The author of this book might have been motivated by anger.
When I get annoyed at stuff, I write. For a long time, I thought maybe something was wrong with me for using such a negative feeling until I read a portion of Neil Gaiman’s new book A View from the Cheap Seats.
There’s a section at the very end that talked about how famous author Terry Pratchett (Small Gods and a lot of Discworld stuff) used anger as his motivation. In a lot of ways, Pratchett was a humorous writer, so to me, it was surprising that he used anger to drive him to write. Anger is more extreme than annoyance, and Pratchett had some stuff going on in his personal life that justifiably caused extreme emotions. But when I go through an extreme emotional phase, I can’t concentrate on being creative.
Anger is too much for me, but something minor like annoyance? I constantly use annoyance as motivation, which is good because recently there’s been a lot of minor stuff that I’ve found annoying. Maybe I’m getting more annoyed with more stuff as I’m getting older, but it’s been very easy for me to write recently.
Some kid got on national TV for doing mediocre celebrity imitations. A lot of people can do celebrity imitations, but since this was a kid, he got on television. I don’t like it when kids get on television. Almost every show/movie I watch is ruined by kid actors. Plus, being on television teaches kids a bad lesson. Once they’re adults, it’ll be almost impossible to get on television again. They will have peaked as kids. They’ll live the rest of their lives knowing the best is behind them. Then again, that’s what YouTube is for.
But by the time today’s kids are adults, television might be what performers do when they can’t make it big on YouTube.
Anyway, I don’t have to watch kids on TV because when they show up, I suddenly feel motivated to write.
Overenthusiastic applause and cheering is annoying. I can’t watch talk shows or late night shows because the audiences cheer too much. When somebody tells a mediocre joke, the audience laughs too hard. It’s not their fault; they’re having a good time. I don’t want them to change their ways. I can either turn on the captions, or I can change the channel. Or better yet, I can go write.
Almost all new popular music is annoying. That new Ghostbusters theme song by Fall Out Boy is annoying. Even the movie looks annoying, and it’s not because the cast is all-female. The cast seems all-obnoxious. In the original Ghostbusters, only Bill Murray was obnoxious, and his character was punished for it almost as often as he was rewarded. I like movies where obnoxious behavior gets punished, even if it’s just a little bit.
There’s going to be a lot of Ghostbusters hype, so I might be in the mood to write a lot soon.
You can’t really define annoying. All of us have different standards. A few years ago, a study found that the word moist was considered to be the most annoying word in the English language. Moist has no effect on me. To me, share is the most annoying word. I had a teacher who pronounced share as “shaaaaaaaaiiiiiiirrrr,” and she said it a lot. Back then, I didn’t write when I got annoyed. I just shivered and looked down at my desk.
Now that I’m an adult, I have more control over my own actions. When I get annoyed, I can close the door and write.
For a while, I believed I was being too negative for letting my annoyances motivate me to write. Then I realized, if anything, I’m lucky I live today. With so much new content on TV and the internet, it’s easy to find annoying stuff. And that makes it much easier for me to write.
*****
What do you think? What emotion/feeling motivates you to write? What do you find annoying?
We didn’t HAVE to do this. It was merely a suggestion. (image via wikimedia)
The monkey bars at our local park just got taken down because a kid broke his arm on them a few weeks ago. At least, that’s the rumor, and I’m pretty sure it’s true. The park still has some slides and see-saws and exercise equipment, but it’s kind of bare. When I was a kid, parks had more stuff. We had merry go rounds (that we shot bottle rockets off of), monkey bars (that we’d break our arms on), and sand boxes (that somebody peed in). Most of those are gone now.
“That’s stupid,” my youngest daughter said when I told her why the bars were no longer in the park.
I don’t trust my daughter’s opinion on a lot of things. She doesn’t understand liability, hospital bills, and stuff like that. She knows a kid who got her toes sliced on an ice rink, so she understands inherent risk. The ice rink is still open, but part of that might be because parents have to sign waivers. I’m not sure the waivers mean much. A lawyer friend of mine laughs every time we have to sign waivers at a kid’s party.
“These don’t mean sh*t,” he declares, and he signs them without reading them. He’s my friend, but I don’t know how good of a lawyer he is. He travels a lot, though, and his house and cars are bigger than mine. As far as I remember, my parents didn’t have to sign many waivers when I was a kid. Life was more dangerous back then, and we didn’t know it.
My daughters look at me bewildered when I tell them that seat belts were not mandatory when I was growing up. Parents usually forced their kids to wear them but often didn’t do so themselves. That way, the kids might be orphaned after a traffic accident, but at least they’d still be alive. Kids didn’t have to wear helmets while riding bikes. Skateboarders didn’t wear pads, and we intentionally chose streets with the steepest hills to try our stunts.
We used to ride unrestrained in the back of pick up trucks. My hair always looked great after riding in the back of a pick up truck. No hair dryer could get my hair to look as good as it did after riding in the back of a pick up truck. If that pick up truck had ever been in a wreck, I don’t want to think about how far (and fast) my body would have flown and how many places where they would have found my body parts. At least the hair on what was left of my corpse would have looked good.
When I was a kid, bottles didn’t have child safety caps. If I wanted to swallow a bunch of aspirin (that’s what we called pain relief medicine back then), I could open a bottle and chug down a bunch of pills. We had easy access to a bunch of cleaning fluids too. Nobody I know ever drank any though. Our parents would have killed us if we did.
We even had a song about it, based on Comet, a prominent cleaner of the time. I’m not sure what tune it was based on, but the lyrics went like this:
Comet/
It makes your teeth turn green/
Comet/
It tastes like gasoline/
Comet/
It makes you vomit/
So eat some Comet/
And vomit/
Today!!!!!!!!!!
I didn’t write those lyrics, but I recognize the genius behind them. We were too young to worry about body image, so all of us hated vomiting, so therefore nobody would eat Comet or anything like it. But we knew somebody must have done it because otherwise nobody would have written that song.
Pre-teens used to have paper routes. Some kid in a nearby town got killed while he was doing his morning paper route, and the next day another kid took his place. The paper route was a popular job. At the time, I wanted a paper route too. Now, it’s adults who do the paper routes, even though nobody really wants the newspapers anymore.
During the summer I could eat breakfast and tell my mom I was playing outside all day, and it would be okay. Lots of kids played outside, baseball in the streets, riding bikes down steep hills, swimming in backyard pools while the home owners were at work. It was great. Then cable TV was invented. Once we had cable, there was no need to go outside anymore.
Parents today sometimes yearn for the good ol’ days. I like that kids are supervised. If I go to the mall and see a bunch of unsupervised kids running around, I get annoyed. Kids should get bossed around as much as possible. It prepares them for their adult lives. Plus, being supervised makes them safer. All that freedom I had running around, it was great, but I was probably lucky I didn’t get killed.
I’m really glad I didn’t get killed.
*****
What do you think? How dangerous was your daily routine when you were growing up? What safety precautions do you remember not having back then?
*****
And for more about old things that are tough to explain, read Old Things That Are Tough To Explain: You Could Only Watch It Once.
(image via Wikimedia)
Even though Donald Trump is in the title, this really isn’t about politics. It’s about writing about politics. I sometimes write about writers, and Stephen King has been talking and writing about Donald Trump, and since Stephen King is a prolific writer, I think commenting about his comments is justified.
In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, Stephen King was asked his opinion of Donald Trump. When celebrities talk about politics, I usually cringe, but sometimes authors can do a good job because they’re better communicators than other entertainers who only sing and/or act. Since Stephen King is a writer, I was expecting something insightful. Instead, he said something that I thought was the opposite of insightful:
“I am very disappointed in the country. I think that he’s sort of the last stand of a sort of American male who feels like women have gotten out of their place and they’re letting in all these people that have the wrong skin colors. He speaks to those people. Trump is extremely popular because people would like to have a world where you just didn’t question that the white American was at the top of the pecking order.”
To be fair to Stephen King, he was asked the question. It’s not like he brought it up himself, and he’s not paid to be a pundit. On the other hand, I myself am “disappointed” (in quotes because it’s a word King himself used) because I expect professional writers to express ideas that are more original than this. Instead, King went directly to skin color and race. Anybody can do that.
A fiction writer is supposed to have empathy for characters and people in general, and King’s analysis of Trump supporters shows a lack of insight into people with whom he disagrees. A fiction writer should understand human nature. I know a bunch of Trump supporters, and I know a bunch of Clinton supporters, and both groups are great people with different motivations for voting, and the people whom King described don’t match the Trump supporters I know. I thought that since King is a pretty good writer, he would dig deeper than what he did.
Later in the interview, King says something else that wasn’t quite insightful.
“Of all the candidates who ran this year, the only one who is remotely qualified to do the job is Hillary Clinton. There’s a lot of prejudice against her, just because she’s a woman. Having been raised by a woman and lived in a family where my wife has, like, six sisters, I hate that.”
Again, any average person could have said what King said. If anything, the “there’s a lot of prejudice against her, just because she’s a woman” argument might be sexist, because it uses Clinton’s gender to shield her from legitimate criticism.
Besides, if anybody should be criticized, it’s a politician. Politicians write the laws that we (but they often don’t) have to follow, and it’s natural to dislike/distrust people who tell you what to do. A famous writer who delves into human nature should understand all this.
As disappointing as King’s Trump/Clinton commentary was, the anti-Trump open letter last month was even worse. First of all, open letters suck. I’ve never seen a good open letter. Even if an open letter has ever been good, the fact that it was an open letter made it automatically suck.
The worst part of this open letter was that every sentence started with the word because. When I noticed that, I could barely read anything else. Starting with because seems like a high school technique. After the because, each sentence was filled with a bunch of adjectives and generalizations. I’m sure Republicans could take the open letter and just switch out a few adjectives and attack Hillary Clinton the same way.
I’d even say that Donald Trump’s speeches are better written than Stephen King’s open letter. I mean, I don’t agree with a lot of Trump’s speeches, but they were better written than the open letter. If I were a famous author, I’d make sure any open letter I signed was better written than a Donald Trump speech. That’s not a compliment to Trump’s campaign speeches. That’s an insult to open letters.
If I were a famous writer (it probably won’t happen), I’d never sign my name on somebody else’s open letter. Maybe, just maybe, I’d write one of my own, but I wouldn’t sign somebody else’s.
*****
Reading about politics almost always puts me in a grouchy mood. As soon as I saw that Stephen King mentioned politics, I should have stopped reading. I probably shouldn’t have written this either, but I thought maybe a famous writer would have something unique to say. I’ve learned a valuable lesson:
Nobody looks good talking about politics.
And I probably just proved it about myself too.
The hand inside this sock puppet could belong to a plagiarist indie author. (image via wikimedia)
It must be fun plagiarizing other people’s stuff. A plagiarist gets the credit for (and maybe even delusional satisfaction from) creating something original. Maybe the plagiarist even gets paid. Between getting credit and getting paid, there’s a lot of incentive to be a plagiarist.
Technology has made plagiarism a lot easier today than it used to be, but it has also made plagiarism easier to discover. A few months ago, I caught my daughter copy/pasting an article and changing a couple adjectives for a research assignment. After I yelled at her (in a monotone voice) for plagiarism, I showed her how easy it would be for a teacher to prove that she had cheated just by using a search engine. Then I had her explain the paragraph to me while she wasn’t looking at it. I told her to write down what she had said instead of copy/pasting. Maybe my daughter didn’t intend to plagiarize, but adults (especially adults who are writers) should know better.
Supposedly, there’s a lot of plagiarism going on in independent publishing. At least, there are a lot of accusations of plagiarism. It makes sense that a plagiarist would go after an independent author. If you plagiarize a work that has a big publishing company behind it, that company will sue you and destroy you like the insignificant flea you are. But an indie author probably can’t do that.
Suing a plagiarist can be expensive, especially when most indie authors don’t have much money to work with. Any response an author takes requires time and energy, and that’s going to interfere with the indie author’s creative state of mind. Plus, it must be deflating; even if I write something that appeals to a lot of people, somebody else is going to steal it and chances are I won’t even know about it. If I were being plagiarized, I’d almost rather not know about it. Maybe I’d rather be blissfully unaware of the crimes being committed against me as I single-mindedly created new content.
As far as I know, nobody has plagiarized my books or blogs. It’s almost insulting. If somebody plagiarized me, I’d at least feel relevant. Then again, I know I’d be really pissed if I got plagiarized, especially if the plagiarist made money off my stuff. Even I haven’t made money off my stuff. I wouldn’t feel “violated” as some writers put it, but I’d be pissed off.
Some writers plagiarize public domain authors because estates of public domain literature can’t sue anymore. Some authors justify it by giving classics authors co-author credit, such as Pride and Prejudice with Zombies. If I were going to plagiarize public domain, I’d go all-out and make it everybody curse with modern day slang. Cursing is funny to a lot of people, especially if it’s done in formal situations. I could write Pride and Prejudice with Cuss Words or Pride and Profanity. I’d still give Jane Austen top billing on the book cover.
Even though plagiarizing the classics is allowed, it still seems like it’s breaking the rules, and I’m a rule follower. Sometimes I get tired of being the rule follower, though. Maybe I should become the plagiarist after all.
A few years ago I thought about being the sock puppet, an author who writes fake reviews for his/her own books. I thought about creating a bunch of fake accounts and giving myself undeservedly high praise for my own books. I was even going to plagiarize other reviews so that all of my favorable reviews to myself would sound different. Some authors pay for book reviews or have their friends write 5-star reviews. I figured that if I was going to cheat, I’d rather do it myself and not involve others. Even when I was in school, I preferred working by myself, and I haven’t gotten much more sociable as I’ve gotten older.
I decided not to use any fake reviews (as far as I know). Now my books have only a few reviews, but they’re all real (and sincere, I think). Writing my own fake reviews wouldn’t be as bad as plagiarism, but it’s still dishonest.
I think I could have gotten away with it, though. I think I could be a great diabolical mastermind if only I would put my bad ideas into practice. It’s not conscience or lack of guts that keeps me from following through. I just know that if I plagiarized books and wrote fake reviews and STILL couldn’t make a lot of money off my writing, I’d really feel like a failure.
*****
What do you think? If you could plagiarize any book, what would it be? Which public domain book would you like to change around? Has anybody ever plagiarized your work? Have you ever plagiarized?
*****
When I was a kid, I got my mouth washed out with soap for saying the word crap.
Looking back, it ticks me off because now I know….
Now available on Amazon!
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(image via Wikimedia)
Today I found out that I’ve received a small refund credit from Amazon. It’s not cash, and it’s not worth a lot, but it’s unexpected and I can buy something nice with it. I like getting a refund when I never asked for it. If I have to ask for a refund, then there was usually something bad that happened first, and that can ruin the good feeling of getting refund credit.
It’s not that Amazon did anything wrong to give me a refund. According to the U.S. government, it was the fault of Apple and a bunch of publishing companies.
A few years ago, the U.S. Department of Justice accused Apple and a bunch of book publishers of colluding against Amazon to keep the price of ebooks artificially high. Since Amazon, Apple, and the publishers have reached a settlement, customers who bought ebooks during that time period of collusion can get refunds for the price difference.
The details are kind of boring. You can read about them here if you want. I was aware of the lawsuit a few years ago, but it was not as glamorous as other stuff going on. There was no sex or murder (that we know of), and it involved lots of numbers, so journalists probably didn’t want to deal with the story. I was aware of it only because I try to pay attention to book news. Anytime book news is something that is not related to J.K. Rowling, Stephen King, James Patterson, or a celebrity children’s book (or memoir), it catches my attention.
Amazon figured out the refunds for each customer through an algorithm, but I don’t know if I should trust the algorithm. Sometimes Amazon’s algorithm suggests books that I don’t want to read. If the algorithm can’t pick books for me to read, then how can it determine my refund credit? Maybe there’ll be some class-action lawsuit claiming Amazon messed up the algorithm. I’d hate to sit on the jury for that lawsuit.
I almost didn’t know about my refund. Amazon sent me a notification through my app, but a bunch of apps send notifications, and I usually ignore them. I almost ignored this notification too. I saw the words Amazon and free, but I thought it was just another Kindle Unlimited ad, so I ignored it. If you’ve been ignoring your Amazon notifications, double check. You might have gotten an unexpected refund.
If you don’t want to spend it right away, you can wait a year. It doesn’t expire until July 24, 2017. At first, I misread the date and thought I had only a couple days to spend the refund credit. It actually stressed me out because I already have stuff to read and I wasn’t sure how I wanted to spend my credit. Then I got mad at myself for getting stressed out over how to spend a refund credit. Then I got mad at myself for not realizing I had an entire year to spend it. I really don’t get mad at myself very often. It was just one of those days.
Anyway, if you’ve been an Amazon customer for the last few years, check to see if you’ve received a refund credit. And if you did, don’t stress yourself out while spending it.
*****
If you’re not sure how to spend your Amazon refund credit, this won’t take much out of it:
Only 99 cents on Amazon!
Great Expectations can be difficult if you’re average.
Classic novels are classic for a reason, but sometimes the sentences in those classics can be tough for an average guy to read. For example, struggling readers might think the novel Great Expectations by Charles Dickens has an unintentionally ironic title because they don’t expect much, except that it will be difficult. Charles Dickens has a reputation, after all; he’s not the easiest author to get through.
I know that “bad” and “good” sentences are subjective. My rule is that if a writing instructor would call it a bad sentence when a student writes it, then it’s a bad sentence. Classic literature is filled with sentences that writing instructors would tell us not to write. True, modern literature has many of the same issues too, but it’s more fun to find bad sentences in literature that instructors tell us are the classics.
I thought it would be easy to find these kinds of bad sentences in Great Expectations, but after reading the first few chapters, I changed my mind.
The sentences in Great Expectations aren’t as complicated as I was expecting. At least for me, they’re easier to follow than sentences in other classics, and I think I could even diagram most of the sentence in Great Expectations (if I really wanted to). But I saw a few sentences that I wasn’t sure about. These sentences might be great to sophisticated readers. To an average reader, however, they might suck. And if students turn in sentences like these to their writing instructors… Look out!!
SENTENCE #1 (Chapter Three)
I had seen the damp lying outside of my little window, as if some goblin had been crying there all night, and using the window for a pocket-handkerchief.
My instructors might have thought that was a good sentence, but I don’t know. They might have said this kind of figurative language detracts from the story. Why did we need to have a metaphor describing the damp outside window? Where did the goblin come from? And the window being used a handkerchief, well, that’s just disgusting.
One of my writing instructors was paranoid, had a constantly runny nose, and carried a handkerchief. He would have taken this sentence as an insult.
SENTENCE #2 (Chapter Three)
The gates and dykes and banks came bursting at me through the mist, as if they cried as plainly as could be, ‘A boy with Somebody-else’s pork pie! Stop him!”
My writing instructors were not fans of the speaking simile, where an inanimate object talks, but it’s a technique that Dickens uses. If I had written a sentence like that in high school or college, my instructors would have told me to chop off the second half. We didn’t need to know the exact words that the mist is figuratively crying out. Seeing those words is distracting. Maybe it wasn’t distracting in the 1800s, but it’s distracting now. At least, that’s what my writing instructors would have told me if I had written it.
SENTENCE #3 (Chapter Three)
On every rail and gate, wet lay clammy; and the marsh mist was so thick, that the wooden finger on the post directing people to our village- a direction which they never accepted, for they never came there- was invisible to me until I was close under it.
This was just a fancy way of saying that Pip couldn’t see much in front of him, but it took a long time to get to a simple idea. That’s when descriptions can get in the way, my writing instructors would say. We’ve got a thick mist, a sign with a finger that nobody pays attention to even when the mist isn’t thick, and the finger isn’t necessary to explain that the mist was thick. That was the whole point, wasn’t it? The mist was thick.
But since it takes too long to get to its point, I think my instructors would have called this a bad sentence if I had written it.
SENTENCE #4 (Chapter Seven)
mI deEr JO i opE U r krWite wEll i opE i shAl soN B haBelL 4 2 teeDge U J O aN theN wE shOrl b sO glOdd aN wEn I M peNgtD 2 u JO woT larX an blEvE ME inF xnPiP.
Even by today’s texting standards, that’s a bad sentence. I think I’ve written sentences like this in the middle of the night, but there’s no way I’d ever have shown them to my writing instructors.
The word bad has such a negative connotation, and I know that most of the sentences listed above aren’t really that bad. A lot of them together, however, can make a book difficult to read. And if you turn sentences in like these to your writing instructors, some of them will find the sentences questionable.
Questionable. Maybe that’s a better word than bad. Maybe the next series from Dysfunctional Literacy will be… “Questionable Sentences in Classic Literature.”
*****
What do you think? What is your opinion of each sentence? Would you use a speaking simile in your own writing? Do you think context matters for SENTENCE #4?
*****
Here are some more Bad Sentences in Classic Literature!
Bad Sentences in Classic Literature: Jane Eyre
Bad Sentences in Classic Literature: Moby Dick
Bad Sentences in Classic Literature: The Great Gatsby
Bad Sentences in Classic Literature: The Scarlet Letter
Bad Sentences in Classic Literature: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
Bad Sentences in Classic Literature: Great Expectations
Everybody would have Grimaced if they’d seen the kid vomiting behind them.
I didn’t mean to take a picture of a kid throwing up.
It was near lunchtime at the comic book convention, and food vendors had just opened up their booths. Groups of costumed characters (I guess they’re called cosplayers now) were taking pictures with the rest of us normal people.
Everybody was getting along. Marvel and DC cosplayers were taking selfies together. The weirdest mix was a group of imperial stormtroopers posing with the McDonalds Hamburglar and Grimace (the goofy purple monster). The comic book convention is the only place where different genres of cosplay can get along. If they’d met in Times Square, there would have been a brawl.
Anyway, a bunch of bystanders were taking pictures of the Star Wars/McDonalds team-up in front of a starship corridor backdrop. Since I’m slightly taller than average, I stood behind everybody else and took a wide shot that caught part of the food court behind the backdrop.
As the characters were posing, I heard a faint “UUUrrrgh” grunt and a prolonged splaaaaaaatt!
When you’re a parent, you recognize the “UUUrrrgh” and splaaaaaatt sounds, especially on a concrete floor. Even with all the convention clatter, I heard the vomit sound, but the cosplayers didn’t notice, probably because their backs were turned.
My daughters hadn’t noticed yet either, so I steered them away from the food court because I didn’t want them to react to the vomit. My youngest daughter has a weak stomach, and I didn’t want her setting off a domino effect in such a crowded space.
“Let’s come back later,” I said, shooing them to a caricature artist on the other side of the convention floor.
“I’m hungry,” my youngest said, beelining toward the food vendors.
“You won’t be if you keep walking that way,” I muttered and turned her around.
My oldest looked back at the food court and laughed. “Some boy just puked.”
I hesitated and said, “Yeah, I think I got a picture of it too.”
For some morbid reason, all three of us wanted to know if I had caught it on my cell phone, so we stopped in a secluded corner where I could check my phone. I even put my back up against the wall so nobody could sneak up from behind and conk me on the head. I tapped the camera button on my phone and and inspected the Star Wars/McDonalds photo.
“There he is,” I said, pointing to the right edge of the picture.
“Oooooh,” my oldest daughter said in disgust, but she snatched my phone and expanded the section with puking kid.
“Uggggh,” my youngest daughter said. She made faces, but she kept staring and watching as my oldest daughter manipulated the picture size.
“When I was a kid, you couldn’t expand the picture,” I proclaimed. “If a kid threw up in the background of a picture, it stayed in the background of the picture.”
The puking kid was lucky it was my phone. If my daughters had taken the picture on their phones, they would have gone public with it. In fact, they begged me to text the picture to them. They were going to post it on Instagram. They were going to make a meme with it. They wanted to make this kid go viral.
I couldn’t let that happen to the poor boy. He’d probably been dreaming of a fun day at the comic convention, and he ended up throwing up in public. Having his vomit go viral might have made that the worst day ever for him. Plus, I don’t like meme humor. I think it’s down there with puns and famous movie quotes. And even if I did like memes, I wouldn’t want to create one with some poor kid throwing up in public.
As a parent, it’s my responsibility to tell my kids when they have a bad idea. There’s a part of me that would like to share a photo of a kid puking, but the adult part of me needed to take control and not do it. Bad ideas are great for fiction but not for real life.
So naturally, I put the picture on my blog. I have standards, though. I’ve cropped the picture so that you can’t see the kid losing his lunch. In the original, he’s off to the side in the food court in the distance, and you might miss it if you don’t look closely. But with an expanded picture, you can pretty much tell which of the food vendors he’d just visited.
When you’re in public, you can expect to end up in somebody else’s pictures. It’s unavoidable. I try to never scratch my nose or adjust my pants in public because you never know who’s making memes I wouldn’t want to adjust my pants and discover later that I’ve become a meme. That’s one my goals in life, meme avoidance. I’ve always tried to avoid conflict. I might as well avoid becoming a meme too.
When we got home, my wife asked us, “What’d you get?”
We’d gotten caricatures, a celebrity autograph, superhero t-shirts, posters, an action pillow, and assorted comic book related trinkets. What was the first thing my youngest daughter said to my wife?
“Dad took a picture of a boy throwing up.”
*****
When I was a kid, I got my mouth washed out with soap for saying the word crap.
Looking back, it ticks me off because now I know….
Now available on Amazon!
Not THAT kind of “adult” coloring book! (image via wikimedia)
When I first heard the term “adult coloring book,” I thought it would be something I couldn’t show my daughters. I was actually kind of disappointed to see that it was simply a coloring book too intricate for most kids. 20 years ago, we called them black-and-white comic books. We rarely colored our black-and-white comic books back then, but we could have. Since we have to be clear about how “adult” these adult coloring books are, they should probably be called coloring books for adults. When it comes to the word adult, word placement means everything.
Most people who don’t read books might not recognize the name Chuck Palahniuk, but they know Fight Club. Everybody knows Fight Club. Everybody knows the rules of Fight Club. Even people who haven’t see the movie know the rules of Fight Club. Anyway, famous author Chuck Palahniuk who wrote the book Fight Club is collaborating with Dark Horse comics to put out a collection of new short stories in a coloring book format . Fans of Chuck Palahniuk might buy his coloring book simply because they’re fans of Chuck Palahniuk. Fans of coloring books for adults might buy it because it’s intriguing, and then they might read some of Chuck’s other books later on.
Dark Horse is a comic book company that has put out a lot of underrated stuff. It’s not ever going to overtake Marvel or DC, but it’s a respectable company that takes some risks, and some of their stuff (at least 10-20 years ago) was worth reading. Maybe they’re hoping to attract comic book readers too. Comic book fanboys like Fight Club. Comic book fanboys like anything that has fights in it.
Some adults malign this new trend of coloring books for adults. Some say it’s childish, that adults today are clinging to their childhoods rather than embracing their responsibilities. I read comic books until my mid-40s, so I don’t have any business mocking somebody else’s hobbies. As far as I’m concerned, as long as adults are fulfilling their responsibilities as adults, their hobbies should be whatever they want it to be.
I never enjoyed coloring, though, when I was younger. I had a few coloring books, but to me they were a waste of time. The stories were always very basic, and they didn’t take long to read. They usually had only one sentence at the bottom of each page. They weren’t very challenging. Even the pictures weren’t complicated, and if you colored outside the lines, some other kid always criticized you.
Color by numbers were even worse because it eliminated all choice. “What kind of fascist puts out a color-by-number coloring book?” I yelled out in school one day. I didn’t know what fascist meant, but it sounded good. I think I’d heard that word around my house a lot.
As a former comic collector, I’d be torn about the Chuck Palhniuk coloring book because the first rule of comic collecting is that you don’t mess up the comic book. You wrap it. You store it in a safe, dry, dark location so the color doesn’t fade. And for god’s sake, you never color a comic book, even if it’s black-and-white. Comic collectors who buy the coloring book won’t color it because they see coloring it as ruining the value. 30 years from now, somebody might want a mint condition Chuck Palahniuk coloring book for adults.
I’ve read some Chuck Palahniuk short stories. To me, this coloring book for adults looks like a gimmick. I don’t see how making a new short story into a coloring book for adults makes the story better or improves the experience. I’m not against a coloring book for adults. If they made a Fight Club coloring book, I might buy it. It’s Fight Club.
*****
What do you think? Is a short story coloring book for adults anything more than a gimmick. Would you be more likely to buy an adult coloring book or a coloring book for adults?
(image via wikimedia)
The internet is a massive race for new content. Monolithic websites combine news with cat videos, scantily clad women, and lists, lots and lots of lists. YouTubers rush out new videos every day. When you read/watch too much of it, you realize most of the content is regurgitated. So many people are creating new content that most of the ideas are overlapping.
And with so much new content being forced on the public, it’s tough for independent artists and writers to make money off of it.
I’m not complaining. 20 years ago, it was almost impossible for independent writers to make money. Now it’s just difficult. I’d rather live in a time where it’s difficult to make money than a time when it’s impossible. But I’m not sure I’m prepared to do what it takes to be successful in a difficult environment.
Last week I ran across an article about plagiarism where an indie author says she has to write 15 books a year to make a living. 15 books? That’s James Patterson range, and he has a bunch of co-authors doing his work for him. I don’t want to use this author’s name because she’s feeling a lot of stress from writing (and other issues) anyway, and even though she probably doesn’t read my blog and wouldn’t care what I had to say, I don’t want to feel like I’m criticizing her personally. She’s making a living by writing, which is what I’d like to do, so more power to her.
But 15 books a year? I’m sorry. I can’t let that go. 15 books a year.
This prolific author writes erotic romance books, and that’s a completely different genre from what I write. I’ve written one sex scene in my life, and she’s written 75 sex books in the last five years. I don’t know how many sex scenes go into an erotic romance, but I’m guessing it’s more than one.
Who’s got the dirty mind? I’m a guy, and I don’t think about sex enough to write 15 erotic books a year. If I had to write 15 erotic books a year, I’d feel a lot of pressure, and I’ve heard what can happen to some guys when they feel too much stress about their performance…
I don’t want to think about it.
If I were in my 20s or 30s, I’d probably be working for a website churning out that new content. Instead, I’m in my 50s with a job that has nothing to do with writing, so I can take my time. True, I might run out of time (I try not to think about that), but anybody can run out of time and not realize it.
I’m not sure I’d want to be a writer if I had to write 15 books a year to make a living. I’d rather have a day job and struggle selling one ebook at a time. At least I’m having fun writing. I don’t always have fun at my job, but it doesn’t feel like the independent writer who has to write 15 books a year is having fun either. And if you can’t have fun writing 15 sex books a year, then what can you have fun writing about?
Writers have to be a little delusional, but I’ve never been insane enough to think I could write 15 books in a year. I couldn’t think of enough new ideas to fill out 15 books. Readers wouldn’t want to read 15 of my books a year. I haven’t even finished reading 15 books this last year (I’ve started dozens/hundreds, but I’ve finished only a few.) Writers shouldn’t write more books in a year than they read in a year. I don’t know if that’s true, but it sounds good.
Sometimes I complain about my lack of financial success as a writer, but maybe I shouldn’t. I’m having fun, and the writing isn’t stressing me out. If I felt like I had to write 15 books a year to make a living on writing, maybe, just maybe it wouldn’t be worth it.
*****
What do you think? What is your book-per-year limit? How much writing would make the whole thing not worth it for you? Is it better to write for fun or to stress out making money from it?
At least Ned Stark doesn’t have to read all seven books to find out what happens to him.
No matter what time of year it is, people who watch Game of Thrones like to talk about Game of Thrones. It can be annoying to the innocent bystanders who don’t watch it. Even worse are the book snobs who have read the books and watch the show. The book snobs have had an advantage for years because they’ve known what was going to happen on the show and would like to sprinkle spoiler hints just to piss off the rest of us who haven’t read the books.
Just so you know, I have nothing against book snobs. I was a book snob when the Lord of the Rings movies came out. And I’m still a comic book snob when it comes to superhero movies. I’ve bored many non-comic book readers about how the movies are different from the original comic books. I’ve lost friendships over it, and I don’t even have many friends. So being a book snob isn’t necessarily meant as a negative.
As much as I respect them, it’s fun to annoy the book snobs by calling the book series A Game of Thrones. A Game of Thrones is the name of the first book, the book snobs keep telling me. The name of the entire series is A Song of Ice and Fire. The book snobs are right, but they don’t need to remind me every time I mention the Game of Thrones books. Everybody knows what I mean. If I say A Song of Ice and Fire, a bunch of people who know about the Game of Thrones TV show but don’t give a crap about the books won’t know what I’m talking about.
So from here on out, I’m going to call A Song of Ice and Fire… A Game of Thrones.
With the series overtaking the books, book snobs don’t have as much bragging rights anymore. Now, they’re just as uncertain about what’s going to happen as the rest of us, especially since the show has changed a bunch of stuff.
A Song of Ice and Fire was originally supposed to be a trilogy. Now it’s set for seven books, with only five of them completed. But how do we know that author George R.R. Martin won’t decide that seven isn’t enough? If three wasn’t enough, seven might not be either. Three is usually the magic number for trilogies. Once a trilogy goes beyond three books, plots get convoluted, and the reading experience deteriorates. I’m not convinced that seven books will be enough, especially since Martin keeps adding subplots.
Plus, Martin writes other stuff. A new Dunk and Egg book came out a few months ago. If I were an avid fan of ASOIAF, I’d be pissed off that Martin is writing other stuff, even if it’s related to A Game of Thrones. I’m sure Dunk and Egg is very entertaining, but it’s not Game of Thrones.
When I was younger, I hated cliffhangers because the time between episodes seemed to take forever. Now I hate cliffhangers because I’m not sure I’ll be around to see the next episode. I’m not being morbid; I’m just thinking about the odds. Plus, George R. R. Martin might not be around either. If he died before he finished writing Game of Thrones, I’d feel cheated. Dude, I’d think to myself, you had over 20 years. When the author dies before the series is completed, that’s the ultimate cliffhanger.
I don’t want some literary agent or estate lawyer “finding” Martin’s almost-completed manuscript in an attic and hiring another writer to do the editing. If I can’t read the whole thing as it was meant to be read, I don’t want to read it at all.
THE CASE FOR READING GAME OF THRONES
It’s much more detailed than the series, book snobs tell me. Sometimes in the show, things happened that might seem not to make sense, but the books explain it better. Characters have different personalities. Some events are completely different. The first three books supposedly are great, and even the fourth and fifth books have moments of greatness, even if the plots get complicated and stories are told from points of view of characters you might not care about.
Maybe it would be fun to see what changes the TV show made, except the book snobs have already told me. In a way, watching the show is more fun now because the book snobs don’t know much more than I do. And now that the TV show has passed the books, there may be even more changes and the book snobs won’t know it until the book series is completed in a few years… or more!
Ha ha book snobs!
It could be fun reading A Game of Thrones, but there are other books that I want to read. And they don’t have television shows based on them. And they’re already completely written.
*****
What do you think? What other good reasons are there to read A Game of Thrones? Do you trust George R.R. Martin to finish the series?
*****
While you’re waiting for George R.R. Martin to finish A Song of Ice and Fire (if he ever does), you can read The Sunset Rises: A 1990s Romantic Comedy (sample chapter) .
And you can purchase The Sunset Rises: A 1990s Romantic Comedy here on Amazon!
Or you can get your own signed copy (I might even write a note where I pretend I know you!)
The Sunset Rises: A 1990s Romantic Comedy
Get a signed copy of my one and only novel, The Sunset Rises: A 1990s Romantic Comedy. The price includes USPS media rate shipping in a sturdy box. My signature is legible, but I’m left-handed, so I might smudge it sometimes. I usually mail out the book within two business days of payment.
$20.00
