Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 151

“Due to” does not mean “because of”

So, I ran into this particular detail of grammar because I said to a student, “Due to basically means the same thing as “because of –” and then paused, feeling that perhaps this was not the case, but not sure.

So, given this sudden uncertainty, I poked around and found this article:

“Because Of” and “Due To”

Many are of the opinion that both of the pairs refer to the same thing, and that they can be used as synonyms. This is an absolute misconception. They cannot be used interchangeably because they do not belong to the same classification. When the classification is not the same, how can the usage be? …

By “classification,” they mean that “due to” acts as an adjective, while “because of” acts as an adverb.

Interesting! And possibly why I suddenly paused, but I’m not sure. Let me try this out:

“Due to that dragon, we find sheep difficult to raise here.” Okay, is “due to” an adjective? I would not say it is modifying the noun, but it certainly applies to the noun.

“Because of that dragon …” looks exactly the same to me. But perhaps that is actually not technically correct? The linked post would say, I think, that this sentence should be re-written more like this, “We find sheep difficult to raise here because of that dragon.” The idea is that “because” applies to finding the sheep difficult to raise, not to the dragon. Hmm. I’m finding this distinction a little difficult to grasp.

The post suggests this:

One trick you can use is to substitute “due to” with “caused by.” If the substitution does not work, then you probably shouldn’t use “due to” there.

I’m happy to find a nice little trick when a rule does not really work for me. I’m also perfectly okay with suggesting to students that they use “caused by” instead of “due to,” for a different reason: many English instructors illustrate the concept of “too wordy” with the phrase “due to the fact that.” Since this tends to mean that instructors dislike any phrase containing “due to,” it’s probably tactically wise to avoid the latter phrase.

However, I will just note that every single English book that says “due to the fact that” is too wordy suggests replacing that phrase with because.

If any of you would like to dust off your grammarian hat and clarify all this, be my guest.

One little trick that DOES work for me is:

That does not have a comma in front. If you want to put a comma there, use which.

Of course, using this particular rule means you’d better have a general feel for where commas go. But that’s how I do that one. I never think about restrictive and nonrestrictive clauses. That’s too hard to remember. Comma = which, and there you go.

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Post-Thanksgiving Update

So, I didn’t quite finish Tarashana. Two reasons: the weather was pretty nice, and, as always, the draft is stretching out with more words than I expected and therefore is taking a little more time than I really thought it would. (Even though I TOTALLY ALLOWED FOR THAT. Regardless of how much I allow for that sort of expansion, it’s never enough.)

I didn’t write 80 pages over the four-day weekend, but I did write 72, so that wasn’t so far off. The manuscript is up to 198,000 words, which is, yes, fairly ridiculous. It’s going to wind up just a bit longer than the first Tuyo draft. Which is fine, but still, kind of a ridiculous length. But there we are. I will trim it back before anyone sees it, but at least one person is going to get a longish version with a request to, among other things, note if and when something is too slow or boring or whatever.

What I did over the weekend: wrote the climactic scene, mainly. This is not a big battle scene. You might say it’s a more intimate battle scene. A little rough on various characters. You might say that Ryo and Aras had a pretty brutal Thanksgiving. But, I trust this is not too much of a spoiler, they are recovering now. More or less.

I had written three chapters past that point, so I connected up the climax to those post-battle recovery chapters. That’s a big accomplishment. I’ve been looking forward very much to getting through this part.

What’s left: The denouement. Two important denouement scenes plus transitions. I trust I can get this section to flow from one of the important scenes to the other in some not-too-jarring way, even though they’re not intrinsically related to each other. Except that both are important to Ryo.

I would very much like to finish this before NEXT Monday, so that I have time to fiddle around with Tenai and get that trilogy in shape to send out to readers and put covers in motion and all that, before Christmas break starts. I would prefer to open up the month of Christmas Break so I can work on something different during that time. We’ll see.

Meanwhile!

I do not like pumpkin pie, but I do like to do something pumpkin-pie-adjacent for Thanksgiving. This year, I made a pumpkin cheesecake that turned out really well. I added marshmallows for extra Thanksgiving cred, since we weren’t making those yams with marshmallows, something I remember fondly from when I was a kid. Just in case any of you might like to try this, here is the recipe:

No Bake Pumpkin Marshmallow Cheesecake

3 8-oz pkg cream cheese

1 1/2 C pumpkin puree

1 1/4 to 1 3/4 C powdered sugar, depending on whether you add the marshmallows

1 tsp pumpkin pie spice, which I didn’t have, so I used cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, allspice, mace, and cloves, all of which I did have. I didn’t bother looking up the proportions typical for pumpkin pie spice. I just used a quarter teaspoon of each of those, except heavy on the nutmeg and ginger and light on the cloves.

1 tsp vanilla

1 envelope unflavored gelatin

1/4 c water

3/4 C cream, whipped

Half a bag of miniature marshmallows, or so

Graham cracker crust or vanilla wafer crust or whatever; actually, I made this without a crust of any kind. That’s why I added the gelatin, which was not included in the original recipe. I needed this cheesecake to stand up firmly because I wasn’t going to have a crust that would help support it. But use a crust if you wish, and if you do, then if you prefer to leave out the gelatin, fine. Just whip the cream extra stiff and probably that will work fine.

So:

Soften the cream cheese — I just microwave it briefly — and beat it with the pumpkin and powdered sugar. If you aren’t going to add marshmallows, use the larger amount of sugar. If you are, then perhaps the smaller amount, but it would probably be fine either way. You can start with a smaller amount, taste the batter, and adjust, of course.

Beat in the spices and vanilla.

Stir the gelatin into the water and microwave on low power just to melt the gelatin. Stir to make sure the gelatin is dissolved. Add that to the cheesecake batter and beat in.

Beat the cream until stiff.

Cream always whips just fine, except for mine this past Thanksgiving, which WOULD NOT WHIP. That was a new one on me. Fortunately, since it is a 40-minute round trip to the grocery store, my mother had a different carton of cream. HER cream whipped just fine, thus establishing that the problem was with my cream, not my mixer. I was utterly boggled by this experience and would really like to know what the stuff in my carton WAS. It wasn’t cream. I think it was ordinary milk? One person on Facebook said she had that happen to her this spring. Has anyone else ever opened a carton of cream and found out it wasn’t cream, but milk? Or maybe half and half?

Anyway, my mother’s cream whipped, which was a relief.

One way or another, get the cream whipped until it is stiff and fold it gently into the pumpkin cheesecake batter until thoroughly combined. You could substitute 6 oz of Cool Whip, if you can stand Cool Whip, which I do not like, but at least I imagine Cool Whip is always whipped when you buy it and therefore does not involve the risk of staring at frothy milk that is not turning into cream.

Fold in all but a handful of the marshmallows.

Spread the cheesecake batter over your crust, if you are using a crust, or into an 8-inch springform pan, or whatever size springform pan you have, or a pie pan, or whatever. One of the joys of no-back cheesecakes is it just does not matter what kind of container you put this in. Divide it up between little glass dessert dishes if you prefer and that will also work just fine. Whatever you do with it, sprinkle with the remaining marshmallows.

Chill overnight. Remove the rim of the springform pan, if that’s what you used, and serve.

Very nice for those of us who prefer a less pumpkiny dessert that is still in the pumpkin pie family. One hundred percent of spaniels surveyed also agreed this was tasty.

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SPFBO Black Friday sale

Not just TUYO, but quite a few other novels, all at 99c this weekend.

Click here for the full list!

https://storyoriginapp.com/to/gMPGWk7

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Happy Thanksgiving!

I think we would all prefer a calmer, less stressful year for 2021, but still, most of us hopefully have a lot to be thankful for. I certainly do.

1.Pippa

She is doing so much better at this point than I expected a month ago. Look how alert she is in this picture! She can go up stairs now. If she gets started right, she can leap up two steps at a time, just like a young dog! I prefer that she let me carry her down, but she sometimes thinks she can manage. She can keep up with the other dogs again on walks, so she really does not need special walks of her own any longer.

2. TUYO, NIKOLES, and (almost) TARASHANA. I am very pleased with how this series is going so far!

3. COPPER MOUNTAIN and the new covers for all the Black Dog books. The story collections should all have their new covers before Christmas. Also, I will have a cover for the fifth novel waiting for me to actually write the book. What a project! But nearly there, whew.

4. Although sales and KU reads are not yet where I want them — I would certainly not want to support myself and the horde of spaniels solely from writing just yet — the improvement since the beginning of the year is really good and I hope foreshadows still better things to come. Royalties from Amazon in October were nearly 14x higher than this past January. I have been working really hard since May to do things to boost sales. I still have soooo much to learn about all these marketing things, but I’m cautiously pleased with the results of my efforts so far. Sales and especially KU reads are still up since the Black Dog sale, too. I hope that lasts for some time!

5. My parents are still healthy, or at least, as healthy as they were pre-Covid. They’ve been very isolated, but since they’re highly introverted, they’re doing fine. Covid cases are up in this county, more so proportionately than in most big cities because we had so few cases until basically now. But, fingers crossed, we ought to have a vaccine pretty soon.

That’s my top five personal things to be grateful for this year. If you’re particularly grateful for something that happened this year, by all means share that in the comments! It would be nice to hear about good things that happened for people this year.

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Sale!

Just letting you know that TUYO will be 99c for the Kindle ebook for Black Friday.

I was just aiming at Black Friday, to take advantage of a SPFBO sale, but to make sure the price was reduced in time, I dropped the price early. So it’s 99c right now. Unless I remember to change the price back via my phone on Saturday, it’ll stay there for the full weekend.

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Coming up: new fantasy trilogy

So, I’ve recently decided to take a really long fantasy novel that’s been sitting here for quite some time, cut it into pieces, and self-publish it. It’s a portal fantasy, more or less, with a tremendously important backstory. You can think of it as a story that asks the questions, “And after the hugely important quest has been achieved, what then? What if destroying the Dark Lord was seriously traumatic? Where do you go from there?” I basically took a big epic fantasy and put the whole thing in the backstory and then moved on from that point.

This is an interesting story to me because I was trying to do several things I haven’t done in other novels. One of the most important influences was Dorothy Dunnett, because I was deliberately trying to do something unusual that Dunnett pulled off perfectly: separate the roles of the pov character and the protagonist. The pov is a person from our world, but the protagonist — the person who drives the action — is not that person and never takes the pov.

I worked and reworked this story several times … I remember referring to it as The Neverending Revision From Hell for a while … but it’s been finished for a long time. So, now that I am seriously trying to increase sales and income from self-published work, this seems like a good time to bring it out. That won’t be tomorrow. I need to do a fair bit of tinkering to get it ready. I’m thinking early next year.

Stuff I need to do to complete this project:

a) Cut it up. That part is done. I have chosen to break this story into a prequel novella that will be about 150 pages followed by two novels that will each be about 350 pages. The novella takes place in our world, then there is a natural breaking point as we leap forward 16 years, then the story picks up just as we move through the portal and into the secondary world.

There are a lot of benefits to breaking off that novella. Not only is that a natural breaking point, but the tone shifts a fair bit. The novella is almost more literary than fantasy. The rest of the story is more fantasy than literary. That is the only natural break. Setting that part aside lets me cut the rest into two average-sized novels.

b) Write new transitions. Now that I have the story cut into pieces, I have to write an introductory scene that helps guide the reader from the novella into the first book and both ending and introductory scenes that help move from the first book into the second.

Moving from the prequel into the first book will be challenging. I want to make it at least possible for a reader to get into the first book without reading the prequel (though that will not be an ideal way to approach this story).

The transition from the first book to the second will be much less challenging. This is because the novella resolves, but (sorry) the first book will not resolve. That’s going to just inevitably involve some sort of cliffhanger. Given that there will be a cliffhanger, there will not need to be much of a transition, as readers will either go immediately to the second book or they won’t, but they’re not likely to pause in the middle.

If you hate cliffhangers (and doesn’t everyone?), that shouldn’t matter too much, as that I will bring all three works out on the same exact day, so it won’t be like anyone has to wait to find out what happens next.

c) Proofreading. This is a story I have been over and over and OVER. Nevertheless, I expect there are some typos in the manuscript. I will, of course, be grateful if some of you are willing to do a proofread in return for getting an early look at this story.

d) Titles. Right now, the working titles are Tenai, Talasayan, and Nolas-Kuomon. These names will not do. One-word weird names are far too much like the Tuyo series. Even with an entirely different cover style, I think I had better come up with better titles that much more clearly indicate that this is a different and self-contained series. (Aargh.)

Also, HOW DO I NUMBER THESE?

Prequel, Book I, and Book II?

Book I, Book II, and Book III?

If I go with the first option, then how do I make it clear that really, the reader should read the prequel, that it changes the entire reading experience if you skip it? I’m afraid if I indicate in any way that this is a prologue or a prequel, readers will often be inclined to skip it. But if I call it Book I, then it’s really short to be treated as the first actual book.

Thoughts on this would be (very) welcome.

e) Covers. I would prefer the novella cover have a literary/fantasy vibe and the other two a fantasy/literary vibe, but they all need to look like they belong to one series. This is something I’m thinking about. I really do not know what direction to steer a cover artist. I have an idea about the novella, but I’m not entirely sure how to do the fantasy element. Maybe a sword somewhere.

I am not remotely sure what to do about the other two. I certainly do not need to contact an artist about these covers until I have titles, but still, hmm.

***

Stuff that I am doing right now that is not this:

I am actually sort of thinking I might finish the third Tuyo book, TARASHANA, or come close to finishing it, this weekend. We’re not doing much for Thanksgiving. If the weather is terrible, I won’t be doing much with the dogs either. (If the weather is nice, we’ll head for the park / go out for long walks / I really need to do some training with the youngsters / every one of the dogs could really use a bath and thorough brushing).

I hardly know what kind of weather to wish for. If I write 20 pages a day for four days, that might be just about enough to finish it. That will, btw, bring it to about 600 pages. I will probably be doing some trimming and tightening before I ask anyone to read it, but a couple of you may get that request yet this this year. No rush for this either, as I will not bring this book out this year regardless.

I will need a cover for that, too. It’ll need an animal on the cover. Maybe an eagle would be suitable this time.

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The charm of the large word

A delightful and intriguing title for a post at Jane Friedman’s blog: The Charm of the Large Word.

When I see a blog title like this, I instantly stop and think of particularly wonderful long words. Perspicacity! Quintessential! Brobdingnagian! (I don’t believe I have ever used that last one personally. I had to look up how to spell it.)

Anyway, by all means, let’s see which long words get picked out in this post …

To earn its place in a text, a big word must be two things: the right word and the best word.

It’s the right word if its meaning is what you intend.

It’s the best word if using it reduces your overall word count.

Well, okay. By all means, only use words you understand! If a word’s meaning is not what you intend, well, oops! I am now, almost involuntarily, thinking of the (popular, successful) fantasy novel where the author used the word parameters when she meant (probably) perimeter. I am still astonished that no copy editor caught that — and more astonished if the copy editor DID catch that word, but the author steted it back to the wrong word. Anyway, yes, the point is, only use words if you know what they mean!

Reducing the overall word count … okay, that’s fine, if you really want to reduce the overall word count. Not sure this strikes me as super important (unless you have a hard limit for the word count, I guess).

I guess, actually, I’d take that Rule 1 without argument, but for Rule 2, I’d go with:

It’s the best word if it best suits the rhythm of the sentence and the tone of the story.

For example, chatoyant is a great word. I used it a couple of times in The Floating Islands, for the eyes of the dragons:

Great heads as fine boned and delicate as a bird’s, chatoyant eyes glimmering with pale opalescent colors …

Replacing chatoyant with reflective of light would hardly improve that description. Chatoyant isn’t the better choice because it’s one word instead of three or more. It’s the better choice because it’s way more artistic.

The author of the linked post adds:

One of the English language’s most beautiful features is its many words, each with a shade of meaning ever so slightly distinct from its next nearest relative. This feature lets us write with precision, which gives our ideas clarity, which improves communication, which is, after all, the point of prose.

To which I would say, yes, clarity is important, but precision of meaning doesn’t just improve the clarity of prose. In addition to improving clarity, precise words that are also beautiful improve the elegance and artistry of prose.

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Tangled up with verbs

A good post by PJ Parrish at Kill Zone Blog: Tangled Up With Verbs

Parrish starts off more or less like this:

You’d think this would be easy. Pick a noun, pick a verb. Repeat until you’ve written oh, about 300 pages that might resemble a novel.

But it’s not easy. Verbs are the lifeblood of what we do. The good ones juice up our writing and help readers connect with our plots and characters.…

Next time someone asks me how to write a novel, I may say, Pick a noun, pick a verb. Repeat until you’ve written 300 pages that resemble a novel.

Parrish goes on:

But verbs are on my mind also because a friend, novelist Jim Fusilli, posted on Facebook a terrific article by music producer Tony Conniff called “In Praise of Bob Dylan’s Narrative Strategies…and His Verbs.”

Now, I am not a huge Dylan fan, but I do appreciate that he is a poet. (officially). And as I read Conniff’s analysis of the song “Tangled Up In Blue,” I understood how powerful the right verb in the right place can be. Take a look at just one verse of the song:

She was married when they first met
Soon to be divorced
He helped her out of a jam,
I  guess, but he used a little too much force

They drove that car as far as they could
Abandoned it out West
Split up on a dark sad night
Both agreeing it was best

She turned around to look at him
As he was walkin’ away
She said this can’t be the end
“We’ll meet again someday on the avenue”

Tangled up in blue.

Conniff says that most of the story is conveyed in vivid verbs — the action, drama, conflict and emotion. “The verbs tell the story,” he writes, “the story of how being with this other woman, probably for a one-night stand, led his thoughts back to the one he couldn’t forget or let go. Every verse, every chapter of the story, leads back to the same woman and the same impossible emotional place—Tangled Up In Blue.”

Now this poetry analysis is a really neat way to look at verbs, and I like the observation that the story is conveyed by the verbs. Although I think “married” here, and probably also “divorced,” are participial adjective rather than actual verbs.

Parrish goes on:

The right verb gives your story wings. The wrong verb keeps it grounded in the mundane.

Now here’s the caveat. (You know I always throw one out there.) Not every sentence you write needs a soaring verb. “Said,” as we’ve said over and over, is a supremely useful verb that, rightfully so, should just disappear into the backdrop of your dialogue. And in narrative, when you’re just moving characters through time and space, ordinary verbs like “walked,” “entered,” “looked” do the job. If you try to make every verb special, you can look pretentious and, well, like you’re trying to hard. Sometimes, smoking a cigar is just smoking a cigar.

Good advice, basically!

I’ll add an important caveat to the caveat: Said does not always disappear. If the author doesn’t take care, it can be as obtrusive as tags like “he expostulated.”

I know I have said that before. Oh, here is that post. THIS is how said can become obtrusive. My post was all about dialogue tags, not verbs. Click through and re-read this post and I think you will agree that said can be obtrusive.

Parrish has a lot more about verbs, though. He picks out a bunch of paragraphs from various books by different authors and looks at the verbs. I enjoy that — I should do something like that. Imagine how different verbs would be in Pride and Prejudice vs a hard-boiled detective novel, say.

Plus an exercise! The kind I actually like! Pick one:

Let’s use the poor old verb “walk” as a lesson here. Your character is a sophisticated spy entering the Casino de Monte-Carlo to meet the evil villain Emilio Largo. He’s not just walking in; it’s a grand entrance that sets up the next plot point. How do you describe this?

He walked into the casino and paused when he spotted Largo at the baccarat table with his mistress Domino.He walked haughtily into the casino but then came to an abrupt stop when he saw Largo at the baccarat table. He had to take it slow, assess the man and the situation.He sauntered into the casino, like a king surveying his realm. But when he saw Largo at the baccarat able, he paused, and then ducked behind a palm and watched Largo, like panther eyeing his prey.He strode into the casino, but when he spotted Largo at the baccarat table, he slid behind a pillar so he could observe him without being seen.

Which do you think works best, and worst? (I think the worst is very clear.)

Click through to see which version Parrish likes best and why.

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Man’chi is not liking

A post at tor.com: “Man’chi” Is Not the Same as “Liking”: Intercultural Communication in C.J. Cherryh’s Foreigner Series

My very first reaction: well, of course not. No one translates man’chi as “liking.” It would be more correct to translate it as “loyalty.”

Reading the article, I see that it spends rather more time on a plot summary of the first three books than I would prefer, and then focuses on linguistics. The linguistics part is interesting, but not as interesting as the concept of man’chi. That’s what I want to focus on.

It’s not that humans mis-translate man’chi as “liking” or “loving.” That isn’t the problem. The problem is that humans expect atevi to feel friendship or some similar positive emotion in the same contexts that humans feel that kind of positive emotions, and therefore act in the same way a human would act. Then those those expectations get in the way of predicting atevi behavior.

But man’chi doesn’t mean anything similar to “liking.” It’s a word that, when atevi use it, always means something more like “loyalty” — or so it seems to me. Speaking as someone who has read the whole series several times.

It seems to me that it works like this: man’chi is a direct sense of hierarchy; an emotional tropism toward the leader. Those individuals who all feel man’chi toward the same leader are associates and feel some positive emotion toward each other that might best be expressed as “that person can be relied on.”

Thus, for example, I don’t believe it’s correct to say that Banichi and Jago feel man’chi toward each other. They both feel man’chi toward Bren and toward Tabini, but they feel something toward each other that is different. I would argue that this is something like a sense that the other person has rock-solid reliability in the identical man’chi. Atevi do not appear to have a word for this feeling, but it seems to me that this is the feeling that replaces “friendship.”

It’s even quite possible they use the word man’chi to mean both kinds of feelings, just as English uses the world “love” to mean a boatload of different feelings. That doesn’t mean the emotion is the same, and in fact, it cannot be the same.

As it happens, English has a word for “positive emotions toward other individuals.” This word is “affiliative.” It encompasses the positive emotions a person feels toward their spouse or lover, toward their parents, towards their children, and towards their friends. All of those are positive. All of them can be called “love.” All of them are different. I hereby declare that this word — affiliative — can also be used to encompass at least three distinct types of positive emotions that atevi experience toward other individuals.

The affiliative emotions atevi feel must, at a minimum, include:

–man’chi, a feeling directed toward a leader.

–something else, possibly also called man’chi, a feeling that someone else reliably feels man’chi in the same direction and can be depended on.

–something else, probably not called man’chi, a feeling toward an individual whose loyalty is unimportant; for example, a young child. Some emotion has to cause a mother to take care of her baby. Tabini cannot feel man’chi toward his son Cajiri. He has to feel some other affiliative emotion. This is that.

It is important to note that these are all positive emotions and that it is quite all right for a human to think that an ateva feels a positive emotion toward him. The emotional experience is not the same, but it’s an emotion and it’s positive and that’s why Bren’s emotional needs can in fact largely be met by atevi.

If one defines loyalty to the leader as the central atevi emotion, and a feeling that others can be relied on to share that loyalty as the emotional glue that holds people together, then poof! Atevi social behavior at once becomes predictable. If humans had framed Atevi associations in that way to begin with, and acted in accordance with that understanding, they wouldn’t have accidentally caused the War of the Landing.

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What makes good back cover copy?

From Book Riot: WHAT MAKES GOOD JACKET COPY?

Good question! Here’s what I think:

–SHORT

–SHORT PARAGRAPHS

–NO SPOILERS

–Also, it’s nice if the back cover copy also gives a sense of the “feel” of the story.

I think it’s almost impossible to provide more than the most basic suggestion of the initial problem the main character is facing, and a mistake to try. It’s a worse mistake to throw a bunch of names in the back cover copy, even if a bunch of characters are important.

That’s basically what I think, I guess. I believe I’ve posted before that the basic structure is pretty much like this:

When [Character] faces [Problem], can she overcome [Challenge] in order to [Resolve the problem]?

To which the astute reader assumes the answer is yes.

Here’s a longer and funnier fill-in-the-blank version based on one I saw a long time ago, in a post that appears to have since been deleted:

(Main Character name) is a ____________. She lives in ________ and what she wants most in the world is _________. But that’s not possible because ________. So she ______. However, that didn’t work out very well because_______ and ______. Then along came _________. He/she/they did ___________ and __________ and ______. That made things even worse because _________. Now it looked like (Main Character name) would never get what she wanted. But then, one day, __________happened. Would (Main Character name) finally find the __________ she was seeking? This (suspenseful, gripping, lyrical) story of (intrigue, mystery, romance), captures the spirit of (setting or tone) and confirms the power of (theme or message).

It’s funny to think how close a lot of back covers come to that basic pattern. Break that into SHORTER PARAGRAPHS and it would basically work.

Shorter paragraphs are a lot easier to read online than longer paragraphs. That’s basically why I would suggest breaking up back cover copy into short, one- or two-sentence paragraphs.

Well, okay, that’s what I think. Let’s see what Book Riot thinks.

Here’s the editorial director of Graywolf Press:

“It’s essentially advertising copy, and during my attempts early in my career I felt like I was learning a new language. There’s definitely an art to it: you want to, in some ways, channel the tone or mood or style of the book while doing some very concrete things very quickly to catch a potential reader’s interest. There are also shoals to avoid: empty adjectives and adverbs, dead words, words that only ever appear in the context of catalog or jacket copy, transparent hyperbole.”

That sounds basically right, but what are those “very concrete things”?

Ethan then shared ­with me Bring Me the Head of Quentin Tarantino, a recently published Graywolf book, as an example of jacket copy he finds enticing. …

Okay, let’s take a look!

In this madcap, insatiably inventive, bravura story collection, Julián Herbert brings to vivid life people who struggle to retain a measure of sanity in an insane world. Here we become acquainted with a vengeful “personal memories coach” who tries to get even with his delinquent clients; a former journalist with a cocaine habit who travels through northern Mexico impersonating a famous author of Westerns; the ghost of Juan Rulfo; a man who discovers music in his teeth; and, in the deliriously pulpy title story, a drug lord who looks just like Quentin Tarantino, who kidnaps a mopey film critic to discuss Tarantino’s films while he sends his goons to find and kill the doppelgänger that has colonized his consciousness. Herbert’s astute observations about human nature in extremis feel like the reader’s own revelations.

The antic and often dire stories in Bring Me the Head of Quentin Tarantino depict the violence and corruption that plague Mexico today, but they are also deeply ruminative and layered explorations of the narrative impulse and the ethics of art making. Herbert asks: Where are the lines between fiction, memory, and reality? What is the relationship between power, corruption, and survival? How much violence can a person (and a country) take? The stories in this explosive collection showcase the fevered imagination of a significant contemporary writer.

Okay, well, I think that is pretty long, BUT it’s hard not to write longer jacket copy if you’re doing it for a collection of short stories.

I do think the above is very good back cover copy. I am not at all interested in reading these stories, but obviously this description does a great job of advertising the collection to the readers who would be interested.

I would not, however, use the phrase “fevered imagination” except perhaps ironically. Or to discuss cliched phrases. “Ruminative” is a great word, so that at least partly makes up for the use of “fevered imagination.”

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