How Dumb Is Too Dumb?

Kathyrn Lilley over at The Kill Zone has an interesting post on whether writers are being encouraged to "dumb down" their work be avoiding unfamiliar or highfalutin' words lest they turn off the mainstream audience.

It'll be a sad commentary if we're condemned to confine ourselves to a sixth-grade vocabulary and eschew -- sorry, avoid -- the panoply -- I mean whole bunch -- of wonderful words that English offers. One of the strengths of our language is how it has drawn from so many others, fashioning words to allow precise description of unique things and situations.

What do you think?

Why I Hate Facebook

Here are just a few of the things I hate about Facebook:

1. Posts that you've killed off with the "Hide Story" function resurrect themselves from time to time. Listen, if I've killed it, I really don't give a hoot about someone's new comment.

2. Posts are not in chronological order of their original posting. This is related to (1) above.

3. Some posts by my FB friends don't show up till days after they originally post 'em. WTF kind of tech savvy is that? How much was that IPO worth again?

I could go on. But time for you to sound off. What do you hate about FB?

My First Obscene Review!

A reader -- possibly a reader, possibly just someone who didn't like a comment I left on some website somewhere -- has left a one-star review over at Barnes & Noble, complaining about the author's "political agenda" (as if authors can't have political agendas, though in fact Tainted Souls doesn't really have one). Just to show how articulate he is, the reviewer used a homophobic obscenity to describe the alleged political agenda.

My, my.

How about you? Ever had someone so mad at your "agenda" or story that they skewer you with obscenities.

More Nice Reviews, Still No Cash

I'm leaving Tainted Souls free for a bit longer, since it's gathered some attention and prompted some new reviews, including a couple at Barnes and Noble like this one: "Very good book- held my attention and kept me guessing." I guess I'd rather have people read it for free and write nice things about it than charge for it and have no one read it, but trying to make the whole new publishing paradigm work for a new writer is quite a task, it seems.

POD Publishing with Lulu

I promised earlier I would talk a little about publishing with Lulu, the POD purveyor. No, I don't mean this kind of pod:

I mean POD as in "print on demand." Basically, you set up your book in Lulu's computer server somewhere in the Gobi Desert and every time you, or a customer, wants one, one gets printed up and shoots out the door. Even with the advance in technology, it's still pretty amazing that it can be done at a reasonable price. The current price (at Lulu) for the trade paperback edition of Tainted Souls is $10.47, and the regular, non-Lulu price would be $14.95, which is more or less what you'd pay for a mass-marketed book.

And it cost me nothing to do all this. Except that you are required to buy at least one copy of the book so you can check it before it gets distributed. Lulu takes a cut of $2.00 from the book, but I still don't see how they make money. I don't understand how Google or Facebook make money, either, so I suppose it has more to do with my ignorance than anything else.

It will cost you money if you use their services like formatting, or cover design or marketing or if you want distribution beyond Amazon. If you do everything yourself, though, it's a free ride. You even get a free ISBN.

It was easy. I downloaded a template from Lulu and stuck in my manuscript. I had to adjust a few things here and there (the first lines of each chapter, for example, are in small caps -- something I couldn't figure out how to do on the Kindle, since Kindle owners can change the size of font and thus the number of characters in a line) but no real sweat. If I'd wanted to put in the time, I could have mucked around with the justification and widow control, since Microsoft Word doesn't know how to use hyphens for the former, and gets around the latter by adding or subtracting lines on a page. I didn't bother, though, since for me, setting up for POD was more an ego trip than a serious attempt at book publishing.

I couldn't quite get the cover exactly right -- the print on the spine is a little too far to the left. I tried to fix it but couldn't. I think it has everything to do with Paint.net, which I used to make the cover, rather than Lulu. But again, I don't really care that much. I just did this to have a few copies of my own and so I could give a few copies away to select friends and family. I'm not expecting any orders from Amazon. Especially since the ebook's so much cheaper (as in, free).

So count me in as a big fan of POD. As vanity publishing goes, it sure beats the likes of Publish America, bete noire of the folks at the Absolute Write Water Cooler. No ponying up for big upfront printing costs. No boxes and boxes of unsold books in the garage. And if I seriously wanted to go on a road trip and sell the book, I could order up say, 50 and hit the highway and see how it goes, ordering more as needed. No huge out-of-pocket expenses.

There are other POD printers -- CreateSpace is one. Most charge a fee, though not a huge one. I'm too cheap for that, but if you're interested, be sure to check around before settling on a POD partner.

Now Free on Kindle - PODcast Later

I was going to write a bit today about publishing on demand through Lulu, but I noticed today that TAINTED SOULS was listed as free on Amazon (catching up to everywhere else) so I'll just mention that and write about Lulu later. Gotta take the daughter unit to the doctor this morning anyway, so I'm in kind of a rush as it is.

Apocrypha of the Novel

There's a story that James Joyce, nearly blind by the time, was dictating Finnegan's Wake to Samuel Beckett when there was a knock at the door. "Come in," Joyce said. Beckett, intently scribbling, dutifully wrote down this comment. Later, as Beckett read back what Joyce had dictated, Joyce asked where the errant "Come in" had come from. Beckett explained he must have written it down by mistake. "That's all right," Joyce allegedly said. "Leave it in." So, if you are of such mind to comb meticulously through the 800-plus pages of tiny print that make up Finnegan's Wake, you will eventually come upon a "Come in" that seems out of place.

Although in Finnegan's Wake it's rather hard to tell what's out of place.

I mention this because I was reading through the Lulu-printed copy of Tainted Souls that arrived in the mail yesterday. (A very nice job. I'll post more about this POD stuff next week.) In one chapter I came across an errant sentence that somehow survived multiple revisions of the manuscript only to live on, like the single bacterium that survives a blast of penicillin and goes on to found a whole race of superbugs.

The line is "He wiped his mouth with a napkin."

Originally the scene in which this line occurs took place in a restaurant, but I later moved it outdoors and shortened it considerably. Somehow, though, this line avoided my red pen. So now, completely out of context, a character named "Red Shoes" Mario suddenly pulls a napkin out of nowhere and wipes his mouth. The fact that he must have been eating must be inferred. Well, it could have been worse.

What about you? Did anything slip past you and into the final version or your story or book despite multiple revisions?