of Windows than is currently producing obscene profits for Bill Gates. In order to be able to handle files sent to me by people who are slaves to the system and use late versions of Word, I also have the free download of Sun Microsystem’s Open Office software.

I started by running the Track Changed doc file in Open Office – until it balked at my choosing to reject some of the insertions my editor had added. (The novel has elements of engineering and military description that she was obviously not familiar with, but her initial queries and tactful questions eventually gave way to outright directives about matters she did not understand.) I could easily have smoothed over the human misdirection but after a short fight, the software decided to no longer give me the opportunity to either accept or reject the changes.

I had been keeping up a copy of the file in Word Perfect, so when I asked her for a new working file in rtf I only lost a day transferring the changes. I used a new copy of the doc file that I took from the original e-mailed edits as my guide. Two days later my rtf copy in Word Perfect went crazy. Two lines of text per page and large chunks of text – whole pages – missed out. Reluctantly I switched to Open Office with the file to continue working. That lasted until next day, when Open Office couldn’t handle the file either – the same two lines of text per page, but these appeared sideways, in landscape mode.

Deciding what to do, and contemplating having to start all over again with a new file. I noticed that the original file had magnified to over 2 Meg in size and wondered if that might be a symptom of the problem. I decided to switch to Wordpad – remembering the way I use Notepad to strip all the formatting residue from files I want to send in clean text. Opening the file in Wordpad – fingers crossed because I didn’t know if it would refuse to open something so large – I found all the pages filled with text, and no blocks of text missing. I saved the file and opened it again in Word Perfect. Perfect was the word – no problems at all now. The file that had collected so much irrelevant formatting and correction trash because of the buried Track Changer commands had shrunk back to a clean 740 kb. Only another one day wasted – but I didn’t have to start all over again – I was almost on the last lap. I’d promised the completed edits for Sunday, but deciding to be safe, I elected to read the whole novel from beginning to end to do final edits and ensure no software bombs were hidden in the pages. I managed to send it off Monday evening.

Why do I feel as if I’ve just given birth?

Writing withdrawals

2008-01-14T06:31:00.000-05:00

It's been a very difficult two months for several reasons. If you've read previous entries, you'll know that I've been suffering from Effexor withdrawal symptoms, that we were in the process of buying a condo and of preparing our house for sale. Experts say that moving is one of the most stressful elements in a life, after a death or a divorce.

I've been managing fairly well but there's a consequence to all this "new" activity I hadn't considered: I'm not writing.

It's not that every minute of my time is filled up, it's that it's hard to get into the mode where there are a million things to think about. Every time I mention writing habits, I always say to try to write every day, if only a few words. I'm not sure I ever explained why: it's that you lose momentum and, after a short while, you stop dead.

See, even though writing is my life, my passion, my job, I don't feel like doing it any more. I don't think it has to do with me needing to find a new job. It has to do with routine. A well-known author --cant' remember the name-- said that if she waited for inspiration, she'd write two days a year. And that's it.

Writing is all about routine. Some call it discipline, and it is that, as well, but it's also a way to get the brain trained into writing mode. A mode where it goes into painful contractions if it's not used to use words.

After a while, like any withdrawal symptoms from any drug, the effects go away and you're left with only the memories of it. This is not whining self-pity; it's a hard realization for me, because yesterday I tried to think when I last wrote, and I couldn't remember. I started to panic.

So today, this morning, I'm getting back into the routine, if only for writing that single page that will get me going. Time to train the brain back into doing its calisthenics, and producing those endorphins that give me such a rush.

Rejected Manuscripts

2007-12-26T05:10:00.001-05:00

It's been crazy in our house for the past two weeks. We've put an offer on a condo and are putting our house on the market in January, which means de-cluttering and, most of all, clearing things out since we've decided to update the carpets --whatever's left, which isn't much-- and freshen up the paint in the basement.

Clearing out 21 years of accumulated junk is more than daunting. Sometimes it's depressing and sometimes downright heartbreaking. We're going into a much smaller place so we have to be ruthless. Both my husband and I are pack rats, for different things, but we both love books. Getting rid of our books has been a wrench and we've already kept more than we should. What the heck, we figure we'll cull again once we see what kind of space we have.

While sorting books, I came across Rotten Reviews & Rejections, edited by Bill Henderson and André Bernard and while I go through it giggling and being amazed at people's lack of foresight, I thought I'd spend a couple of posts talking about rejections and reviews, interspersing them with some of those same from authors about authors (we are our worst critics), from publishers, newspaper people, etc. taken from the book mentioned above.

My work in progess (what we call, in writer's parlance a wip) is quite different from what I usually write. It started during NaNoWriMo this year and has taken a life of its own so I decided I'd like to see if I can find another publisher for it. This is like not putting your eggs in the same basket principle; I'm not, however, looking forward to the process.

Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll, 1865: "We fancy that any real child might be more puzzled than enchanted by this stiff, overwrought story." Children's Books

Looking for a publisher, or even an agent, can be an exercise in frustration. As a writer, you believe in your story, in your writing. You want to put it out there because most writers write to be read. (Any writer who says differently should be journaling instead). The fact that most writers would like to write full time and can't is a source of frustration. Writing full time means giving up food and shelter because, unless you sell a lot of books, you basically make little if no money.

"But... aren't writers loaded?" Ha! There are literally tens of thousands of writers, fiction and non-fiction, and I'm talking only in the English-speaking language. If you chop the heads off the J. K. Rowlings, Stephen Kings, and Doctor Phils, who allegedly rake in millions, the average yearly salary for a writer is in the four digits.

The Postman Always Rings Twice, James M. Cain, 1934: "...I think it is only a matter of time before you reach out into more substantial efforts that will be capable of making some real money as books."

So when you send out your manuscript to a publisher and agent, it's not only your hope that it will be published that goes with it, but also your hope that, maybe, you'll be able to afford one day to do what you love full time.

The disconnect comes right here: publishers are strictly a business. They don't exist to help up-and-coming writers, or to present new, talented writers to their readership. Publishing must be, to survive, a low risk business. That's why publishers would rather publish well-known writers (that's why you see so many reprints) than throw good money after bad on an unknown. There are additional factors, as well, of course, such as the sheer volume of --often very bad-- manuscripts they receive. The number, let alone the quality, would daunt and discourage any editor. Add to that a decreasing readership and the disconnect between hopeful writer and publisher becomes the Great Divide.

So are we silly idiots or great dreamers? Depending on the day, I feel like one or the other. Or both.

Tiles, loaves, and plots

2007-12-22T19:06:00.000-05:00

You don’t mind if I carry over a topic from my other blog www.serial-adventure-fiction.blogspot.com here do you? Thanks. My stollen I was baking yesterday when I wrote an entry in the other blog, turned out fairly well. Quite edible even if they didn’t close up around the filling. My wife says to reduce the amount of filling (sugar and cinnamon) and I think I might also double the amount of yeast, but not too bad a result from interpolating across two book recipes.

Having a busy writing life, you might be excused for wondering how I have time for such flights into the wild unknown. Well it’s all the fault of the tile setters. They were to come to lay tile in the bathroom on Wednesday . . . then it was Thursday . . . then. Well, they arrived this morning. With the threat of having to cross my legs for a whole day hanging over me I just couldn’t settle down to working on the next chapter of the novel in progress. I did manage some material in trial introductory chapters for the next novel in my Iskander series, but I’d been mulling that over for weeks – months even.

They are using Quick-set for the tiles and promise the whole job will be completed early this evening when they come back to grout. I had intended to tile the bathroom myself – even bought the tiles about ten years ago – but just couldn’t work up the enthusiasm to start. Well, we’d laid about 500 sq ft ourselves some years before that and although everything came out well, it kinda dampened our enthusiasm for doing more. There still is more to do but what the heck, the house was built in 1984, so leaving a few jobs for later is a minor detail. I’d much rather be writing.

Talking about trial introductory chapters, you wouldn’t happen to know an early test to indicate whether a plot and scenario is going to work, do you? Each one of the three novels published or under contract for the series has a somewhat different dynamic. Deadly Enterprise, the first release has Gisel Matah my feisty security officer acting as a guy’s bodyguard, pursued by enemies as she takes him to an enemy city. (Think Frodo making for Rivendell.) The second, The Wildcat’s Victory, has her as a director of events when she leads troops into dangerous action. (Aragorn becomes the King of Gondor.) The third, Arrival, is a prequel when she’s a sixteen year old brat who grows up into this competent warrior over the course of an eventful five months. (Merry and Pippin coming of age.) For the next novel I want to show her in an executive position, military governor of a turbulent city, while she struggles to keep the lid on the plots of a host of enemies – and become a new mother at the same time. This time my protagonist doesn’t have an objective and a plan, other than to stay alive, while a number of antagonists assail her position as governor from all sides. It seems backwards from the general structure of hero struggling against outer forces to attain a goal, but perhaps its not too different to work.

Will close with season’s greetings to all.

Swimming against the Current.

2007-12-14T15:56:00.000-05:00

Thanks for the intro, Dom.

Hello, I’m Christopher Hoare, the new addition to the writers of the blog. Trailowner is the name I used to sign on to Blogspot for the blog I started back in 2006. It was supposed to be an advice and commentary site for people traveling off-road, since I’d been involved with off road travel since 1959, first in the British Army and then oil exploration in the Libyan Desert, Canadian mountains, bush and the Arctic. That direction for the blog didn’t attract attention – I guess there’s a certain machismo attached to getting stuck in mudholes that prevent the participants from seeking experienced input. I quickly switched the blog to my rant site whenever I needed to let off steam about public affairs.

I live in a small hamlet in southern Alberta tucked up against the Rocky Mountains at the entrance to the Crowsnest Pass. Looking north from our place one sees first the CPR Crowsnest line, then Highway 3, and down in the bottom of the valley the Crowsnest River on its way to meet the Castle and the North Fork to become the Oldman River. Retired from surveying in oil and gas exploration I now write full time.

The community is classic western, filled with cows and cowboys, and with a European outlook I’ve never pretended to fit in. That consideration was moot until my first novel, Deadly Enterprise a sci-fi adventure, was released this July. People are interested – I’m known fairly well, my wife and I have been here for 32 years – but the first questions usually is, “Is it a Western?”

Not exactly. It’s a story blending the future with a 17th century alternate world and the action takes place in an alternate Europe – a journey from what we call England to a city at the mouth of the river that today forms the boundary between Germany and Poland. It doesn’t have cows or cowboys, but it does have horses – and the female protagonist is somewhat of a swordfighting equivalent of a gunslinger.

I’m pleased to have placed or sold about 35 copies locally in the past three months, but most of my promotion is conducted on the internet to cajole readers to the e-book site and the POD paperback site on Amazon. I have to wonder what the response would have been if I’d worked on a historical western along the lines of Fred Stenson’s “Lightning” – that incidentally closes at a location on the Crowsnest River below the community where I live. (Fred described the place at a reading I helped organize for the Alberta Centenary.)

I have used the view from my deck as the basis for the map of Rast, the location for a fantasy novel that will be released in a year or so by Zumaya Publications. The Livingstone Range has become the Foghead mountains and the Porcupine Hills the Meronin Hills. The transition to prairie and the whole sweep of the land as far as the patriarchal kingdom of Easderly (Ontario & Quebec) has become the Undulains. I resurrected Palliser’s assessment for the land south of Hwy 3 because I needed a desert, which I imported from Cerenaica in Libya, complete with the Sebket es Sahiba – a salt marsh that now covers the Blood Indian Reserve and the town of Cardston. I hope I’m not visited by a lynch mob from the area when this new geography is revealed.

Those thoughts lead me to pose a question. Science fiction and fantasy writers do not write regional fiction, but how strongly does the geographical and demographic location of the writer figure in their output?

A new contributor to the blog

2007-12-14T07:54:00.000-05:00

If you looked at the right side of the blog, you'll see that there is someone new there: Trailowner. I'm not quite sure why he calls himself that, but Chris Hoare is a fellow Canadian Writer whom I invited to contribute to the blog.

If you read his bio, you'll see that life has definitely been a ride for him, so he should provide us with some interesting insights into the world of writing and life in general, especially since he lives somewhere in the boonies (well, it is a small village) in Alberta, Canada, a province whose face has changed many times over the years.

If you want to read more about what Chris is doing or thinking, follow the road to http://trailowner.blogspot.com

Airbrushing pictures

2007-12-13T06:28:00.001-05:00

The Digital Photoshop Retouching site here shows how it is difficult, and how it will become more and more impossible, to know the truth through digital photographs.

Some of these "improvements" are quite dramatic and supports my contempt for Hollywood's beautiful people and those who think that what they see is the real thing. It's all a fake, guys.

Hook, Line and Sinker: Blogging Basics

2007-12-06T07:38:00.000-05:00

Well, at least I don't have to tell you what a blog is; you're reading one right now. But if you're thinking of starting a blog, or have just started and wonder where to go with it, this post's for you.

The first question you must ask yourself is why you want to maintain a blog, and the key word here is maintain. I don't have any statistics on the time it takes time to get a blog established but you're not the only one out there, so it won't happen the first time you write a line. In 2004, ClickZ Network reported that there were over 4 million blogs and that this number was doubling every two months. Technorati is now tracking 81.3 million blogs. Kind of a needle in a haystack, isn't it?

Here are a few tricks that may help you bring readers to your blog and, more importantly, get them to come back.

The Hook: Determine what your blog is going to be about. Is it a personal journal you want your friends to read, do you have political ideas you want to disseminate, or do you have a field of expertise you want to share with others? Or do you just want to communicate about a topic in particular such as books, cars, Elvis? As broad or as narrow your subject is, you must then stick to it. Some people maintain two or more blogs because the topics they want to discuss are incompatible with each other.

The Line: Now that you've decided what you want to write about, then you have to add content. Blogging can be a work-intensive, time-consuming endeavour. A blog is made of a series of entries or posts, to each of which visitors can comment. There are several important aspects about posting:

Frequent posts: You must post often, at least three times a week or on a regular schedule. The beauty of a blog is its dynamic nature. If you have little to say on a day-to-day or week-to-week basis, then a website, which has more static information, might be better suited to you. If you don't post often, if you have no new content for weeks or months, people will give up on you and go elsewhere.

Keep posting: It may take one or two years before you develop a faithful readership. That means posting without much feedback on whether people like what you say or not. It can be discouraging and disheartening (like a lone voice in the desert). If you have a very busy life, and barely have time to surf the net, then blogging may not be for you.

Use tags efficiently: Tags are a way to categorize what you write. Search engines such as Google use semantic algorithms that search on keywords for websites and tags and keywords for blogs. Carefully select the tags for each of your post so that people searching for your topic will be able to find you. You'll often see what are called "tag clouds" (see right beside this post). Those are all the tags used on a blog; the larger and darker the letters, the more posts pertaining to that tag. Try to find tags that are used by other people. For instance, I found that the tag SF was used by very few people, but that sci-fi is the most used tag. Although my books aren't exactly hard sci-fi, I use this tag because it will lead more people to my blog.

Use web syndication services: Web syndication is "A publishing format that lets people view headlines of the latest updates from their favorite blogs and Web sites all from within a single newsreader program. The major syndication formats are RSS and Atom, and most newsreaders support both formats. See RSS and Atom." (Answers.com) Most syndication services are free (bloglines.com is one). Bloglines will be able to show you what the RSS for your blog is, then you can add it to your blog so that people subscribe directly to your blog and are told when you updated it (still, you have to post often).

The Sinker: So you've done all that and you're ready, or you've improved what you were already doing. No doubt you've thought about starting a blog because you'd been on others and decided it was a neat thing to do. But there's one thing that no one talks about and may make the difference between seen as a nice, cooperative blogger or as an opportunist: netiquette. Netiquette is short for Net etiquette (in the same way blog is short for Weblog). Here are some important dos and don'ts:

Capitals and bold letters: On the web, typing your words all in capital letters or in huge, bold letters is the equivalent of shouting. Don't do it unless you mean it.

Hyperlinks: There's noting more annoying in a post than when someone gives a url (a website address) without the hyperlink or hot link. A hot link is an address you can click right away that leads you directly there instead of you having to cut-and-paste the address. A hot link requires either simple html code (we'll talk about that in another post) or you can use the smart editor that most free blog hosts, such as Wordpress , provide. To be live, the address requires http:// before the address. Make sure it's there.

Linking to sites, blogs or pictures: Give credit where credit is due. If you read something on another site or blog and you want to repeat that information on yours (even if it's only a link to another site), thank the person you borrowed it from in your post. As part of the Web2 social network, it's standard practice to spread news this way, but you must give that person the credit. As far as pictures, do not link to the address of the picture. This is considered very bad form. If you want to use a picture, copy it instead of linking to it (after making sure the picture isn't copyrighted). When you link to a picture, you're using someone else web resources (they're paying for those) so essentially you're stealing from them.

Double- or triple-dipping: So, you reason, I wan't to get my name out there so I'll have three, four, fifteen blogs with the same information. Ha! Someone's already ahead of you, especially the algorithm-writers of search engines, like Google. Since search engines use interpretive semantics and volume of visits to rank websites and blogs, you'd be doing two major things wrong by doing this. First, you'd be spreading your visitors over several blogs, reducing your volume ranking. Second, when Google and the other major search engines look at exactly similar content on several sites, they decide it's either advertising or spam and discard all the sites from their ranking. So you're worse off than before, and you'll never appear on a search. It's not enough to change a word here an there in each post; the posts have to be substantially different to be picked up separately. Google also does something interesting; one mention (such as the url of your blog) on a high-traffic blog is weighed more heavily than a hundred mentions on blogs with little traffic. Food for thought, and a future articles on strategies in blogging.

So, there it is: hook, line, and sinker. Now go catch'em.

Follow-up to brain zaps

2007-12-03T11:03:00.000-05:00

It's been five days since I wrote about brain zaps, and I'm still getting them. I also still have that tuba playing in my ears, and nausea. A couple of other symptoms I developed I hadn't associated with Effexor that I forgot to mention:

cramps in my legs and arms: they're akin to the brain zaps as it's very acute pain shooting down my legs and arms
muscle twitches: sometimes so pronounced the muscle caves in. It's kind of fun to watch and it doesn't hurt (much) but it can get annoying.
mood swings: I' m not the most patient of people in the first place but these days everything is pissing me off. I know it's because the serotonin and norepinephrine levels in my brain are readjusting, but that makes me a real bitch to live with.

Will it ever end? Everything I've read had at least a couple of people saying they tried to stick it out but went back on it. I totally understand it now. I'm tired, I feel ill, I want it to be over.

I mean those damn symptoms, not life in general. No, I like life. It always takes you for a ride. This one's a hell of a roller-coaster.

Brain zaps: they're not a myth

2007-11-28T16:25:00.000-05:00

They're called brain zaps, brain shivers, or brain shocks, but when I began having them, I thought I was the only one who'd ever experienced them. My doctor certainly didn't warn me about them, I suspect for the simple reason that he doesn't know about them. Either that or he doesn't believe in them, which wouldn't surprise me a bit.

In turns out brain zaps are one of the myriad of withdrawal symptoms people experience when they try to get off an anti-depressant such as Effexor. According to a short article at Wikipedia, "phenomenon is most commonly associated with paroxetine (Paxil, Seroxat), fluoxetine (Prozac), venlafaxine (Effexor), sertraline (Zoloft), duloxetine (Cymbalta), fluvoxamine (Luvox), citalopram (Celexa) and escitalopram (Lexapro)".

I started taking Effexor, an anti-anxiety and anti-depressant six years ago. Since then, I went through the big M (menopause) and felt that my life, my body, and my emotions had gone through a lot of changes due to all this hormonal roller-coaster I was for a month. In hindsight, I'd probably been on that ride for a lot longer but with my doctor telling me I was more than likely anxiety disorder (my mother also suffers from it) than perimenopause symptoms, I took the drug.

This year, however, after deciding I hadn't felt "myself" for too long I decided, with my doctor's knowledge and approval, to reduce and then quit taking Effexor. I was taking 300mg, the prescribed dosage for anxiety when I started.

Unfortunately, I can't remember when I started weaning myself off it. But I can remember shaking uncontrollably especially in the afternoons for a long, long time. Silly me, I never associated it with cutting down on Effexor.

Three weeks ago, I decided to go off it completely, from 75mg to zero. Again, because I hadn't been warned of side effects, I didn't associate what I was feeling with quitting Effexor. Finally I added two and twenty and came up with four. Thanks to the internet, I now know that I haven't been the only one suffering from the collection of horrible symptoms I've been suffering from. So I decided to add my two cents to what my own withdrawal symptoms are (apparently I can expect some, like brain zaps, to last maybe two months or longer) and how I've been coping with them (which is not very well).

brain zaps: think of an electric current that "zaps" through your brain or between your brain and your skull, followed by about 10 seconds of dizziness and disorientation. They've been compared to epilepsy. How I cope: I stop and wait until the world re-establishes itself. It's worse in the afternoon, so I'll lie down for a half hour or so.
nausea and vomiting: I was beginning to think that I was building an intolerance to alcohol (those couple of glasses of wine sure packed a punch) since I would get up with nausea in the morning. How I cope: throw up, rinse your mouth, brush your teeth, and take half a Gravol.
the shakes: they could be so bad sometimes I couldn't even type (not a good thing for a writer). How I cope: copious amount of water which seem to help me. I always feel dehydrated.
numb lips and fingers: it was getting so bad that I thought maybe I was having a heart attack or something of the sort. It's now much better. How I cope: not much to do in that case.
tinnitus: sometimes it sounds like a tuba is playing in my ear. It's a whoa-whoa kind of sound and it drowns everything else. How I cope: Listen to my music with earphones. It may be one evil for the other, but at least they're sounds I like.
diarrhea: man, this one is a pain in the... well you know. It's not pleasant, especially when it comes out both ends. How I cope: Let it all out, stay close to a bathroom, preferably in your own house.
sweating: in my case, cold sweats, as opposed to the furnace-like hot flashes of the big M. How I cope: I keep a warm sweater or a wrap close by and wrap or shed as needed. As soon as I'm wet through, I change.

The official Effexor site does address some of these very briefly, stating that they can happen if you stop taking it too fast. From all the forums I read, this isn't quite the case. With each drop in dosage you experience the same withdrawal symptoms, whether you take a year or the next six to go back to zero. In fact, many people were so ill from cutting back or stopping that they went back to taking it.

Not me. I'm through with it. I've begun researching alternative methods to curtail my anxiety disorder: a Litebook in winter to help with the low level of sunlight; dietary changes, including lots of Omega 3; exercise.

These symptoms I've had for nearly a year, now that I know what they are, scare the bejeezus out of me. I have only one brain, for goodness sake, and I can't exchange it. Not yet anyway. I may have to go the chemical route in the future again but before I take anything like that, I want to be able to say that I've tried everything else first.

Gotta go lie dow, now, my brain zaps are getting worse.

Sojourns In Nature

2005-11-01T07:20:00.000-05:00

From time to time, I talk about a photographer I found on the web. I confess I don't know much about photography in general or in particular, but I know what I like.

What I like, very much, is the photography of Robert Servranckx. Robert started out a few years ago, taking pictures of his two labs, Gryphon and Syrah, and found a passion for the medium. And the passion is paired with an incredible eye, especially for birds. Gustav Verderber, another awesome nature photographer, initially gave space to Robert on his website. It is a measure of the quality of Robert's photography that Verderber has now ensconsed Rob's photos with his own.

Well worth the visit.

Rats, he's gone

2005-10-28T08:53:00.000-04:00

I couldn't pass this one up, it's too delicious. New Zealand scientists tried to discover why rats are so difficult to eradicate by dumping a single rat on a deserted island then trying to catch it. Him, I should say, because the darn rat showed almost human intelligence. He evaded traps, baits, and other nasties for four months, then was finally found on another island 400 meters from the island he was dropped on. On top of it, the rat had a radio collar!

"After 10 weeks on the island the rodent decided it had had enough. It swam 400 meters, the longest distance recorded for a rat across open sea, to another rat-free island where it was eventually captured in a trap baited with penguin meat several weeks later."

Huh. Talk about survival of the fittest.

It's in the BAG

2005-10-27T07:57:00.000-04:00

I've been increasingly enjoying the BAGnewsNotes entries, which are political commentaries based daily media pictures. Michael Shaw is a clinical psychologist whose research "involves the psychology of character and the everyday presentation of self. His research has dealt primarily with symbolic expression, the process of visual narrative, and the psychological function of metaphor."

This bent is evident in his analyses. They are incisive, sometimes funny, often quirky. Well worth a visit.

The Cliché Finder

2005-10-26T06:58:00.000-04:00

Cat got your tongue? Do you work day and night not to use clichés? The truth is out there, in the form of the Cliché Finder. Just pop in a word, click the search button and voilà! It's a sad sack who can't use it to do a clean sweep of these overdone expressions. This is the work of Morgan Friedman, who looks like a very busy man.

It's so easy to write

2005-10-25T08:52:00.000-04:00

Ink Slinger again, but this time his website. Paul Guyot has an interesting take on why people think it's easy to write:

"There are two reasons, actually. The first is what I call the Summer Vacation syndrome. Every person has, at one time, had to write something. In elementary school it was the "How I spent my summer vacation" essay. In high school it was the "Analysis of manuscript," formerly known as a book report. In college it was the "Thesis."

I hadn't thought about it in that particular way, but it struck me as quite true. Everyone in school had to write some kind of essay or story, and were graded on it. If you got an A, doesn't that mean that you're good? That it's easy to write?

To paraphrase Lawrence Block, many writers want to have been published. They want the hardcover with their names on it in Chapters, or Barnes and Noble, or on amazon. That is the accomplishment. Never mind having to spend time perfecting the craft. I'm not talking about spelling and grammar, although both are necessary basics. I'm talking about mastering character motivation, structure, description, style, tone, setting, conflict, action, suspense.

Plot? Sure, that's important, too, but these days there are too many good stories badly written. Case in point, The Da Vinci Code, which has been on the best seller lists (but we know about these, now, don't we?) for months and is a badly written book.

This seems to reinforce the idea that it's okay not to know how to write well, as long as the story is sensational enough. And of course, if you're a celebrity, then even the story itself doesn't count. They're selling their names, not the content of the book.

Doesn't matter. I'll continue to try to perfect my craft because, even though I'm not a literary writer and never will be, it's important to me to give my readers the best experience possible. I want them to say, at the end of the book, that words flowed so well they couldn't put it down.

Miscellany

2005-10-24T08:27:00.000-04:00

An interesting informal survey at Ink Slinger on the importance of a striking book cover. People do judge books by their cover.

A revealing article at Independent Publisher on bestseller lists and book returns. Those lists are not what they seem. The article also mentions the Book Standard's "real" bestseller list, based on numbers of books sold rather than numbers of books ordered by bookstores.

In Wired News, an article on businesses blocking blog sites at work.

Why I love my Library

2005-10-24T08:09:00.000-04:00

Last week I went to a book sale that benefited the Friends of my local library. They advertised 8 miles of books at up to 80% discount, and they delivered. I admit it, I went into a feeding frenzy and came out with $70 worth of books. Most of them unknown authors (to me anyway), except for a Salman Rushdie and a Nora Roberts I intend to give away.

Well, the authors were unknown (to me anyway) for a reason. The books are crap. The writing is crap. The stories are crap. Sigh. And I paid good money for them.

Then, last week again, I picked up Squeeze Play from R. J. Kaiser at my local library. It looked interesting. Wrong. The writing was crap. The story was crap. I stopped reading after 80 pages. The difference? Reading that book didn't cost me a penny.

Gotta love the library. Go get some books, people. Encourage your local library.

How many have you read?

2005-10-21T09:21:00.000-04:00

And having seen the movie doesn't count. Chapters Indigo has come out with its Top 100 Readers' Choice. Here they are, from first to one-hundreth:

The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee
Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
The Lord of the Rings, The Return of the King, J. R. R. Tolkien
The Lord of the Rings, The Fellowship of the Ring, J. R. R. Tolkien
The Lord of the Rings, The Two Towers, J. R. R. Tolkien
Anne of Green Gables
Outlander, Diana Gabaldon
A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, J. K. Rowling
Angels and Demons, Dan Brown
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, J. K. Rowling
A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving
Memoirs of a Geisha, Arthur Golden
Harry Potter and the Philosopher Stone, J. K. Rowling
Fall on Your Knees, Ann-Marie MacDonald
The Stand, Stephen King
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, J. K. Rowling
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
The Hobbit, J. R. R. Tolkien
The Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger
Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold
Life of Pi, Yann Martel
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, C. S. Lewis
East of Eden, John Steinbeck
Tuesdays with Morrie, Mitch Albom
Dune, Frank Herbert
The Notebook, Nicholas Sparks
Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand
1984, George Orwell
The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley
The Pillars of the Earth, Ken Follet
The Power of One, Bryce Courtenay
I Know this Much is True, Wally Lamb
The Red Tent, Anita Diamant
The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
The Clan of the Cave Bear, Jean M. Auel
The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini
Confessions of a Shopaholic, Sophie Kinsella
The Five People You Meet in Heaven, Mitch Albom
Gift and award Bible NIV, Various
Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
The Cound of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
Angela's Ashes, Frank McCourt
The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
She's Come Undone, Wally Lamb
The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver
A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card
Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Stone Angel, Margaret Laurence
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, J. K. Rowling
The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCullough
The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood
The Time Traveler's Wife, Audrey Niffenegger
Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand
War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
Interview with the Vampire, Ann Rice
Fifth Business, Robertson Davies
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, Ann Brashares
Catch-22, Joseph Heller
Les Miserables, Victor Hugo
The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Bridget Jones' Diary, Helen Fielding
Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Shogun, James Clavell
The English Patient, Michael Oondatje
The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith
The World According to Garp, John Irving
The Diviners, Margaret Laurence
Charlotte's Web, E. B. White
Mot wanted on the Voyage, Timothy Findley
Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck
Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
Wizard's First Rule, Terry Goodkind
Emma, Jane Austen
Watership Down, Richard Adams
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
The Stone Diaries, Carol Shields
Blindness, Jose Saramago
Kane and Abel, Jeffrey Archer
In the Skin of a Lion, Michael Oondatje
Lord of the Flies, William Golding
The Good Earth, Pearl S. Buck
The Secret Life of Bees
The Bourne Identity, Robert Ludlum
Th Outsiders, S. E. Hinton
White Oleander, Janet Fitch
A Woman of Substance, Barbara Taylor Bradford
The Celestine Prophecy, James Redfield
Ulysses, James Joyce

In cases like this, thank God for libraries.

Currently Reading...

2005-10-19T08:01:00.000-04:00

Under the Duvet: Shoes, Reviews, Having the Blues, Builders, Babies, Families and Other Calamities, by Marian Keyes.

In Under the Duvet, Keyes talks about her (somewhat dysfunctional) life in a series of essays, most of which were published in the Tatler. From her loathing of gardening to her dark days with alcohol abuse, she unveils her thoughts and feelings about the terrors and bliss of living, in a very Irish way. It's not only the language that's different (crisps instead of chips, boot instead of trunk, etc.), it's the mindset of being a woman in Ireland. Typically, the women in the essays are more fleshed out than the men, which makes the poor men always sound dense and unenlightened, while the women put up with it because that's just the way it is. Despite the cultural differences, it's easy to relate to many situations she's gone through: learning to drive, going through house renovations, spending Christmas with your family (when you'd rather be elsewhere, like in Groenland).

Okay, Under the Duvet is not literature. But it's fun, and a touch of levity in life has never hurt anyone.

Random Title Generator

2005-10-04T11:03:00.000-04:00

"Silent Sparks." "The Bare Hunter." "Dreams in the Stones." "Storms of Silence."

Pretty good stuff, which was created by the Random Title Generator, which is part of Wordsmiths.net a derivative fiction --or fanfic-- site.

Currently Reading...

2005-09-30T07:53:00.000-04:00

The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova.

I picked up the book because it has been on the best-seller list of many newspapers for a while and I was curious. It's a big book (over 600 pages); the story mixes several eras and spans a large chunk of Eastern Europe. It deals with a much beaten up subject: Dracula, as a man and as a vampire, mixing up real history with legend.

Kostova's historical research of Dracula as a legend and of the history of Eastern Europe, from the days of the Ottoman empire to the late 70s is as impressive as her writing skills are mundane. The ending is also a lose-lose situation: will Dracula live or die? Either way, the solution is implausible and cannot help but disappoint.

After finishing The Historian, I was left not with the satisfaction of a great story, or the awe for a great writer, but with a sense that I learned an incredible amount of the history of Eastern Europe. If only for that, it was worth the read.

Katrina

2005-09-29T07:10:00.000-04:00

Extraodinary pictures by Alan Chin and intelligent commentary at BAGnewsNotes.

The Great Canadian Blog Survey

2005-09-22T08:00:00.000-04:00

If you're Canadian and have a blog or read them, take 5 minutes to answer the Great Canadian Blog Survey. It's an independent survey led by Aaron Braaten, M.A. Candidate in Economics at the University of Alberta and aims at providing "a free, globally available report on the state of Canadian Blogging, as well as a more technical paper that will examine the differences between those who read blogs and those who choose to write them."

The Reviewer's World

2005-09-20T07:43:00.000-04:00

There's an eye-opening entry from Guest Blogger David Montgomery on M. J. Rose's blog, Buzz, Balls & Hype. David Montgomery is a freelance reviewer, and discusses how he selects books to review.

What staggered me is the number of books he receives to review, as opposed to how many he ends up reviewing:

"Deciding which book to review, or even which book to read next, is one of the hardest parts of a critic’s job. I receive somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 books every month. I try to read 12-15 and review 6 or 7."

That's over 2,400 books a year, and only in the crime fiction genre.

Wow. Now I understand why it's so hard to get someone to review your book, especially if he or she is a well-known, well-respected reviewer.

We authors all have a tendency to be self-centered. How else can we dare believe that the stories we have to tell are worth sharing with the world? Unfortunately, that quirk of personality (yes, let's euphemize) makes us think that our story is the only one that exists at this time, that the reviewer --or agent, or publisher, or bookstore-- is waiting with bated breath to receive it. I admit it, I wear these blinders. They prevent me from thinking that I don't have a hope in hell in succeeding at what I desperately want: to have people read my words. If I begin to think I'm only one in a horde of authors in stand-by mode, I'll turn off my computer and get a "real" job.

Mr. Montgomery also mentions something that I'm hearing over and over again: the only way to get noticed is to have people start talking about your book. Word of mouth, he says, "is crucial in this business".

"I’ve gotten to know a lot of people in the mystery community over the past few years, including reviewers, writers, publicists, bloggers and fans, and I get recommendations from them. A lot of what I read is influenced by what they say. After all, there’s no better endorsement than the word of someone whose opinion you trust."

Easier said than done, but feasible, on a small scale at first --your favorite bookstore, your community-- then hoping it'll spread. Takes time, and a whole bunch of good friends. Or willing acquaintances.

It's not only unknown authors like me who have a problem getting known. On her very frank blog, Tess Gerritssen talks about how difficult it is to become known, and what she think the solution is:

"...to illustrate just how hard it is for an author to become known. Just a few days ago, I was signing books at a Kroger's store in Cincinnati, and quite a few customers frowned at my books, confessed that they'd never heard of me, and said they weren't really willing to buy a book by someone they didn't know.

I don't know how to get past that. No amount of advertising will change it. There's only one thing that can change it: Word of Mouth. It's the most powerful force on the planet. It takes time to generate it, and in the meantime, many an author's career has crashed and burned, many an author has found himself abandoned by his publisher. We can't force word of mouth. We can't even beg for it. We can only hope it happens, that our readers like our books enough to tell their friends, their colleagues, their room-mates."

There's that word-of-mouth thing again.

So I'd like to do what Tess did on her blog and thank everyone who's ever talked about my book, who's encouraged others to read it and/or buy it. You are the ones who'll end up making it happen for me, and you deserve my thanks.

Hard-to-find Books

2005-09-13T08:19:00.001-04:00

Bookfinder.com Journal has released their fourth report "tracking the most sought-after out-of-print books in America." They claim the report is surprising and, indeed, it is.

Brave New Words

2005-09-13T07:32:00.000-04:00

This is almost a year old, but my friend Ron Purvis sent it to me today and I got a chuckle out of it. I've inserted the entire article here, since I couldn't find the original link in the Washington Post:

The Washington Post's Mensa Invitational once again asked readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition.

Here are this year's winners:
Intaxication: Euphoria at getting a tax refund, which lasts until you realize it was your money to start with.

Reintarnation: Coming back to life as a hillbilly.

Bozone (n.): The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little sign of breaking down in the near future.

Foreploy: Any misrepresentation about yourself for the purpose of getting laid.

Cashtration (n.): The act of buying a house, which renders the subject financially impotent for an indefinite period.

Giraffiti: Vandalism spray-painted very, very high.

Sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.

Inoculatte: To take coffee intravenously when you are running late.

Hipatitis: Terminal coolness.

Osteopornosis: A degenerate disease. (This one got extra credit.)

Karmageddon: It's like, when everybody is sending off all these really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth explodes and it's like, a serious bummer.

Decafalon (n.): The grueling event of getting through the day consuming only things that are good for you.

Glibido: All talk and no action.

Dopeler effect: The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.

Arachnoleptic fit (n.): The frantic dance performed just after you've accidentally walked through a spider web.

Beelzebug (n.): Satan in the form of a mosquito, that gets into your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out.

Caterpallor (n.): The color you turn after finding half a worm in the fruit you're eating.

And the pick of the literature:

Ignoranus: A person who's both stupid and an asshole.

Yeah. I know lots of those.

What's a lulu?

2005-09-12T09:01:00.000-04:00

In this case, it's the idea of Bob Young, from Hamilton, Ontario (that's in Canada), a free, self-publishing, Print-on-Demand worldwide service that is revolutionizing the self-publishing industry. But the self-publishing is not only for book authors, it's also for musicians and photographers. A BBC News article explain what Lulu is about:

"Many works are rejected by regular publishers because they do not think many copies of a title will be sold, and the cost for them of going into production cannot be justified.

"Authors are rejected not because the book is terrible but because the publisher thinks the book will not sell enough," says Mr Young.

Furthermore, whereas normally the novelist or artist will get a 10% royalty of sales, with the Lulu model the creator gets 80% of sales takings and the website just 20%.

"Our income model is almost the complete opposite of regular publishers'. We provide the market and the only time you pay is when you sell a copy of your book. You don't pay anything unless you sell.

Authors build their books themselves (hence the free aspect of it) then set a price. Buyers go onto the Lulu website and buy the book there, which is printed and sent right away, in a similar fashion to Amazon or Booksurge.

Lulu seems to attract niche subjects (Titles such as Crowd Safety and Survival, or Raw Food for Busy People), although there's pretty much every subject available.

A caveat: Self-publishing means that, more often than not, the books have not been edited professionally, or that the awful gets published along with the good. Many books are rejected by publishers because they are bad, not only because they don't meet bestseller status.

And another caveat: Print-on-Demand (or POD) doesn't equate to self-publishing. POD is a printing method, not a publishing method. Lulu is straddling both, and may end up doing quite a bit of harm to the small independent publishing industry that uses POD to print its book. But then, Mr. Young would say, who cares? The publishing industry is a business, nothing more.

Buy a Friend a Book

2005-09-09T07:04:00.000-04:00

The week of October 1, 2005 will be the last of this year (there are four in a year) for the Buy a Friend a Book week. Debra Hamel, from North Haven, CT, started this charming idea this year. She says that the rules are simple:

"Just get yourself to a real-life or virtual book store during Buy a Friend a Book Week (the first weeks of January, April, July, and October) and, well, buy a friend a book (or e-book)! But here's the fun part: you can't buy your friend a book because it's their birthday or they just graduated or got engaged or had a baby or anything else. You have to give them a book for no good reason. In fact, this present out of the blue from you should shock the pants off of whomever you decide to give it to. And it'll make them happy. And that's the point: promote reading, promote friendships. Just make sure to let them know about Buy a Friend a Book Week."

Great marketing idea, and a perfect way to please someone and get them to read.

Plot beware

2005-09-08T11:32:00.000-04:00

Found a wonderful commentary in the Mumpsimus , based on a comment China Miéville made about his latest volume of short stories, which has a more "literary feel," according to critics. China says

"...one of the things you have the opportunity to do in a short story is to indulge a mood, an idea, a sensibility, rather than worrying too much about plot. So that makes it feel more 'literary', because you have the surreal/strange/dreamlike, but without the necessity of shots-ringing-out and the cavalry riding in. Then the next thing you know, people are comparing you to Borges. Cool."

Matthew Cheney then goes on to add:

"China then offers a quick equation for discussion, but it doesn't get much, and deserves a bit more: "Fantastic + plot = pulp. Fantastic - plot = literature".

All writers of genre fiction seem to suffer from this malady and rejection from so-called literary writers and readers. The Mumpsimus doesn't entirely agree:

"China's equation is, I think, more about perception than about reality -- it's an illusion that comforts both the lovers and haters of this thing we're calling "plot" (but which may, in fact, be something entirely else)."

What Cheney then explains is that plot for plot's sake is as much bad writing as plotless prose. What makes a piece of work interesting is a "love for language, metaphor, imagery, and small moments of psychological revelation," in addition to plot.

I love that: "small moments of psychological revelation." He continues to say that a story stands on its own when it is neither static (something that some readers and writers may take for literary style) nor so action-packed that the story becomes action for action's sake, without elegance.

As usual, Matthew Cheney has wowed me with his incisiveness, and his ability to express his thoughts so coherently. It is worth to go to his blog and read the entire commentary.

Weirder, indeed

2005-09-08T10:54:00.000-04:00

From a picture of moving rocks in Death Valley, CA to that of a fetish model wannabe with a 14.5" waist, Odd Pics proves that life is weirder than fiction. Most of the pictures are commented and seemed to be "true" as far as trick photography can be detected these days.

There's also a fascinating page on Death Trivia, such as:

"Elvis and Charles Schultz were the #1 and #2 money earning dead people in 2002. Elvis made $31 million; Schultz made $9 million"
or
"Napoleon killed over a thousand people with a cough. In 1799 he was deciding whether to release 1,200 Turkish prisoners of war when he coughed and said, "Ma sacrée toux!" (my darned cough) which sounded to officers like "Massacrez tous!" (Kill them all!). So they did."

Now try to make up something as bizarre.

In the eye of the beholder

2005-08-31T08:23:00.000-04:00

A new study that will appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal indicates that Americans and Asians pay attention to different things when they look at a scene. Americans tend to look more at objects in the foreground, while Asians will take in the background.

The researchers think it shows a difference in culture and thought processes:

"These results suggest previously reported cultural differences in thought processes may be related to variations in what people focus on as they view a scene, the researchers said. They speculated that these variations may reflect greater importance of context and social interrelationships in East Asian culture compared with Western culture."

Wow. Who would have thunk it? Talk about closing the barn door after the horse has escaped. We didn't know that Americans and Asians thought differently, right?

I really hate it when researchers make overreaching conclusions on basic data. To connect thought processes (which are extremely complex) to the way the eye travels on a couple of pictures is specious at best. Sure, the eye connects to the brain, but it's the interpretation of what it sees that makes a difference in thought processes. What the eye looks at is only a very small portion of it. It would have been more interesting to try to determine, based on specific cultural differences, what these subjects would look at in a picture. That would have been much more revealing.

Excuses, excuses

2005-08-30T09:14:00.000-04:00

"Please excuse Jennifer for missing school yesterday. We forgot to get the Sunday paper off the porch, and when we found it Monday, we thought it was Sunday."

This excuse is part of a collection of excuses at Strange Places garnered from the Office of Educational Assessment at the University of Washington. My favorite:

"Carlos was absent yesterday because he was playing football. He was hurt in the growing part."

Obviously, some parents need to go back to English composition 101.

I also like 101 reasons why fingers are better (than what -- or who, you can guess).

Okay, I'm feeling silly today. That's my excuse, and I'm sticking to it.

US Politics are weirder than fiction

2005-08-25T08:35:00.000-04:00

Yep. Not only is it possible to predict senatorial race results 70% of the time simply by quickly looking at the candidates' faces, now actors are entering the field in droves.

The latest in the actor-driven politics in the US is: Christopher Walken for president. Not only is he using the power of photography to appear suitably presidential (as far as I'm concerned, he looks more like a Capone look-alike than a president-- maybe he should read the article above) but he's also touting some backyard philosophy that attempts to sound profound, but sounds just plain stupid, like:

"If you want to learn how to build a house, build a house. Don't ask anybody, just build a house."

Ah, yes. The old trial-and-error bit. Let's not consult experts. Let's not take advice from more knowledgeable people than us. Let's make our own mistakes, which, by the way, were made by others before us, but we'll ignore that. We have the right to screw up all on our own.

Mr. Walken is also in favour of stem-cell research because he met Christopher Reeves (gee, another actor). How deep. I'm not diminishing Reeves courage. All I'm saying is that there is more to the issue than wanting someone to walk again.

And then there are the last words on his site's page about his own politics:

"We appreciate the great response you've sent us, interested in more information about Christopher Walken's policies and platform. Please have patience as he puts his ideas into words, and as soon as they're available, we'll put them here. Thank you for your support."

You mean to tell me he still doesn't know why he's running for president? What he wants to do for the country? Mr. Walken must be a method actor. He must have infused himself in the role of president, believed himself to be the president, dressed himself as president. Therefore, he could be the president. No need to think.

Declaration of Revocation by John Cleese

2005-08-23T07:45:00.000-04:00

"To the citizens of the United States of America, in the light of your failure to elect a competent President of the USA and thus to govern yourselves, we hereby give notice of the revocation of your independence, effective today.

Her Sovereign Majesty Queen Elizabeth II will resume monarchical duties over all states, commonwealths and other territories.

Except Utah, which she does not fancy."

In typical Cleese-esque humour (notice the "British" spelling), the Declaration of Revocation is a satire on the cultural differences between the US and UK, although most of it could apply to the rest of the English-speaking world.

Some of my favourite parts:

"You should look up "revocation" in the Oxford English Dictionary. Then look up "aluminium." Check the pronunciation guide. You will be amazed at just how wrongly you have been pronouncing it.

The letter 'U' will be reinstated in words such as 'favour' and 'neighbour'; skipping the letter 'U' is nothing more than laziness on your part. Likewise, you will learn to spell 'doughnut' without skipping half the letters.

You will end your love affair with the letter 'Z' (pronounced 'zed' not 'zee') and the suffix "ize" will be replaced by the suffix "ise."

You will learn that the suffix 'burgh' is pronounced 'burra' e.g. Edinburgh. You are welcome to re-spell Pittsburgh as 'Pittsberg' if you can't cope with correct pronunciation.

Generally, you should raise your vocabulary to acceptable levels. Look up “vocabulary." Using the same thirty seven words interspersed with filler noises such as "uhh", "like", and "you know" is an unacceptable and inefficient form of communication.

Look up "interspersed."

There will be no more 'bleeps' in the Jerry Springer show. If you're not old enough to cope with bad language then you shouldn't have chat shows. When you learn to develop your vocabulary, then you won't have to use bad language as often.

"The cold tasteless stuff you insist on calling "beer" is not actually beer at all, it is lager . From November 1st only proper British Bitter will be referred to as "beer," and European brews of known and accepted provenance will be referred to as "Lager." The substances formerly known as "American Beer" will henceforth be referred to as "Near-Frozen Gnat's Urine," with the exception of the product of the American Budweiser company whose product will be referred to as "Weak Near-Frozen Gnat's Urine." This will allow true Budweiser (as manufactured for the last 1000 years in the Czech Republic) to be sold without risk of confusion."

2005 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest

2005-08-01T07:59:00.000-04:00

Every year, the English Department of San Jose State University sponsors the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, in which entrants must submit the beginning sentence of the worst possible novel. The contest originated from the following sentence, which Bulwer-Lytton himself wrote in 1830:

"It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents--except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."

This year's grand winner is Dan McKay of Fargo ND:

As he stared at her ample bosom, he daydreamed of the dual Stromberg carburetors in his vintage Triumph Spitfire, highly functional yet pleasingly formed, perched prominently on top of the intake manifold, aching for experienced hands, the small knurled caps of the oil dampeners begging to be inspected and adjusted as described in chapter seven of the shop manual.

Kevin Hogg, of Cranbrook, BC, is the winner of the "Dark and Stormy Night" genre:

"It was a dark and stormy night, although technically it wasn't black or anything -- more of a gravy color like the spine of the 1969 Scribner's Sons edition of "A Farewell to Arms," and, truth be told, the storm didn't sound any more fierce than the opening to Leon Russell's 1975 classic, "Back to the Island."

My favorite in Glen Lawrie's entry for Romance:

Billy Bob gushed like a broken water main about his new love: "She's got long, beautiful, drain-clogging hair, more curves than an under-the-sink water trap, and she moves with the ease of a motorized toilet snake through a four-inch sewer line, but what she sees in me, a simple plumber, I'll never know."

(We won't either)

For more winners of the contest, go to the 2005 Results page.

Thanks to Ed Willet for pointing me to them.

About vandalism

2005-07-29T07:53:00.000-04:00

I wanted to give this entry the title "Shocked and appalled", after the pervasive cliché, but then it would give this rant an element of levity I didn't want.

Nervertheless, I am shocked and appalled.

I am a tremendous user of my local library, not only for works of fiction and non-fiction, but also for reference books. This week, I picked up a book on 19th century art, an oversize, beautifully written book by H. W. Janson. Hundreds of b/w pictures accompany the text, and there are dozens of color plates of various pieces of art. (The paperback version on amazon.com is worth over $90US)

Here comes the shocking part: several color plates had been cut out with a razor blade. Millet, Delacroix, and others, gone. How can someone deface a book this way? What kind of person would have no thought for all the other users of this book? In some cases, the text was also gone, because the picture was at the reverse of it. That person deprived others, me included, from being able to learn from this book. The use of a razor blade, instead of tearing off the wanted pages, was even more shocking to me. It spoke of a premeditated, conscious act: excising what they needed, leaving the rest.

The appalling part of this is that it speaks of a lack of social respect, a scorn of the needs of others, a tremendous egotism. Not to mention a total lack of manners. This is worse than graffitti, which, as insensible as it may be, at least is a form of expression, a need to communicate. This is more than plain destruction of property, because it is sneaky and vile. How many other books did this person destroy or deface? Which other ways are they using to reach a goal?

Because this is what is the worst: for people like that, the end justifies the means. It speaks of a moral turpitude that leads, eventually, to the lack of social conscience we have today.

Where fiction meets reality...

2005-07-25T08:24:00.000-04:00

...or maybe it's the reverse. At first, I thought they were incredible ping-pong players. Then I realized they had a "little" help.

The video is hilarious, the skit ingenuous. A smile for the beginning of the week.

Currently Reading...

2005-07-14T07:55:00.000-04:00

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, by Umberto Eco.

"The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, Eco's fifth novel, follows Giambattista “Yambo” Bodoni, a man who loses his memory after an accident. In an attempt to deal with his amnesia, he travels to his childhood home, where he reconstructs his life through a collection of old newspapers, comic books, school papers, record albums, and his grandfather’s diary. After a few days he is visited by another misfortune, and slips into a coma where he begins to have increasingly strange hallucinations. The work is heavily illustrated with accompanying images reflecting Yambo’s collection of memorabilia."

Not as strange as The Island of the Day Before, but as compelling, Queen Loana gives us an Italian perspective of the war era through pop culture of the time. I was particularly fascinated by the translated comics, like Flash Gordon or Mickey Mouse. Many of the pieces come from the author's collection, giving us an intimate peak at Eco's own history.

Yambo, the protagonist, is as hazy as the fog he is so fascinated with, and so are the other characters in the book, mere sketches as backdrop to time travel. This is especially evident during the coma section, where pop culture takes over as reality. Challenging, fascinating, bizarre. Pure Eco.

Ansel Adams Landscapes

2005-07-08T09:08:00.000-04:00

Some eye candy for the end of the week. This one is of an oak tree in Yosemite, taken in 1948. Well worth the visit.

How to unburden yourself

2005-07-05T10:07:00.000-04:00

Ever wanted to dump all those negative feelings you have about a family member or an ex-friend? In general, our normal societal hang-ups prevent us from doing so, but we all have this deep-down wish that we could let go and damn the torpedoes.

Well, there's help on the horizon from Dr. Chinese, who has devised the Dysfunctional Family Letter Generator. There's an intense satisfaction to choosing raving insults and a sheepish feeling of guilt. Here's my version:

Dear Cindy,

I just wanted to let you know that you have completely fucked up my life. If you had access to sharp objects you would be dangerous. I have had shock therapy to try to forget your existence because you have manipulated me one too many times. I have frequently looked the other way, which makes me a doormat.

This time you have painted yourself into a corner.

I have never shirked my responsibility to tell you that you are the missing link. You would be so much better off if you would just lay off of the welfare and get a job. You must be the product of inbreeding. If I have to hear you tell me that one more time, I will hurl. You are SICK. It is time for you to stop being a leech. Let this also serve as notice that all future visits have been cancelled as I would rather claw out my eyes than see you.

Drop dead you waste of space,

ME

PS: Please do not reply back, this email address is dead. I need time to report your whereabouts to the repo man.

Of course, there is no Cindy, and I'll never send the letter but, man, like in the song, I feel good!

Writer's Pain

2005-06-22T08:07:00.000-04:00

Found an interesting article by Quinn Dalton on MobyLives, talking about one of the most painful events a writer can live through: having a reading scheduled and no one shows up. In his Reading to Chairs, Dalton relates the indignities of having to sell your work when no one cares:

"It's worse than the worst humiliation you've ever brought on yourself at the office party, or during a break up, or during other life hiccups that most people recognize and can sympathize with. But then you find there are entire other universes of self–dismantling experiences available to you. And there you are, trying to pace yourself, so you don't hyperventilate and die on the spot.[...]

In any other business, products are designed to meet real demands. But anybody can live without books. If you design a sexy toaster, it will sell in millions of units at Target, and you will get that airy Manhattan loft, or seaside retreat, or whatever your material fantasy may be. If you write a sexy novel, you will be sent, like a vacuum salesman with a bag of dirt, to as many bookstores as you can survive. You will dump that bag of dirt on the ground and yell, hoarsely, "See? See how this will change your life?" You can count on multiple character building experiences."

Dalton's article made me realize why I've shied away from organizing readings. I'm a yellow-bellied coward. There. I admit it. I've use the excuses that I was a writer, not a marketer, or a business person, or my publisher, even. Why should I have to do their work?

But now I can't avoid admitting it: organizing a reading and having no one showing up for it, except a couple of friends who would have taken pity on me, terrifies the heebie-jeebies out of me.

Maybe, in a year or five, Dalton's courage will have an effect. Or maybe I'll brace myself and prepare a blitz for Meter Destiny, coming out this November.

Excuse me, while I go throw up.

Thanks to Liz Burton for pointing me to Dalton's article.

"Intolerable Beauty"

2005-06-21T07:28:00.000-04:00

Striking photography from Chris Jordan, Intolerable Beauty -- Portraits of American Consumption makes us realize how our throw away-and-replace society is affecting our environment. Well worth the visit to the website, if you can't make it to one of his exhibits.

Two great blog discoveries

2005-06-16T08:22:00.000-04:00

Ann Lamott, author of one of my favorite books about writing, bird by bird has taken to blogging at TPMCafe. In her usual sardonic style, she expounds her opinions about life (society, culture, media, etc.) and is not short of comments back.

The other great blog I discovered is called BAGnewsNotes and is an in-depth analysis of photographs presented in the media, photos that are used to underscore an article. It's controversial, sometimes (okay, most times) politically heretic, and absolutely fascinating. This blog lets us realize why a picture is worth a thousand words. Unfortunately, the photos often convey a different message than the words. And Michael Shaw definitely meets two of his objectives, to "analyze "high profile" news, advertising and advocacy images for the way they reveal political or cultural stereotypes, and to encourage and help train my readers to become better consumers of visual news media, advertising and advocacy images, and political propaganda."

Definitely two blogs that go on my list of faves.

Musings on spam mail titles

2005-06-15T07:56:00.000-04:00

For a while, now, spammers have tried to defy email filters by using every day words in their email titles. I wonder, however, who would be stupid enough not to figure out that what they're receiving is spam, just by the title. Here are some examples:

in give be muskrat cleaner+s
Is talk of billhook complex
Re: With read he meatball
Re: As live my dreadnought
And take of concur fatherhood

I mean, come on. Sure, the words are probably automatically generated, but, even if they get to my inbox (which they rarely do, they end up in my junkmail folder) what's the use? Not only am I not deceived, there's no way I'm curious enough to actually open one. If I open one by mistake, I'll definitely not be taken by the offers of cheap viagra, cialis, or any other deal too good to be true. Although P.T. Barnum did mention suckers, and he was right.

According to Postini, right now, 10 out of 14 messages, or 68.7%, are spam, and one in two smtp connection is wasted because of that. Fifty percent of spam is generated outside the US, making it difficult to control. Spam acitivity has increased 65% since 2002.

However, Andrew Lockhart, from Postini says: "More spam is being sent. Less is being received in inboxes." A survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, taken early this year indicates the following:

28% of users with a personal email account say they are getting more spam than a year ago, while 22% say they are getting less.
21% of users with a work email account say they are getting more spam than a year ago, while 16% say they are getting less.
53% of email users say spam has made them less trusting of email, compared to 62% a year ago.
22% of email users say that spam has reduced their overall use of email, compared to 29% a year ago.
67% of email users say spam has made being online unpleasant or annoying, compared to 77% a year ago.
Overall, more than half of all internet users (52%) complain that spam is a big problem.
And in a first-time measure of “phishing,” or unsolicited email requesting personal financial information, 35% of users say they have received such email, and 2% have responded by providing the information.

Phishing is not new, but it has expanded its operation from the African request letter to much more.

What is phishing? Phishing is a form of on-line identity theft. Attackers send e-mails and use fake Web sites that spoof a legitimate business, such as a bank, credit card companies, ebay, or Paypal to lure unsuspecting customers into sharing personal and financial data. The sender will state that something's wrong with your account and they need to verify your personal info. After you give it to them, they use it to clean you out. Banks and cards issuers lost $1.2 billion in 2003 and the problem is growing. Techworld indicates that

"Gartner conducted a phone poll of 5,000 people in the US in 2004 and came up with the figure $2 billion a year lost to banking scams, including online fraud and phishing. Since this includes a variety of bank and card scams, phishing will account for only a fraction that total. In the UK, Association for Payment Clearing Services (APACS) estimated 2004 banking fraud at £500 million ($950 million), £12 million ($22 million) of which was from online fraud, including, presumably, phishing. Banks don’t discuss the issue openly so it is hard to go much beyond these figures."

Nevertheless, over 6.6 million email messages have been sent last month. This means over 4.48 million spam messages. Even if only one percent of recipients get taken by spam or phishing, it still means that in nearly 45,000 spams or phishes were successful. That's over 53 million a year, folks. No wonder spammers continue to send spam.

Any internet user has the responsibility to become informed about these issues se that we can fight them, and render them ineffective. So please, don't join the ranks of the suckers and fight the waste with knowledge.

Annual Neologism Contest

2005-06-14T09:56:00.000-04:00

"Once again, The Washington Post has published the winning submissions to its yearly contest, in which readers are asked to supply alternate meanings for common words.

And the winners are:

1. Coffee (n.), the person upon whom one coughs.

2. Flabbergasted (adj.), appalled over how much weight you have gained.

3. Abdicate (v.), to give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach.

4. Esplanade (v.), to attempt an explanation while drunk.

5. Willy-nilly (adj.), impotent.

6. Negligent (adj.), describes a condition in which you absentmindedly answer the door in your nightgown.

7. Lymph (v.), to walk with a lisp.

8. Gargoyle (n.), olive-flavored mouthwash.

9. Flatulence (n.) emergency vehicle that picks you up after you are run over by a steamroller.

10. Balderdash (n.), a rapidly receding hairline.

11. Testicle (n.), a humorous question on an exam.

12. Oyster (n.), a person who sprinkles his conversation with Yiddishisms.

13. Frisbeetarianism (n.), The belief that, when you die, your Soul flies up onto the roof and gets stuck there.

14. Circumvent (n.), an opening in the front of boxer shorts worn by Jewish men.

15. Rectitude (n.), the formal, dignified demeanor assumed by a proctologist immediately before he examines you.

16. Pokemon (n), A Jamaican proctologist."

An interesting note: depending on which website present the WP's contest results, some entries have been either omitted or modified. I suspect it's to make them more politically correct. However, isn't that a form of censure? That could be an interesting debate.

However, what is even more fun, is WP's Style Invitational, where people with way too much time on their hands play with words and phrases. Anagramed phrases such as:

Bob Dylan, age sixty-two, appears in a Victoria's Secret commercial, singing while Adriana Lima slinks around in her undies.
= Ridiculous ad attacks women, i.e., insists sex appeal is a rich, incoherent old man and a servile bra-baring girl. Oy, I'm yawning. (Brendan Beary, Great Mills)

or again, play on words like these:

Silent Bid x Hole in the Head = Shh for Brains (Dan Seidman, Watertown, Mass.)

Snack x I Live for This = Raisin d'Etre (Ron Bottomly, Columbia)

Roman Ruler x Awesome Twist = Pontius Pilates (Jon Reiser, Hilton, N.Y.)

Texcess x Snack = Best Little Ho-Hos (Chris Doyle, Raleigh)

And the winner of the Inker: First Word x Wrapped = Mummy (Lori Price, Leesburg)

Great fun for word lovers everywhere. Thanks to my friend Ron for pointing me to the neologism contest.

Stereotypes and decisions

2005-06-13T07:40:00.000-04:00

A recent study shows that people use people's physical appearance to make decisions, even very important ones such as electing a president. Psychology Today has an interesting article on how to choose a president, comparing past (and current) presidents' promises to actual happenings, with the conclusion that, if people voted based on these promises, they definitely go short-changed.

It's sad, but it's true. We do judge a book by its cover, and a person by his/her appearance. Isn't that kind of judgement the onset of prejudice? We look at someone, and almost instantly compare them to us, or our standard. There have been studies that indicate that, even with those of us who think we don't make those kinds of judgements, our subconscious does.

I just found this wonderful site by the photographer Eric Myer. Apart from great photography, he has a page, Stereotypes that tests these snap judgements we all make. By mixing the top and bottom of a head and torso, you can see how drastically it changes the person, and the impression he/she makes on you. If you look at it honestly, you may find yourself very uncomfortable with your reactions to these faces. I know I did.

Our trip to Scotland

2005-06-09T09:51:00.000-04:00

This is my entry for this month's Blogging for Books, from Jay Allen's The Zero Boss:

In September 1992, we left for a three-week trip to Scotland. Unfortunately, so did Hurricane Charley, which meant rain, rain, and more rain. We had chosen September because everyone we had talked to had said that it was the most beautiful month of the year in Scotland.

I remembered that as we stood under a tree in a park in Edinburgh, trying to find protection from another torrential downpour, so strong that it pierced through our GoreTex jackets. The rain bounced on the pavement and wet us through up to our knees.

We had planned to travel through Scotland and, by God, we were going to, rain or no rain. Travel through we did, but we didn’t see much of it. Loch Ness was a mass of fog, so dense we couldn’t see the other side. At Eileen Donan castle, the most photographed castle in Scotland, the wind was so strong we had horizontal rain. We saw only the bottom of the Cuillins, their tops lost in fog and clouds. Oban was so cold, the first thing we did was buy wool hats and gloves.

Two weeks into our trip, pretty much demoralized, we arrived on Skye island, and our B&B, which was cold and damp: the lady of the house didn’t start heating the parlour until five in the evening, and there was no heat at all in our bedroom. Too late to search for another place, we stayed.

About 24% of Skye residents speak Gaelic, the ancient Celtic language, but it is a dying tradition. There are more Gaelic-speaking people in Nova Scotia, Canada, than in Scotland. We had a nice chat with the owner about that, after she’d asked about our trip so far. The amount of rain didn’t seem to faze her. Still, hopeful, we asked her if she’d heard the weather forecast for the next day. She barked a laugh and said: “Just look outside!” It poured rain.

“You can’t let it get you down,” she said, in her thick accent. “There’s a Ceilidh, tonight, at the community center. Why don’t you go?”

The Ceilidh, a Scottish gathering of dance, song and music, sounded perfect. We expected a local group, when she added, “The band is from Canada, so you should feel at home. The Rankin family. Do you know them?”

We did, and found it ironic that we had come so far to hear a Canadian band. However, since it was a choice between the Ceilidh or a damp parlour, we decided to go.

The community centre was a converted barn, with a stage at one end and wooden benches in front of it. The floor, bare wooden planks, resonated under the dozens of pairs of shoes. It seemed that at least three or four villages had converged into the centre: teens, old people, couples with children, farmers dressed in woollen sweater and Wellingtons, couples in suits and pearls, they all took their seats eagerly, calling to each other, joking, laughing.

When the Rankins came onto the stage, everyone focused on the show. They were fantastic; the band sang and danced with so much energy, you could almost imagine they’d been bewitched. The Rankins have paved a Celtic highway around the world, preserving Gaelic folk songs and making them part of their repertoire. Maybe they felt the history of the island and it energized them, or maybe they felt that these people, in this converted barn, were the most appreciative audience, because they could understand the songs.

About two-thirds through the concert, Cookie introduced one of the songs: “This is a song about what is lost to us. A song about losing the past because the language is lost. If you know this song, please join me in singing it.”

She began to sing, a capella, in Gaelic. The melody was melancholy and poignant and even though we couldn’t understand the words, we could feel the emotion it conveyed. Then, one by one, all around us, people began to sing under their breath. Their faces were reverent and sad, and as the song continued, their voices rose like a prayer.

Rain didn’t matter anymore. Neither did the fog, or the cold. We had been given a precious gift: to be part of a people, their history, their regrets, and their hopes. I carry it as my most vivid memory of Scotland.

Body Images

2005-06-08T08:47:00.000-04:00

Everyone has an idea of who they are and how they want to project to the rest of the world. People who get tattoos are simply more vocal about who they are, want to be, or pretend to be. That's my theory, anyway.

Some people, however, don't seem to be able to communicate quite well. Did they stutter at the tatto parlor? Did they respond to a dare? a date? Many times I'll think: What did they ever think of? At G-Shack.com there's proof that some people park their brain somewhere before they go under the needle.

And I tend to agree. They are pretty stupid-looking tattoos. No regrets, unh?

Ja well no fine and trisackaphobia

2005-06-06T08:02:00.000-04:00

I found a fantastic site, the Double-Tongued Word Wrester Dictionary when I dropped in on The Quipping Queen. The dictionary

"records undocumented or under-documented words from the fringes of English. It focuses upon slang, jargon, and other niche categories which include new, foreign, hybrid, archaic, obsolete, and rare words. Special attention is paid to the lending and borrowing of words between the various Englishes and other languages, even where a word is not a fully naturalized citizen in its new language."

For any language lover, this is a dynamic, real-time reference, built by a respected lexicographer. Well-worth the visit.

Challenge Darth Vader

2005-06-01T07:58:00.000-04:00

Okay, it's corny. Shtick. A commercial gimmick. But kinda fun. In 20 questions or less, Vader will tell you what you were thinking, and he's uncannily accurate. It shows how unimaginative the average person is, if an algorithm can determine the choice he/she makes.

Shades of artificial intelligence? Naw. It's what's called a Viral Try, a program that lets you talk to the screen, and is used by Burger King as a publicity campaign. It hasn't convinced me to go out and buy a burger, but I had my 10 minutes of fun.

If you want to have a real taste of the Dark Side, read Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the American Meal. If you read it, you'll never eat fast food again.

New Review for Metered Space

2005-05-28T08:12:00.000-04:00

Just by happenstance, I found a new review of Metered Space at BVSReviews. Not a bad one, with the conclusion that:

"M.D. Benoit has written a book that keeps you going, wanting to get to the end so that you know how everything turns out."

It may not be a rave one, but then Metered Space isn't a pretentious book. All I wanted to do with it was to entertain and, from that review, it looks like I've accomplished my goal.

BVSReviews has been around since 1997 and reviews a variety of media.

What to read to know Canadians

2005-05-25T11:21:00.000-04:00

James Munroe of Counterpoint answered Pete Bevin's entry Write Only Media: What is First Nations, Meti and Inuit?, and I thought it was so comprehensive that I decided to quote it here in its entirety:

"If you really want to understand (recent) Canadian political history, the four Prime Ministers you should Wikipedia (IMHO) are: Pierre Elliott Trudeau, John Diefenbaker ("Dief"), Lester B. Pearson, and Brian Mulroney ("Muldoon"). It's important to know why their terms of office were particularly important.
Other important political figures are Tommy Douglas ("the father of Medicare"), Réne Lévesque, David and Stephen Lewis, and Ed Broadbent.

Culturally speaking (to scratch the surface): you don't get much more Canadian than Farley Mowat and Stephen Leacock, unless you're talking about the Group of Seven.

Historically speaking, you'll already know the importance of learning about the Confederation of Canada, but you should also read up on the Battle of the Plains of Abraham between the English and French forces, led by Gen. James Wolfe andGeneral Louis-Joseph de Montcalm-Gozon, Marquis of Montcalm,respectively; the First Nations and linked articles; Jacques Cartier; Samuel Champlain; and the War of 1812.
The roles of Canada in the First and Second World Wars are alsoimportant (sorry, the links are too numerous - but it's worthresearching nonetheless). Read up also on the failed Meech Lake andCharlottetown accords (linked to from the Mulroney article) and the Canadian referenda, in particular the provincial ones.

For a bit of the underbelly of Canadian history, read up on the internment of Japanese Canadian citizens during World War II, and the execution of Louis Riel (the "father of Manitoba").

Watch CBC TV and listen to CBC radio! You'll discover that there aretwo types of Canadians - those who watch and listen to the CBC andthose who don't - and their views on the world are radically different."

There is much, much more (how do you get to know everything about a country?) but this is a damn good start. Thanks, James.

Billions More in Book Sales

2005-05-24T08:23:00.000-04:00

There's encouraging news. I've been harping about the fact that most people today don't read. I've also said that it's bookstores that run the business, not publishers. In other blogs, there have been complaints that publishers don't do enough for authors, that they give them starvation wages, etc...

M.J.Rose's blog, Buzz, Balls & Hype has been touting the need for alternate marketing solutions to selling books, arguing that publishers aren't doing such a hot job of it. Marketing to the readers, rather than the bookstores, seems to be one of her principles (something she's definitely been successful with).

It seems that small publishers have been having the same idea, and are being successful at it. The Book Industry Study Group, a resource for publishing professionals , came out with an April 2005 report that states that "Smaller publishers also have impressive track records with marketing strategies and tactics that industry giants now see as the wave of the future."

They go on to say that small publishers

"have been using routes to readers beyond the bookstore world, and often selling more books outside trade channels than within them, while the largest booksellers have been claiming more of the traditional bookstore market. More specifically, the study findings indicate that small and midsize publishers do more than 50% of their business outside book-trade channels and inside sales channels designed mainly to serve other industries that the book industry has not monitored.

They go on to say that government and industry will have to readjust their assessment of these small, but effective sellers. Finally, some encouraging news.

To read the entire abstract, go here.

Freaked out

2005-05-23T06:50:00.000-04:00

We still see them in the news: conjoined twins at birth, that medical science is now able to separate, even if it's extremely risky. As rare as they are (1 in 200,000 births) there are other birth defects that are even rarer. Some can be detected in vitro, and the pregnancy terminated. (I'm not going to go into the pro-life, pro-choice debate, here)

In the past couple of centuries, people born with terrible defects were labeled freaks and exhibited in circuses as world wonders. Ratt's Freak Show is a comprehensive and well-documented site about many of these people, with a scientific --but easily understood-- explanation for each of the difformities or conditions, as well as some biographical information about each.

Amazing how human beings can cope even in the face of continuous reminders that they don't fit the mold. Yet some of them managed to have full, satisfying lives. It boggles the mind.

Practice makes perfect

2005-05-20T08:03:00.000-04:00

Yeah, right. I've been trying to draw for years and I still can't put a stick figure together. However, there are some who do like to doodle. My friend Robyn loved the Mr. Picasso-Head site so much, that I decided to include this do-it-yourself painting site, just for her.

On the other hand, for those who love art but restrict themselves to simply looking at it, there's always Paris' WebMuseum. It not only has some very cool paintings, but they are also explained, with background from the artists. Or again, there's the Virtual Museum of Canada, which gives an overview of Canadian Art from various museums across Canada (warning: IE works better to view the works of art). For instance, they have over 200 samples of the Group of Seven, Art Deco examples, and some women artists. Very cool.

I think I'll stick to admiring talent.

The picture is "Juan Gris" by Pablo Picasso.

"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

2005-05-18T08:19:00.000-04:00

"Who will watch the watchers?" This famous quote from Juvenal (c. 60-c. 130) applies to many things today, but most of all to censure: freedom of expression is one of the most precious and fragile of rights.

The Quotable Quotes on my website is visited quite often, but I have not restricted myself to quotes about censure. The Forbidden Library: Banned and Challenged Books not only offers quotes about censure, but a comprehensive list of banned books throughout the years.

Books such as 1984, by George Orwell, banned in 1981 in Jackson County, Florida, because the book was "pro-communist and contained explicit sexual matter." Or Alice Walker's The Color Purple, banned because its "troubling ideas about race relations, man's relationship to God, African history, and human sexuality." Or again The Life and Times of Renoir, byt Janice Anderson. Restricted at the Pulaski, Pa. Elementary School Library in 1997 "because of nude paintings in the book." Huh?

Even the famous Where's Waldo?, by Martin Handford, was removed from the public libraries in Saginaw, Michigan because "there is a tiny drawing of a woman lying on the beach wearing a bikini bottom but no top."

Do I have a feeling that it all comes down to sex? Or maybe the censors hide behind the sex angle so they can restrict critical thinking. As Winston Churchill said, "Everyone is in favor of free speech. Hardly a day passes without its being extolled, but some people's idea of it is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone else says anything back, that is an outrage."

Hallmarks of Felinity

2005-05-17T07:29:00.000-04:00

Brooke McEldowney, of 9 Chickweed Lane, proves that he understands cats intimately. The comic strips are each one of them a small slice of cat perspective. If you need a laugh, and you have a cat, Hallmarks of Felinity is a must visit.

You can also buy the book.

How to profit from your dead grandmother

2005-05-16T07:54:00.000-04:00

According to Mike Adams of the Department of Biology at Eastern Connecticut State University, a "student’s grandmother is far more likely to die suddenly just before the student takes an exam, than at any other time of year." This is an apparently well-known phenomenon (called the "Dead Grandmother/Exam Syndrome") that occurs around the world and which is due to the stress a parent suffers on expecting the students to do well on exams. The article was a tongue-in-cheek report written in 1999 for the Annals of Improbable Research.

Now colleges in the UK have acknowldeged the Syndrome as real.

"GCSE and A-level pupils in England are given 5% more if a parent dies close to exam day or 4% for a distant relative.

They get 2% more if a pet dies or 1% if they get a headache [...] the system was an attempt to quantify the sorts of circumstances which would merit special consideration and ensure consistency across the various exam boards."

I feel this doesn't go far enough in attempting to stem the flow. Davis' solutions are much more appropriate:

1. Stop giving exams, or

2. Allow only orphans to enroll at universities, or

3. Have students lie to their families (This being the favored solution). "Students must never let any of their relatives know that they are at university."

Thanks to Improbable Research -- What's New for their treatment of the problem.

Revamped website

2005-05-14T15:00:00.000-04:00

I took a week off writing and revamped my website. Check out the new look at http://mdbenoit.com

Currently Reading...

2005-05-12T17:06:00.000-04:00

Well, what a disappointment this book is. The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood brought me to tears several times; Little Altars charmed me. This one bored me. There's nothing there: no passion, no interesting tidbit, no heart. Maybe it's because the book is written as a series of short stories with very little connections between them. You don't get the desperation, the angst, or the sheer joie de vivre that threaded the other two books Rebecca Wells wrote. It feels more like a "let's fill you in on those people's background" report rather than a plunge into some pretty intense lives.

And I'm not alone in that feeling. Reviewers at amazon.com barely give it two stars.

Don't waste your money, or your time, on this sequel.

Best Seller or Survival: what's best?

2005-05-11T07:56:00.000-04:00

Back at Buzz, Balls & Hype, in her post "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley..." M. J. Rose has an interesting perspective on every author's dream: hitting the BIG times with a blockbuster bestseller.

I think it's Lawrence Block who said that most writers want to have been published. Meaning that many don't want to expend the effort to get there. They just want to be rich and famous, with a slew of bestsellers to their names. The result is people who give up the craft, because it's too damn hard.

M. J. echoes that by stating that it's not the BIG book that's important, but survival. Making enough so you can keep doing what we love, which is telling stories. I find I totally agree with her. Yeah, sure, I won't lie and say that I wouldn't want the big advance, the hype, the worship. Who doesn't? But what I want more than that is to write, and for people to read my stories. Authors don't really write in a vacuum, although most will say that they write only what they can write. The stories are compelling and authors only hope they'll have the same effect on the readers.

And there drops the other shoe, one I totally agree with: people don't read anymore. They watch TV. As Raymond Chandler said:

"Television's perfect. You turn a few knobs, a few of those mechanical adjustments at which the higher apes are so proficient, and lean back and drain your mind of all thought. And there you are watching the bubbles in the primeval ooze. You don't have to concentrate. You don't have to react. You don't have to remember. You don't miss your brain because you don't need it. Your heart and liver and lungs continue to function normally. Apart from that, all is peace and quiet. You are in the man's nirvana. And if some poor nasty minded person comes along and says you look like a fly on a can of garbage, pay him no mind. He probably hasn't got the price of a television set."

The number of people who actually pick up more than one book a year --and usually, they'll pick up the hyped book, the BIG book-- is rapidly diminishing, and the industry has been passively watching this happening. Instead of trying to revitalize reading, they bemoan the problem. On the other hand, small, indie publishers, even though they might want to do something about it, don't have the clout, or the money to do much.

So we authors must do what our publishers can't or won't do: market ourselves, so we can survive, so we can write. That's why we have websites, blogs, virtual book tours, 'net interviews, to reach as many people as possible. Out of those, maybe we'll find a few readers. Out of those few readers, maybe we'll find some who want to buy our books.

Clearing up POD issues

2005-05-10T09:16:00.000-04:00

My first published novel, Metered Space, is a POD book. Print-on-demand. You want the book, you order it, either from Amazon or from my publisher, Zumaya, or even from the printer itself which, in this case, is Booksurge. Two days later, it's in your hot little hands.

Because you can't get it from a non-virtual bookstore, magazines such as Locus says my book's worthless, not listable, and basically should be ignored.

They're missing the point. The reason my book isn't in bookstores is not that my publisher doesn't want to get it there (Duh!). It's because bookstores don't want to order them. See, bookstores have it swell. They order as many copies as they want of any book. Whatever isn't sold, they send back to the publisher at no cost to them. What kind of stupid organization would want that setup changed? See, with POD, they have to buy the books, and if they don't sell, they're stuck with them. Which means that they'd have to take risks. Too bad, so sad.

What infuriates is that mags such as Locus use all kinds of erroneous assumptions about POD instead on zeroing on the real problem: bookstores are calling the shots. Not the author, not the publisher, not the distributor.

Paula Guran has written a good article setting Locus straight on several of their misleading points about POD. What is ironic about the Locus article however, is that they admit it's hard to tell the POD books from the others. Their terror is that, in their ignorance, they'll list a self-published book that looks like a "real" book. How awful. As Paula says:

"If you err on the side of a high quality but self-published book that deserves notice, we feel that is commendable rather than not [...]Books are books. It is hard to imagine that Locus truly thinks a book must be printed on paper to be a book, thus saying that e-books, audiobooks, and books on CDs do not exist. But, since Locus deals primarily with printed books we understand their prejudice. If they wish to define a book as "text printed on paper and bound between two covers", POD books, in both senses, exist because they are printed.

It seems that Locus does not know which publishers are POD and which are not, especially since several of the publishers they do list use digital printing to some extent. But, more importantly, they are trying to define publishers by the methods they use to print books. We see no publishers referred to as "rotary letterpress" publishers or "sheet-fed offset lithographic" publishers, or "web-fed offset lithographic" publishers. Surely Locus realizes the absurdity of this.

Thanks to Michael Allen, the Grumpy Old Bookman for pointing me to Paula Guran.

Street Art

2005-05-09T07:47:00.000-04:00

Continuing on the art kick, these street paintings are the perfect example of fiction taking over from reality.

In the same manner, the Best pictures of 2003 are impressive, even though I can't help thinking that they're all hoaxes. (The pages are a little slow to load, but well worth waiting for).

Manipulating photos is an art in itself. Worth1000 is one the sites that offers the chance for that kind of exercise. Some of the pictures are striking, some are grotesque. All are interesting, and give you very little faith in proof based on photography. Here's one of the contest, called Partial Symmetry

Three Dee Art

2005-05-07T07:04:00.000-04:00

Seems like I'm into art these days. I've come across this incredible site, 3D Artists. Most of the art is so realistic that, even for the fantastic themes, you'd think it's photographs. The artists come from all over the world and give free reign to their imaginations. I'm in awe of people who can do that kind of thing, since I can't even draw a decent Picasso picture, even with some help from Mr. Picasso Head.

The picture of the car is from Marek Denko, from Slovania.

The dangers of eating bread

2005-05-06T08:07:00.000-04:00

I'm not a fan of bread in general, much to the despair of my Belgian-born mate. As far as I'm concerned, there's nothing much to recommend it, except as a vehicle for butter or mayo. Doesn't matter if it's white or whole wheat, multigrain or flat. It's still just a holder for my sandwich fixings. Give me a salad anytime.

The following article states all the reasons why we shouldn't be eating bread. Clearly, a case where fiction replaces reality and where, if you torture your data enough, you can make them say anything. Too bad, I was looking for enlightenment.

Culled from Stefani Banerian's website.

Incredible cat photography

2005-05-05T08:30:00.000-04:00

If you like kittens --and what's not to like?-- Kittens! is the place to go. Big eyes, button noses, tiny, pointy ears... and a temper. Unfortunately, there is no author to these pictures, so I can't praise her/him by name. (Here's an alternate URL, still with no author)

Another interesting tidbit about the page is that the artist advertises Firefox as an alternative browser for MSIE, which pleased me no end. Firefox is awesome, and much easier to use. It's also sturdier and has all the IE features plus dozens of themes and extensions that make the surfer's life easier. Firefox is Mozilla-based, the "fathers" of the browsers, onto which IE was (badly) copied.

Mozilla also has an incredible emailer called Thunderbird:

"Thunderbird makes emailing safer, faster, and easier than ever before with the industry's best implementations of features such as intelligent spam filters, built-in RSS reader, quick search, and much more."

I have never used Outlook. I've used Eudora, and Pegasus Mail; now I've graduated to Thunderbird and I'll never look back. Outlook is fragile, and easily punctured by viruses. Not so Thunderbird. And it's Junk Mail filter is one of the best on the market.

Best of all: both Firefox and Thunderbird are 100% free.

book-blog.com

2005-05-04T11:39:00.000-04:00

A fantastic site with an incredible variety of book reviews: book-blog.com. Although I may not always agree with the reviews, they are well written, concise, and give the potential readers all they need to decide whether they want to try that book, or that author.

An unsatisfactory conversation

2005-05-03T11:08:00.000-04:00

Ever had one of those? There's something very satisfying about spoofing spoofable people. George and Condi are at the top of the list.

Why you shouldn't post your picture on the Internet

2005-05-02T08:33:00.000-04:00

It's a regular occurrence. Bloggers, authors, artists, and just plain folks... they like to see their faces on a web page. Some even go further and post pictures of their families, their weddings, their parties. As if the majority of 'net surfers would have even a smidgen of interest in other people's ordinary lives. Except maybe to have a good laugh. I can understand wanting to see what an artist looks like, but why would I want to check out a total stranger's wedding pictures? (The site was picked at random) This is what happened with one picture, changed 40 different ways.

Now try not to be paranoid and think that someone is playing the same game with your own mug.

Pushing censure way out there

2005-04-06T07:13:00.000-04:00

There has been a lot of talk about banned Disney movies and banned books in the States because of the belief that they promoted homosexuality. I won't comment on that, but I came across an article that made me shake my head:

"Defensive back Randall Gay wore a New England Patriots jersey as a member of this year's Super Bowl-winning team, but when one of his former college professors tried to order a personalized jersey in tribute to Gay in mid-February, she was turned down. The National Football League's official online merchandiser, NFLshop.com, refused to imprint "Gay" on the back of a Patriots jersey because it was a "naughty" word, one of 1,159 the shop has banned. (Two weeks later, after the Web site Outsports.com picked up the story, the word was removed from the list.)" [Times-Picayune (New Orleans), 3-3-05]

Over eleven hundred "naughty" words? I can't even think of that many. Maybe I've led a sheltered life.

From News of the Weird

The Accidental Cook

2005-03-01T06:37:00.000-05:00

I'm on a Thai and Vietnamese food kick these days. The flavors are incredible -- this mix of sweet, hot, and fresh -- tantalizes the taste buds. I was sure that I wouldn't be able to find the proper ingredients (Thai basil leaves, kafir lime leaves, harissa) but our Asian neighborhood has a Thai/Vietnamese store that has everything we needed. There are these mixes of flavors I never thought to eat: salmon and pineapple, potato and coconut milk. Yet, they work incredibly well.

I have not always had an interest in cooking. In fact, I pretty much despised it. Now I discover that, if you're passionate about the food, you'll want to try to cook it.
The recipes don't need to be long and complicated. Stylish Thai in Minutes has incredible recipes that takes around 30 minutes to make, and ordinary ingredients can be substituted if you don't have access to an Asian market. Of course, you have to like exotic flavors such as curries and hot peppers. Vietnamese cuisine is less spicy and more involved, but works with fresh ingredients and herbs that just explode on your tastebuds.

If you're not ready for that kind of cuisine but are curious about cooking in general, I recommend The Science of Cooking a website that talks about the basics of cooking, gives recipes, games you can play with the kids, as well as quizzes and access to cooks for specific questions.

Move over, dry cleaners

2005-02-11T06:57:00.000-05:00

My blog has moved! I'm now at http://mdbenoit.com/blog. Come visit for the latest stuff.

"What do you get when you put together a physical chemist, two polymer scientists and a self-proclaimed "fiber guy" (that is, a textile chemist)?

A self-cleaning suit, of course."

This is part of the research a group of scientists at Clemson University are doing, using the properties of the lotus leaf and nanotechnology to develop a water and dirt repellant material.

Due to the placement of nanobumps in the fabric, the water can't penetrate and takes dirt with it. All you have to do is take a shower with your suit, and voilà. You're ready for the next day. What the article doesn't say is how it would work with sweat and the acids from the skin or even the acids in the rain (shades of Blade Runner).

Ah, well. Perfection, Earth is not thy province...

Need a Story Idea?

2005-02-03T06:20:00.000-05:00

An infectious farmhand takes a shower with a Marine.
A gas station attendant and two itinerant bartenders discover an ancient burial ground.
A player player and six beautiful courtesy clerks kidnap a crab.

Okay, maybe these are kind of goofy, but the Random Logline Generator is a good way to generate some writing ideas, or, at the very least, help you write a one-liner about your own story. You can define the parameters (nouns, adjectives, action verbs) and the kind of result you want.

If nothing else, it's a cool way to waste some time.

The Surrealist Compliment Generator

2005-01-24T08:46:00.000-05:00

May your shit always sport dog on the bottom of your shoe. Just for a bit of fun, or a much needed chuckle on a Monday morning. You'll have a different compliment every time you reload the page in your browser.

Where are the suckers?

2005-01-21T07:05:00.000-05:00

Every day, and I mean every single day, I get one or two spam messages offering me a partnership from some unknown in Africa: help us transfer $30 million to your country and we'll give you 20% of the take. Of course, all you have to do is give them all your personal info, including the number of your bank account. Needless to say, you don't see the color of their money, and your own all of a sudden disappears.

I'd really like to know what kind of people believe that you get something from nothing, and why they believe that some strange person in Africa has heard of them. Yet the RCMP states that Canadians have lost over $30 million to these scams in the last ten years. The Nigerian scam, for instance, was the third largest industry in Nigeria. Worldwide it wracked up over $5 billion.

Why are these scams still working? Are the people who get taken in the same who believe they'll win the lotto or get all the coins from the slot machine if they put in enough? Or is it simply the still naive belief that people are fundamentally good (yeah, right)?

Regardless, I suspect I'll continue getting those spams. This time it's Zaire, not Nigeria, but you know what? It's the same damn difference.

Kindness, Beauty, and Truth

2005-01-19T07:27:00.000-05:00

"I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves -- this critical basis I call the ideal of a pigsty. The ideals that have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty, and Truth. Without the sense of kinship with men of like mind, without the occupation with the objective world, the eternally unattainable in the field of art and scientific endeavors, life would have seemed empty to me. The trite objects of human efforts -- possessions, outward success, luxury -- have always seemed to me contemptible."

These words were written by Albert Einstein, who ironically also said: "This topic brings me to that worst outcrop of herd life, the military system, which I abhor... This plague-spot of civilization ought to be abolished with all possible speed. Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism -- how passionately I hate them!"

You can read a larger portion of his essay here. Also read a fascinating essay, entitled Einstein's Third Paradise, by Gerald Holton (Mallinckrodt Research Professor of Physics and Research Professor of History of Science at Harvard University), a study of Einstein's journey as a scientist through the analysis of his spirituality. The essay is part of an exhibit on Einstein from the American Institute of Physics.

Need a Quote?

2005-01-18T07:34:00.000-05:00

Just found a site on the web called Brainy Quote. There are other sites that provide something similar, such as Bartleby, but I like this one for several reasons:

The pages are not busy, easy to read
They're from authors and celebrities, from olden to modern times
It gives information on the person quoted, including a biography, from the Brainy Encyclopedia
It links to dates, from Brainy History, and countries, from Brainy Atlas

And here's a quote from Aldous Huxley:

"Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself."

Very cool site.

More on the Tsunami

2005-01-17T07:09:00.000-05:00

Scientific American has put together a series of links documenting the tragedy as well as articles on other earthquakes/tsunamis that help understand how unpredictable these occurrences can be.

Currently Reading...

2005-01-14T07:19:00.000-05:00

Okay, I admit it, the book scared me. Not because of the content, but because of its near 800 pages and the four-inch thickness of it. Quite an investment in my reading time -- would it be worth it?

The story has captured me. Susanna Clarke has written this story has a scholarly tome, complete with footnotes, as if she were only relating, or dissecting, a piece of English history. Most of the basic facts (such as the war with Napoleon) are true. There's only one exception: the story is about English magic, the magic of Merlin and Faeries. She does it so well that you end up doubting your past knowledge of English history: Could the war against Napoleon have been won with the help of magic? Has this been a deeply held secret only now revealed?

Clarke has developed her main characters so well that they are totally believable. We admire Mr. Norrell but don't like him. We despise Drainwright and Lascelles, but are amused by them. We hold our breath, wondering what Lar, the King of the Faeries, will be up to. Johnatan Strange fascinates and frustrates.

Here is an excerpt from a review by Claire E. White, from the Internet Writing Journal:

Written with a dry, very British sense of humor, the narrator delivers the history with an intimate, confiding, tongue in cheek tone which works very well indeed. One buys into the fictive dream and, after about 30 pages or so, historical fact and fiction have merged. In fact, Ms.Clarke's world is so vividly-imagined that it seems quite real. This impression is reinforced by the numerous, droll, detailed footnotes which assist those who have forgotten some of the more arcane or obscure magical historical tidbits.

The book has been called Harry Potter for adults, and in the fact that it deals with magic and has a sly humor behind the prose, that is somewhat true. But Ms. Clarke's entertaining style and worldview call to mind more the work of Neil Gaiman and P.G. Wodehouse than of J.K. Rowling. Ms. Clarke's words are accompanied by the marvelous pen and ink drawings of Portia Rosenberg. Susannah Clarke has produced an immense book, both in sheer heft and in terms of literary value. It is an extraordinary achievement.

I could not agree more.

The Happy Freaking Ray of Goddamn Sunshine

2005-01-13T07:14:00.000-05:00

Just found this blog and it put a smile on my face: The Happy Freaking Ray of Goddamn Sunshine

Dan Wheeler has a style all to his own; he takes the mundane and makes you laugh about it. Well worth the visit.

Tsunami blogs

2005-01-06T07:35:00.000-05:00

The CBC website has collected blogs and other personal sites that talk about the tsunami or give updates of what's going on through the collection of news articles.

Livejournal has a pretty impressive mpg representation of how the tsunami spread.

Wizbang! has photos and videos of the tsunami.

Devastation

2005-01-05T07:39:00.001-05:00

If you still haven't any idea of the devastation created by the tsunami in Banda Aceh, these two pictures will make the point.
Here is what Encarta gives as information on the mosque:

The black domes of the Grand Baiturrachman Mosque rise above Banda Aceh, the capital of the special Indonesian region of Aceh. The mosque was built in the late 19th century and expanded in the mid-20th century. Aceh has a total population of 4,213,400 (2000 estimate), with most people living in rural areas.
(© 1993-2003 Microsoft Corporation)

The mosque is still standing, but there is nothing left of the city. Nothing.

Some villages along the coast have disappeared so completely, it's impossible to know how many people have died. Over 500,000 people in Aceh alone will have to live in camps until they can rebuild their lives. All they can do now is mourn their dead and their vanished.

If you haven't already helped, do so. Now.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/asia_earthquake/helping.html

Want a bigger brain?

2005-01-04T07:36:00.000-05:00

Learn a second language. Researchers in England found that people who learn a second language early had denser grey matter than those who spoke only one language.

"The scans revealed the density of the grey matter in the left inferior parietal cortex of the brain was greater in bilinguals than in those without a second language.

The effect was particularly noticeable in the "early" bilinguals, the findings published in the journal Nature revealed."

The research also concludes that older learners will have more difficulty in learning a second language (that light brain again).

There are other reasons to learn a second (or a third) language. It gives you an insight on how other people think, what they feel, how they look at life. It's hard to hate someone once you understand them. Charlemagne once said: "To know another language is to have a second soul."

2005 has been designated as the Year of Languages in the US. Ironically, when you read the contents of the website, they're talking about people learning English as a language:

"Educators across the country recognize that there has never been a better time to focus public attention on the personal, professional and cultural benefits of gaining proficiency in English as well as other languages.

I'm not sure if this is an indication of the numbers of immigrants to the US who are not learning English, or of the decline of the Americans' proficiency in their own language.

Nervertheless, learning a new language is an exciting, challenging endeavour. I recommend it to anyone who wants to exercise their brain.

2004 Banished Words List

2004-12-24T07:11:00.000-05:00

Lake Superior State University has been compiling the list since 1976, from submissions around the world. This year's list of banished words was compiled from 5,000 submissions. Here are a few more for 2005:

BLAMESTORMING: Sitting around in a group, discussing why a deadline was missed or a project failed, and who was responsible.

SEAGULL MANAGER: A manager who flies in, makes a lot of noise, craps on everything, and then leaves.

ASSMOSIS: The process by which some people seem to absorb success and advancement by kissing up to the boss rather than working hard.

SALMON DAY: The experience of spending an entire day swimming upstream only to get screwed and die in the end.

MOUSE POTATO: The on-line, wired generation's answer to the couch potato.

SITCOMS: Single Income, Two Children, Oppressive Mortgage. What yuppies turn into when they have children and one of them stops working to stay home with the kids.

STRESS PUPPY: A person who seems to thrive on being stressed out and whiney.

SWIPEOUT: An ATM or credit card that has been rendered useless because the magnetic strip is worn away from extensive use.

XEROX SUBSIDY: Euphemism for swiping free photocopies from one's workplace.

IRRITAINMENT: Entertainment and media spectacles that are annoying but you find yourself unable to stop watching them. The O.J. trials were a prime example.

PERCUSSIVE MAINTENANCE: The fine art of whacking the crap out of an electronic device to get it to work again.

ADMINISPHERE: The rarefied organizational layers beginning just above the rank and file.Decisions that fall from the adminisphere are often profoundly inappropriate or irrelevant to the problems they were designed to solve.

404: Someone who's clueless. From the World Wide Web error message "404 Not Found," meaning that the requested document could not be located

GENERICA: Features of the American landscape that are exactly the same no matter where one is, such as fast food joints, strip malls, and subdivisions.

OHNOSECOND: That minuscule fraction of time in which you realize that you've just made a BIG mistake.

WOOFS: Well Off Older Folks.

CUBE FARM: An office filled with cubicles.

PRAIRIE DOGGING: When someone yells or drops something loudly in a cube farm, and people's heads pop up over the walls to see what's going on.

Thanks to Liz Burton for her 2005 list.

Guidelines for cats

2004-12-23T07:19:00.000-05:00

A fun page for cat lovers. I particularly like the concept of Bed Mice and Bag Mice. I also like the last paragraph, which exemplifies the difference between cats and dogs:

"Humans:
Humans have three primary functions: to feed us, to play with and give attention to us, and to clean the litter box. It is important to maintain one's Dignity when around humans so that they will not forget who is the master of the house. Humans need to know basic rules. They can be taught if you start early and are consistent."

Cats rule.

The Killer Quiz

2004-12-17T07:01:00.000-05:00

Ever wonder if you could spot a bad guy just by looking at his face? This quiz asks you to differentiate the serial killers from the Programming Language Inventors.

One way to see money

2004-12-14T07:07:00.000-05:00

When the government talks about deficit, and it's in the millions or billions, it's hard to picture what that means. We know what a dollar bill looks like --or in the case of Canadians, what a $5 bill looks like-- but what does $87 billion look like, one dollar on top of the other? $87 billion is what President Bush asked in additional funds to Congress in September 2003 in order to continue the fight in Afghanistan and Irak.

It's so large that it's almost impossible to imagine. Well, wonder no more. This is what $87,000,000,000,000.00 looks like.

And if you're interested in finding out the real costs of the war in Irak, go to to National Priorities Project Cost of War page. Now try to imagine that much money.

The Pessimist's Paradise

2004-12-09T07:08:00.000-05:00

When motivation doesn't work, why not tap into people's negativity? It's well known that people in general see black clouds much more easily than rainbows. (Dont' you hate these eternal optimists? They're not normal, I tell you) This site shows a series of posters that made me smile ruefully then laugh out loud at their truths. Stunning pictures as well.

Bravo for self-delusion

2004-12-08T07:56:00.000-05:00

In a study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, US students fared near the bottom of the countries surveyed in math knowledge, 28th out of 40 but "with the poorest showing relative to dollars spent on education". And as SciScoop goes on saying:

On the positive side (see chapter 3 of the report, "Students beliefs about themselves"), US students were reported to have the highest self-esteem, with 72% saying they were good at math. In Hong Kong, in contrast, only 25% said they did well - Hong Kong was ranked 4th of the 40 countries.

This is positive? I think these kids need a reality check. This is another example of the US attitude with which they may bring about their own demise.

In contrast, Canada was 13th. "Australia, Canada, Finland and Japan stand out for high standards of both quality and equity, with above-average mathematics performance and below-average impact of socio-economic background on student performance."

Good old Canada, safely in the middle as usual, sitting on the fence, happy about itself.

Miracle Foods

2004-12-03T06:57:00.000-05:00

Religion can do strange things to people. Some come from genuine faith and have positive results. Some lead to exploit others or "see" things. There's the Virgin Mary Grilled Cheese that sold on eBay for $28,000 and the Virgin Mary Holding Baby Jesus Corn Kernel. There's the Jesus Fish Stick, and the NutriGrain cereal that looks like ET (which sold for $1035). There's the Tennessee Nun Bun (a Mother Teresa lookalike) and the Miracle Tortilla of New Mexico, sporting the face of Jesus. Finally, there's the Aubergine Slice of India, which has been enshrined in a mosque because its seeds spell the word Allah in Urdu.

Is it only me, or do all these show a kind of desperation to feel the divine in their lives? Or maybe I'll just put my cynical hat on and say that these people are looking for their five minutes of fame.

(From Museum of Hoaxes)

If you're reading this blog...

2004-12-02T08:12:00.000-05:00

You absolutely must go to this page.

That's all I have to say for today.

The Urban Art of John Felice Ceprano

2004-11-26T07:18:00.000-05:00

Every year, parts of the Ottawa River become so low that its bottom is revealed. Ceprano has taken advantage of that fact to give way to his imagination. He says that the "sculptures are free-standing, unattached and temporal, dismantled by nature each winter season." Each winter, the ice topples them. As soon as the water level is low enough, Ceprano rebuilds them, looking totally different one year from the next.

Saturn's latest daughter

2004-11-25T06:45:00.000-05:00

Thethys, one of Saturn's 33 moons, was photographed quite clearly by Cassini, just under the planet's south pole.

"This latest image in Saturn’s family album was captured on 18 October at a distance of 3.9 million kilometres from Saturn by the Cassini spacecraft. It clearly shows the Ithaca Chasma, a vast trench about 65 kilometres (40 miles) wide, on the surface of Tethys."

The Cassini spacecraft will soon launch the Huygens probe, which will hopefully pierce through the beautiful planet's dense gas cover, land unharmed, and send back pictures of the surface. And maybe an alien or two??

Speeding outhouse

2004-11-24T07:46:00.000-05:00

Gives throning a new definition.

"Powered by a 50-year-old, 750-pound Boeing jet turbine that Stender bought for $5,000, the “Port-O-Jet” can top 46 mph with a tailwind. “It’s not real aerodynamic,” he allows. That said, he’s beaten buddy Tim Arfons’s jet barstool two of the four times they’ve raced."

From Popular Science online.