The Word Cloud

Since 2007, I've written serial fiction on  a blog called Diary of a Heretic, after a novel I wrote and haven't even finished putting up. I'm not trying to get it published traditionally; it's unlikely to appeal to the mass market--it's about a heretic. The idea was to keep myself from rewriting eveything to death. I would post fiction of 500-700 words every other day as a kind slow tightrope walk. It worked for awhile. Mostly I write novels and my word limit when I'm rewriting runs closer to 1000-plus.
     For several years in addition to my blog, which quickly turned into serial fiction, I wrote flash fictions for an online literary magazine, The View from Here. I spent one day writing a full story in fewer than 500 words and included a heavily worked graphic or photo. When TVFH was starting out, I delivered a flash fiction a week--don't ask me how. The ones I find embarrrassingly weak, others claim as their favorites. It looks as if people actually read my flash fiction, however, whereas I'm not so sure they do more than look at my serial posts. (Some of my pictures, free for all, are popular.) After writing a flash fiction a week, my productivity decreased continually and I haven't written one for awhile. They always felt like exercises to me but as I said, people read them, and it seems, still do.
     My serial fiction produced a number of good first drafts. I've rewritten four two or three times. Two of my efforts didn't turn out as I hoped; two novellas that I rewrote many times, I love and have put together--they're about the same characters at different times--as a novel that an agent has been keeping electronically for months.
Now I'm in the middle of a second go at an ambitious novel, James Bond and the Girls of Woodstock. If you're  interested in that, you'll find links to previous posts on the far right sidebar; just scroll down. Other works can be found by catagory, also on the sidebar.
      On Mondays, I'm rewriting a novella, Underground Nest, post by post, at the literary and art online zine, flashing by.

"A tall thin old man comes backwards slowly and carefully through the glass door, carrying a metal stepladder in one hand, and in the other a small pot of paint and a small brush. With an air of methodical tidiness, he leans the stepladder against the front of a left-hand stall, stands the pot of paint next to it, places the small brush sideways across the exact centre of the top of the pot."

The fifth part of a hyperfiction based on visits to churches in the City of London. Part 5 takes in the following:

St Andrew Holborn
Christchurch, Newgate Street
St Vedast-alias-Foster
St Anne and St Agnes

To view the London Churches project, go to www.londonchurches.org .

- Edward Picot

http://edwardpicot.com - personal website
http://hyperex.co.uk - The Hyperliterature Exchange

New Writers.com

I just made up that site, but it probably exists. It seems that everything you could possibly imagine these days has a site.

You can buy anything online from anywhere in the world and not even leave home, it's great...or is it?

Anybody can write and publish a book. The publisher doesn't even read it!

Is that good? I'm not so sure....

I've written a book, almost two, but I can't get an agent and without an agent, I can't get a publisher.

So what....I can put it out anyway and hope that somebody somewhere disscovers it?

I can pay thousands on advertising, marketing and hope....

The internet age is here....
what did we do before the net?

 Online dating is now cool...
more people meet online than ever before

Downloading is massive....
I haven't bought a DVD in two years?

So where do we go from here?

We escape......


www.palmerfiction.com

My paperback for my second book, 'Hunt for White Gold', is released tomorrow so being in a good mood I decided to check out reviews on Amazon. Now I don't check reviews normally as no news is good news and I'm one of those who would rather not know. All OK, so I decided (just for wasting time) to check out some reviews for authors I know personally and others as my clicks just kept leading me from one to another.

Now we all know that there are reviews that give glowing Oscar-like speeches about how wonderful the book is and if you're a savvy Amazon cruiser you normally click 'See all my reviews' and notice that the reviewer has only reviewed that book and go, 'Oh, aye. That's funny. You must be related or a friend,' and discount it. But then I started to think a bit deeper about what this means.

First off, I noticed a pattern, (and I'm not just talking about indie authors I'm talking about traditional books as well; from people I know) often following a rave review there would be a comment or low star review about it along the lines of 'I don't know what book you were reading but,' or 'I wrote this review because I bought this book based on the glowing reviews and,' and generally these people are upset and disappointed.

The other pattern was that a lot of these five-star reviews had clearly not read the book. By that I mean that a genuine review seems to talk about the book in specific terms. They mention characters names, talk about certain plots, talk of parts that moved them or what their experience of it was and even point out why some people might not like it in order to strengthen their recommendation and not mislead. This is almost certain true of a bad review (which often follows) where the reader has blown the book apart. But at least they read it!

You can fill in the blanks yourself but they all follow a similar style:

'Couldn't put it down! Blew me away! Fantastic characterisation!(who? Why?) A real page-turner! Sensational plot! (what's it about other than the blurb above? This is usually where they insert a synopsis of the exact blurb) Kept me on the edge of my seat! (about what?) A roller-coaster ride of thrills and tension! (about what?! Tell me!)'

See what I mean? Now the thing that annoys me about this is that this is often driven by the author either directly or indirectly and supposes that your prospective audience is an idiot.

'If you give me a five-star review people will buy it! Then I'll have their money, ha, ha!'

But what you're actually doing is selling a book that sets itself up to be a disappointment. You're trying to snake-oil people into buying your book. And once you've hoodwinked them once why would they buy your second?

The other disturbing trend I noticed was in clicking on the comments. Often people took the time to write things along the lines of 'I have tried to give this book a bad review but it keeps getting removed.' This may be because of two things. The author reports the review as abuse and asks twenty people to do the same so the review gets removed or, surprise, surprise, Amazon are in the business of selling books and will find any excuse to remove it.

The bottom line is I spent a considerable time checking one author's forty-plus five stars reviews only to discover that two-thirds of them were written by people who had only ever reviewed that item and none of whom showed any sign of actually reading the book other than regurgitating (love that word) the hook of the book.

Personally I do check reviews if I'm intrigued by a book that I wouldn't normally buy and I always use the criteria above to see whether I trust that review or not. To me the reprehensible thing is rather than try to build loyalty with readers through your writing or genuine word of mouth you'd rather bamboozle people into buying your book.

There's an old adage about selling cars that highlights this. 'You don't sell a guy one car. You sell him five cars over fifteen years because he trusts you.'

 

 

 

"The elements of the dinner-parties which Mrs Lennox gave, were beauty, men, and pedantic conversation. They talked in a sensuous way outside, lashed themselves when they were alone, and squandered their capabilities in the drawing-room."

Concluding the abridged version of Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South - abridged on the principle of leaving out all the important bits. Margaret spends some time in Cromer. Dixon is either dead or blue. We finally learn what happened to Frederick; Mr Thornton is in difficulties; and his mother has had wind.

http://edwardpicot.com/and/

- Edward Picot

http://edwardpicot.com - personal website
http://hyperex.co.uk - The Hyperliterature Exchange

The winning stories from the Frome Festival Short Story Competition which I and Jonathan Lee judged are now up on the website, and most of them can be downloaded and read.

The best of the stories were wonderful, and all of them are really well worth a read, not just because reading good writing is never, ever time wasted, but also because if you're thinking of entering competitions, it gives you an idea of the kind of standard that you're up against.

http://www.fromefestival.co.uk/?page_id=4252

Enjoy!

Emma

Angry at the similarities between Cartland's Knave of Hearts... and her own These Old Shades, Georgette Heyer told her agent "I think I could have borne it better had Miss Cartland not been so common-minded, so salacious and so illiterate. I think ill enough of the Shades, but, good God! That 19-year-old work has more style, more of what it takes, than this offal which she has written at the age of 46!"

Wielding language like a rapier, in the manner of the best of her heroines, Heyer says that Cartland "displays an abysmal ignorance of her period. Cheek by jowl with some piece of what I should call special knowledge (all of which I can point out in my books), one finds an anachronism so blatant as to show clearly that Miss Cartland knows rather less about the period than the average schoolgirl," adding that she would "rather by far that a common thief broke in and stole all the silver".

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2011/aug/02/georgette-hayer-decries-plagiarism

Which I suppose is a plug, as I'm one of The History Girls. There are a months-worth of us, though, from Caroline Lawrence to Adele Geras, plus guests, and there's a new post every day, so it's worth dipping into.

http://the-history-girls.blogspot.com/

And, admittedly, the post that's up today is mine...

Emma

"Gathering, gathering along the narrow street, came a hollow solemn blast. From each side of the door there were constant droppings. Higgins crept up carefully upon the stones, his glassy eyes, one half-open, staring upwards to the sky. Owing to the position in which he had been lying, the fore part of his head was bald."

Continuing the abridged version of Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South - abridged on the principle of leaving out all the important bits. Nicholas Higgins maltreats some children. Margaret is investigated by the police. An evil temper takes possession of Mr Thornton.

http://edwardpicot.com/and/

- Edward Picot

http://edwardpicot.com - personal website
http://hyperex.co.uk - The Hyperliterature Exchange

I have a guest blog today over at Claudie A.'s wonderful blog.

It's a piece called Science, Fiction & Truth and I talk about some of my heroes and prejudices in science fiction, what goes into a “high concept” idea, and the Radium Girls. I really, really enjoyed writing this, and I would love if you checked it out. Oh, and she is giving away five free copies of my e-book. 

Here's a little taster:

My science fiction tastes have always been very compartmentalized. Space operas must be TV shows. I’m not convinced they work as well as movies, let alone books. Anything to do with robots, I prefer as a movie. I want to see the robot, and only movies have the budget to make it look really cool.

I’m a little more democratic when it comes to books. A good story will trump all, but I do gravitate towards near-future dystopia. Spaceships and aliens and all that are okay, but I would rather have a story about a man who struggles to form relationships because he can read minds, or about a cloning experiment gone wrong. For me, the further the story is away from the real world, the less it says about it in a clever way.

This latter qualification is important to me. Sure, you can have a version of Romeo & Juliet set on an interplanetary cruiser, or have an alien encounter story that teaches us about racism, but I prefer my messages a little more subtly coded. I don’t like neon signs telling me what to think.

Philip K. Dick is a favourite. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep was great, but I liked Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said even more. He was a master of creating this sense of unease in the reader, which perfectly mapped what the character was feeling.

In many of his stories, it takes a while to figure out if this is taking place on our world or not, or whether it is set in the future or not, or whether the main character is crazy or not. That sense of dislocation is a brave move for a writer. So many feel compelled to do their world-building right from the start, with unwieldy explanations of various technological advances or geographical quirks that signify to the reader, right from the off, that you are somewhere else. 

Read the rest at: http://claudiea.blogspot.com/2011/06/science-fiction-truth.html