Rosina Lippi's Blog, page 32

the brooklyn bridge, sans elephants

City Hall Park, ca 1910. The Brooklyn Bridge entrance to the far right.

The Brooklyn Bridge was an engineering feat of huge proportions, one that came to fruition in May, 1883 with a grand opening celebration. Barnum (the original Barnum & Bailey edition) offered to walk his elephants across the bridge (never missed an opportunity to advertise, astute business man that he was). The city turned him down, but he convinced them in the end and walked the elephants across the next year. You’ll note in the photo that the entrance to the bridge is nothing like it is today, and that’s because you couldn’t drive onto it (because really, most transportation was horse-drawn at that point). You paid your money and took a seat on a cable car.

the gilded hour, or, yes, there is a novel in the works

It has been a while since the sixth and last volume in the Wilderness series came out,  but I still get email almost every day from readers who have very specific questions. At the top of the list is: you haven’t stopped writing, have you?!?

So here I am to say that I am working on a novel, and making some progress. This is not a prequel to the Wilderness series, and while I understand there is great interest in such a thing, I have no plans to write one.  I hope that people won’t be too disappointed by this, especially as I have an alternative to offer. Specifically,  I’m working on a novel which has the tentative title of The Gilded Hour.

click for a larger image

This novel is set in 1883, primary in Manhattan, and the main characters include two young women whose names will be familiar to readers of the Wilderness series: Anna  and Sophie Savard, who are distant cousins. The family tree below provides better background on exactly who they are and how they are related.

I’ll be posting now and then about the novel as it progresses, but let me anticipate a question: it may take me as much as a year to finish it, and then the whole technical/business end of things gets started. So please don’t hold your breath.

Writing and Misrepresenting Dialogue/Dialect: Uncle Peter’s eloquence

Rather than get into a long essay on erroneous use of terms for language (the temptation is great, but I will resist), I will simply state an observation: it’s never a good idea to try to convey variation in spoken language in terms of spelling. The best (and maybe the only) way to make this clear is by example. Take a look at this exchange from Gone with the Wind. In this scene, there is an elderly black man named Peter, a slave, and he’s upset with Scarlett.

“Dey talked in front of me lak Ah wuz a mule an’ couldn’ unnerstan’ dem—lak Ah wuz a Affikun an’ din’ know whut dey wuz talkin’ ’bout,” said Peter, giving a tremendous sniff. “An’ dey call me a nigger an’ Ah ain’ never been call a nigger by no w’ite folks, an’ dey call me a ole pet an’ say dat niggers ain’ ter be trus’ed! Me not ter be trus’ed! Why, w’en de ole Cunnel wuz dyin he say ter me, ‘You, Peter! You look affer mah chillun. Te’k keer of young Miss Pittypat,’ he say, ‘ ’cause she ain’ got no mo’ sense dan a hoppergrass.’ An’ Ah done tek keer of her good all dese yars.” “Nobody but the Angel Gabriel could have done better,” said Scarlett soothingly. “We just couldn’t have lived without you.”

You’ll note that the author attempts to portray Peter’s speech by playing with spelling. The idea being, I suppose, that he doesn’t speak English as it is written (something nobody does, by the way, unless you happen to be having a conversation with the ghost of somebody who lived in the 15th century). The author feels it is important to make the distinction between Peter’s speech and Scarlett’s…. why? Because he’s a slave, and she’s a free white woman of means? Because he is uneducated and she is … a little more educated? Let’s approach this differently, by rewriting the passage:

“They talked in front of me like I was a mule and couldn’t understand them — like I was an African and didn’t know what they was talking about,” said Peter, giving a tremendous sniff. “And they call me a nigger and I ain’t never been call a nigger by no white folks, and they call me a old pet and say that niggers ain’t to be trusted! Me not to be trusted! Why, when the old Colonel was dying he say to me, ‘You Peter! You look after my children. Take care of young Miss Pittypat,’ he say, ’cause she ain’t got no more sense than a hoppergrass.’ And I done take care of her good all these years.” “Nobody but the Angel Gabriel cudda done bettah” said Scarlett soothingly. “We jus’ couldn’t have lived without you.”

I haven’t changed the dialog one bit — I’ve only changed the spelling. In Peter’s case all the grammatical points of his speech are maintained, such as the invariant use of third person singular verb forms (‘he say’). The distinctive lexical items remain, too (hoppergrass) and the syntax (”I ain’t never been call’). If it’s important to portray his speech, then this passage does it by means of lexical, grammatical and syntatic variations without resorting to spelling. Uncle Peter’s eloquence is still there.

I’ve done to Scarlett’s dialog what the author did to Peter’s — I changed the spelling to approximate how she would have pronounced the words. The result? It’s amusing and condescending — the misspellings seem to indicate something about her intelligence, or her illiteracy. The lesson here is simple: don’t play with spelling unless you have a really good reason. Playing with spelling will almost always work as a trivialization of the character, and that’s never good. If it’s important to portray dialect, do that in other ways.

fare thee well

So. For six years I posted on Storytelling at least once a day, and you responded. More than 5,000 posts and even more comments.

All archived and tucked away, quite safe. But after long deliberation I have to face facts:  I can't (1) find time to contribute here regularly; (2) stop worrying about being unable to find time to contribute here regularly.  So I'm shutting Storytelling down. That means there will be no more dynamic content here, but what you will find:

a way to contact me (link above)
links to other places where I leave an update on occasion (links to the right)
a place where you can find all the published bits and excerpts available for download (also to the right)
general information (um, somewhere soon)
selected older posts (to the right; this will take me a while to sort out, but if you're interested, please check back once in a while)

I owe my readers a great deal. I appreciate every one of you and I am sincerely thankful for your support of my novels.  Which are all still in print, by the way.

giving in

The simple fact is, I can't find the time I need to continue posting here. I kept the original version of this weblog going for six years — some five thousand posts and hundreds and hundreds of comments. It's all archived and tucked away safely.

So I'm calling it a day. Thank you for your support and interest. I do try to post updates on my facebook page, if you'd like to stop by there.

In about a week's time I'm going to close this weblog down, leaving only this explanation visible.

SPOILER!!! Regarding Jennet's … unplanned trip at the end of Fire/Sky

Elaine had an interesting question:

I think there are always memory gaps when you read a long series like this and I really appreciated the character lists at the front of each book. My "gap" involves why Jennet was abducted and why she was blackmailed. What were the big family secrets her abductor threatened to reveal?

The answer to this question was set up primarily in Dawn on a Distant Shore, which took place (in part) in Scotland. During this period Roman Catholics were discriminated against to an extreme that included the exclusion from landownership. The Carrycks were clandestine Roman Catholics. The repercussions would have been catastrophic for them, had Degre carried out his threat. Or at least, that's my take on it. Readers may disagree.

Could you please spare a moment …

[image error]…for something that is of no benefit to anybody but me and my dishpan hands?

Trying to win a new dishwasher (as ours bit the dust some months ago and sits there, idle,  looking smug). So I submitted a recipe to a local contest. Buttercup Chicken with a Kick which you can rate  in the flash of an eye.  Just stop by the recipe page, hit "rate" and select how ever many stars you feel comfortable with.  Buttercup and I thank you.

once again: Luke without Jennet SPOILERS

The most common question I get about The Endless Forest has to do with Jennet's death and the aftermath. After Jennet died, Luke returned to Manhattan alone, leaving the children behind to be raised in Paradise. Many readers have trouble with this.

It was very common until not-so-long ago that families traded children around after the death of a parent or because of some other family disaster. Exactly why Luke chose to leave the children in Paradise is a question with dozens of possible answers, for example:

Jennet told him she wanted her children raised in Paradise, or

Luke's business concerns were failing, and he didn't know if he'd have the finances to provide the staff and resources the children would need, or

Luke fell into a depression so deep he was barely able to take care of himself, or

One or more of the children developed complications after the infection that killed Jennet, and needed the kind of medical care they could only get in Paraidse,

I'm sure I could come up with a couple dozen reasonable scenarios, but my job is done. I have to sit back and let the readers decide what happened and why it happened. An author who tries to explain a character's actions after the fact comes across as somebody unsure of the story. I am very sure of my story.

So if you want to bat around some ideas on Luke's decision, please feel free to do it here. But I can't give you an ultimate answer, because there isn't one.

s'okay?

enhanced ebooks and Homestead

I don't mean to post every time I have something to whine about. Really, I don't. So here's (1) an announcement and (2) a… discourse on enhanced ebooks.

The ebook rights to Homestead were never sold to any publisher, so with my agent's help I'm revising it for ebook release. Don't ask me about a timeline, because I have no idea.

The reasons I am pleased:

1. I get a chance to revise some small infelicities (generally an impossibility past a certain point)

2. As it's an ebook, I can add lotsa stuff (insofar as copyright is not an issue). Which means, (or I thought it meant) photos, appendices, etc. In theory.

The trouble:

Ebook publishing is in its cranky toddler stage. Nobody agrees on anything, everybody fights to have things done their way. You can't do Y on Kindle (but you can on Nook); you can't do x on Kindle or Nook, but you can … you get the picture. So progress is slow and painful.

Given the medium, the following should be possible (and you can explore this topic in more detail here):

1. images (maps, photos, illustrations)

2. images linked to explanatory material in an index

3. names linked to a list of characters, a family tree, or similar

4. words linked to specific definitions

5. FOOTNOTES. Footnotes are not evil. Footnotes are the best and most helpful of friends. Reading Pride and Prejudice and still don't know what Bingley is going on about when he mentions 'white soup' — a footnote would tell you. In a big hardcover annotated edition it's a pain to find the footnote, but on an electronic page? You need to wonder about white soup no longer.

Very few of these things (and others I haven't mentioned) are available with any consistency or quality across ebook platforms. Even worse, in their greedy rush to capitalize on the new market, publishers are scanning books and putting them out there without proofreading. Without even letting authors proofread. The results range from the horrific (examples discussed here) to the inconvenient and annoying.

Case in point: I was reading the Kindle edition of Tied to the Tracks, and I ran across a typo that really, really should have jumped out at somebody (and isn't in the print version). More irritating, most double returns — which signal a shift in story scene — were just deleted, which means you get tossed willy nilly from one POV to another and sit there for a moment going WHA? If I do this with a book I wrote, I can hardly imagine what it's like for anybody else.

Can I just contact Amazon and say, hey, errors. How can I fix 'em?

Apparently not. At least, if there is a way, it is well and truly hidden.

If publishers are going to charge as much for an ebook as a print one, they had best get their act together. I will not pay $12 for an ebook of Pride and Prejudice (and I don't have to, as it's free in most places) but I would consider paying $5 for an annotated P&P with clickable links to interesting information.

This is especially relevant when you're reading something like The Brothers Karamazov, which must weigh five pounds in print edition. Translated from the Russian, you need clarification now and then. You need hints about historical and geographical backstory. In this case, you absolutely need links to character lists because by god, the Russians do love long names and they squeeze as many as they can into a single page.

A well done enhanced ebook might even be a way to entice the otherwise timid into trying big scary books. Worried about feeling dumb given the vocabulary? Nobody has to know if or how often you clicked the dictionary button. Confused about geography in the Near East? That little pop up map will get you to the point where you even know one -stan from another.

Here's another part of the problem. You search on line for an ebook edition of X. You get 230 hits, but the pages are set up so it's impossible to compare them. You need to know: abridged/unabridged (and this means also– are the author's notes, acknowledgements etc there, or have they been cut)? translator? clickable table of contents? clickable notes or footnotes? how carefully proofread?

This means that you can't really know which editions are truly well done enhanced editions, and which are donkey poop.  Not a good situation. And yes, you can download a sample chapter — but I am not willing to read and compare 40 editions of the first chapter of War and Peace. I want the bookseller to do that for me.

I had such plans for the ebook of Homestead, but it seems like most of it is impossible. Grrrr.

mathematical fiction

We had friends over for dinner, and the subject of creativity came up. Somebody suggested that the Mathematician's job was just as creative in nature as mine, at which I balked.

Me: You solve problems.

Mathematician: Which requires creative thinking.

Me: Listen, bub. Your idea of a good time is a knotty algorithm. Your problem solving and my invention of a world out of thin air? Not the same thing. Not that I could solve an algorithm. Or know what an algorithm is, even.

Mathematician: An algorithm is basically a recipe. You create an algorithm in order to solve a specific problem.

Our friends thought that was a great definition but the fact remains: I still don't know what an algorithm is, and I can't picture it. Flour + sugar + butter: shortbread. Bush + Cheney + Cowardly Congress: Patriot Act. Those are recipes. But a recipe to solve a problem? In fiction?

Problem: The titanic is going down.

Recipe:

Problem: Character X is terrified of character Z finding out the Truth.

Recipe:

This might mean that (1) algorithms are limited in the kinds of problems they can solve; (2) my brain is simply resistant to the concept of the algorithm.