Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 153

Nice story of the day

I’m keeping an eye out for positive stories right now, and this one certainly qualifies:

Sri Lankan Navy, Villagers Save 120 Whales After Mass Beaching

Short-finned pilot whales. Pilot whales are quite susceptible to whatever problem causes mass beaching incidents.

The navy and coast guard teams worked with local police and volunteer lifeguards using watercraft throughout the night and early morning to pull the whales safely back to the sea.

Good for everyone involved. It’s not always possible to save so many whales after an incident like this, even if people try pretty hard. This time it worked out much better.

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Mari Ness on Mulan

Mari Ness does the best reviews of fairy tales and adjacent stories. Here’s her post at tor.com about Mulan.

“Mulan shi,” the original ballad, is extremely short—only a few hundred lines—and Mulan’s story within the ballad is even shorter than that, since the last few lines are about rabbits. As the ballad begins, Mulan is weaving, worried because her father is about to be drafted into the military. Since she has no brothers, Mulan purchases military equipment and joins the army in her father’s place. Ten years later, after the death of their general, the army returns home, and Mulan is honored by the emperor.

In a great touch, all she wants from the ceremony is a camel, so she can ride it home. 

I’m dying to see the last few lines about rabbits! And, if you feel the same way, here is a pdf version of the ballad, in Mandarin and then a direct translation that looks like it’s word-for-word; then, last, a smoother, more readable English translation. I will quote the two lines about rabbits:

The male rabbit hops from the beginning, the female rabbit’s eyes are misty.

Both rabbits are running along the ground; how can you tell whether I am male or female?

That last line seems relevant to the story, but that first rabbit line is mysterious. A footnote suggests that this line is supposed to describe how to distinguish between male and female rabbits, which seems plausible.

As you’d expect, Mari Ness goes into considerable detail about the history and many versions of this story.

As a heroine who could be, as needed, Chinese or half Chinese, whose story could end happily, or sadly, or with a romantic marriage, or with celibacy, Mulan was not only popular, but could be used in a number of ways

Good article — click through if you have a minute.

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A cynical view of titles and covers

Interestingly titled article at Kill Zone Blog: My Cynical View of Titles and Covers

I imagine the author of this post, John Gilstrap, is going to argue that the title and cover have zero purpose other than to sell the book. I expect that is basically true, though having a cover you like to look at is a plus. I turn physical books with nice covers front-out on my shelves so that I can appreciate the cover whenever I pass the shelves. But sure, let’s see what Gilstrap has to say:

Okay, to summarize, people decide to buy a book in four steps:

a) Know to look for it (which is the kicker, as Gilstrap observes). Then

b) Instant attraction; eg, the cover

c) Plot description

d) First pages, and finally the reader decides whether or not to buy the book.

Sure, the above steps seem perfectly reasonable. Personally, I care less about the plot description, as a rule, and much more about the first pages. In fact, my essential decision to buy a book goes like this:

a) Know to look for it, generally because someone here recommends it, but occasionally because I see a reference to it somewhere else. It’s actually relatively rare these days that I look at a book unless it’s by an author I already know OR someone here recommends it. Because my TBR pile is so enormous, I’m relatively unlikely to visit the blogs of people who review books. I used to do that a lot more and in the unlikely event that I ran low on stuff to read, I’d go back to those blogs to find out about books I might like. Every now and then, someone will say exactly the right thing on Twitter to get me to click over to Amazon and take a good look at the book.

b) —

c) —

d) First pages.

Given a recommendation from someone whose taste matches mine pretty well, neither the cover nor the plot description matters a whit. This is true even though I enjoy a nice cover as much as the next person. Sometimes the plot description does matter. That is the case if I see something on Twitter that brings a book to my notice. More often, unless something about the plot description REALLY turns me off, I’m happy to try a sample. Once the sample is on my Kindle, I’ll try it eventually. Thus, first pages are by far the most important thing after I first hear about the book.

Back to Gilstrap’s cynical view of covers and titles …

The covers and titles needn’t have much to do with the actual plot of the book. They work together to accomplish their jobs in a glance, and then they are forgotten. They work in tandem to convince a potential reader to take a chance, and if you, as the writer, do your job to entertain, no one will notice. 

Yes, I think that is true. Particularly for ebooks, where the cover is not something you see very often or (on my Kindle) in color. I agree that it just does not matter all that much if the cover is faithful to the verbal descriptions within the book, partly because every reader is going to have their own internal image of the characters and figures and scenery and everything.

Having said that … it’s kind of nice when the cover (and, I guess, title) match the story to some reasonable degree. Not crucial. But nice.

Gilstrap adds:

The second book in my Jonathan Grave series is Hostage Zero. It’s the title that broke the series out, and the phrase means nothing. None of the hostages are numbered, and none of them launch a plague, as in “patient zero”. It just sounded cool, and that’s why we went with it.

I do think that’s a bit cynical, and a bit funny too. I don’t think it would have occurred to me to call a book “Hostage Zero” unless the story somehow used the phrase in a way reminiscent of “Patient Zero.” But yes, it’s a good-sounding title. I can see why people might click on the book and read the back cover copy.

The comments on the post are interesting. I notice one commenter agrees with me that almost nothing matters but a recommendation from the right source.

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It is, however, a beautiful day

Fall is one of my favorite seasons. We didn’t get enough rain to REALLY color up the entire woods, but we did get quite a lot of nice color. Here, in case you would like something beautiful to look at for a moment, are some of the pictures I’ve taken over the past couple of weeks, mostly while out with Pippa, who gets a lot of special individual walks.

Japanese maple. Yes, the Ilex glabra shrubs behind this maple do go all the way up to the eaves. I can’t bear to cut them down.



I planted a Persian perrotia, which stubbornly refuses to color up the way they are supposed to. This is the second one I planted, when I gave up on the first. THIS is how they are supposed to look in the fall. At the moment, just six feet tall or so, but someday this will be a small tree.



Dad and I agree this is probably a sassafras, but it’s hard to tell for sure because the leaves are way up there. Mostly sassafras don’t color up all at once the way this tree did.



My Amur cork tree, which is still a baby, but it was about eight inches tall when I planted it, so it’s coming along. This is the best fall color it’s ever shown.



Pippa, shown here with her friend Conner next to her, is doing so much better! She does not really need separate walks anymore; she just likes them. Though her vision is not great, that has improved so much she is almost back to where she was prior to her seizure. She, like all dogs, now once again greets every new day with joy.

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Industrial-scale human sacrifice

Today, I am tired and somewhat out of sorts.

Let’s have a post that reflects my mood:

Feeding the gods: Hundreds of skulls reveal massive scale of human sacrifice in Aztec capital

Death, however, was just the start of the victim’s role in the sacrificial ritual, key to the spiritual world of the Mexica people in the 14th to the 16th centuries.

Priests carried the body to another ritual space, where they laid it face-up. Armed with years of practice, detailed anatomical knowledge, and obsidian blades sharper than today’s surgical steel, they made an incision in the thin space between two vertebrae in the neck, expertly decapitating the body. Using their sharp blades, the priests deftly cut away the skin and muscles of the face, reducing it to a skull. Then, they carved large holes in both sides of the skull and slipped it onto a thick wooden post that held other skulls prepared in precisely the same way. The skulls were bound for Tenochtitlan’s tzompantli, an enormous rack of skulls built in front of the Templo Mayor—a pyramid with two temples on top. One was dedicated to the war god, Huitzilopochtli, and the other to the rain god, Tlaloc. …

Barrera Rodríguez and INAH archaeologist and field supervisor Lorena Vázquez Vallín knew from colonial maps of Tenochtitlan that the tzompantli, if it existed, could be somewhere near their dig. But they weren’t sure that’s what they were seeing until they found the postholes for the skull rack. The wooden posts themselves had long since decayed, and the skulls once displayed on them had shattered—or been purposely crushed by the conquistadors. Still, the size and spacing of the holes allowed them to estimate the tzompantli’s size: an imposing rectangular structure, 35 meters long and 12 to 14 meters wide, slightly larger than a basketball court, and likely 4 to 5 meters high.

Much, much more information, much of it even more disturbing, at the link.

I’ll post something more cheerful later.

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Literary vs Popular Fiction

From PsyPost: Reading literary versus popular fiction promotes different socio-cognitive processes, study suggests

Interesting!

Scholars have typically differentiated between literary and popular fiction. For example, engaging with literary fiction is thought to be active; it asks readers to search for meaning and produce their own perspectives and involves complex characters. Popular fiction, on the other hand, is passive; it provides meaning for the readers and is more concerned with plot than characters.

Hmm! I have severe doubts about this presumed dichotomy. Raise your hand if you think the books you prefer to read are more concerned with plot than characters. Anybody raise their hand? Certainly not everybody.

I wonder very much about what the authors of this study consider “popular books.” I wonder if I would agree that those books are more concerned with plot than character.

The researchers conducted a study involving 493 individuals with an average age of 34. Subjects completed a version of the Author Recognition Test where they were asked to indicate which authors they were familiar with among an extensive list of authors. Subjects were then given scores based on how many literary fiction versus popular fiction authors they recognized.

Hmm! Recognized, not liked, I notice. That seems strange! Haven’t we all heard of the authors whose books were assigned in school? Don’t we recognize those names? I wonder … I wonder if this study is actually doing nothing but drawing a line between people who went to college and people who didn’t? Or good students vs disinterested students? Or humanities majors vs STEM majors? It seems to me that people in the first category in each of those pairs would have heard of more literary authors than those in the second category.

I’m quite suspicious now of anything this study purports to have found. I don’t think they were measuring what they think they were measuring! Wouldn’t it have been better to ask people to choose from that list only authors whose books they had read in the past few years? Read AND liked, would perhaps be better.

The results revealed key differences between respondents who engaged with literary fiction and those who read popular fiction. As the researchers expected, reading literary fiction was a positive predictor of attributional complexity, while popular fiction was a negative predictor. 

As expected! Oh, we had this theory, and Lo! we found a way to design a study that suggests we were right.

… literary fiction “paints a more complex picture of human affairs, and of the human psyche, than popular fiction . . . we should find that readers of literary fiction develop more complex schemas about others, their behavior, and about the social world they inhabit.”

Sure. Well, it’s a theory, sure, but I’m not very impressed by the methodology. How hard would it have been to differentiate between people who preferred to read literary vs preferred to read popular fiction? And I still want to know which popular books the authors of the study consider are plot driven and have little character development.

But click through and read the whole thing if you’re so inclined. I bristled right away at the idea that popular fiction promotes a passive attitude in contrast to literary fiction, so perhaps I’m not being fair.

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Results of the Black Dog sale

Some of you are writers, I know, so I thought you might be interested in the results of the Black Dog free book promotion. This was a five-day Kindle countdown.

October 30 — first day, Friday, promotion on Freebooksy. I used a series promotion. Results: nearly 2500 people downloaded the free book. Discovery: a small but greater-than-zero number of readers will buy every book in a series as soon as they pick up the first book free. I had no idea. Kindle Unlimited pages read might have increased, but not significantly.

October 31 — second day, Saturday, Halloween, so it’s hard to say exactly how that would have compared to the Friday. Promotion on Ereader News Today and Fussy Librarian, both at once, which I realize was a mistake. I meant to make one of them November 1st, but must have stumbled when I selected the date. Results: nearly 1800 people downloaded the free book. Kindle Unlimited pages read rose by 50% over the typical daily number.

Nov 1 — third day, Sunday, post-Halloween. No book promotion. Effect of the Kindle Countdown alone: trivial, as far as I can tell. I mean, probably better than I could have done just mentioning the free book on social media, but a huge dropoff from the days when the book was promoted by one of the services linked above. Results: around 400 people downloaded the free book. Kindle Unlimited pages read: now up to more than twice the typical daily number.

Nov 2 — Fourth day, Monday, also moving toward a crazily stressful election, so who knows whether that might have influenced things. No specific promotion. Another sharp drop — I would have thought that the Kindle countdown would produce better, not worse, results as the countdown ticked toward zero. That does not appear to be the case. Fewer than 200 people downloaded the free book. KU page reads now close to three times the typical daily number.

Nov 3 — Fifth and last day, and though it’s still early, both trends are still very apparent. Plainly downloads of the free book are going to be very low for the day, comparatively. Plainly KU page reads are going to shoot up well above yesterday’s number.

Conclusions: Next time I run a free- book promotion, I’ll try a couple of different things.

First, I applied for a Book Bub ad but didn’t get it. I specified the dates I wanted, which evidently reduces the chances that your book will be chosen for an ad. Next time, if I want a Book Bub ad, I’ll try for that first, not specify a date, and if I get that ad, plan everything else around that.

Second, if I leave a book free for five days, I’ll definitely schedule some sort of free book promotion on each of those days. As far as I can tell, without jumping forward a month to look at sales for the whole series, those promotions are definitely cost effective. There are other services that do book promotion. I think it would probably be worthwhile to schedule a separate one of those promotions on each of the free days, or stack them all up on one free day.

Third, a significant number of readers must pick up free books and then, if they like them, switch to KU to read sequels in the series. I have no idea how long the KU boost will last, but at the moment it’s more important than the uptick in actual sales. That may reverse later. I’ll be keeping a close eye on this for the entire month because I’d think that probably the effects of a free book promotion take some time to work through the series.

If any of you authors have used these same promotion services, I would be very curious to know whether your experience with them was at all similar. I know that you don’t all write UF, so that would make a difference, but still, it would be interesting to compare.

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Lay vs Lie — the confusion is Dear Abby’s fault

Here’s a funny and, I suppose, reasonably plausible reason for the continual confusion between lay and lie.

The original Dear Abby was fond of describing the difference between these two verbs by saying “people lie and chickens lay.” … One myth that persists about the verbs to lie and to lay is that we should use lie in reference to people and lay in reference to animals or inanimate objects (very likely an unintended outcome of the Dear Abby oversimplification about people and chickens).

That is certainly a common and persistent belief. I don’t know how many times I have flinched (inwardly; I’m generally too polite to correct other people’s grammar) when I’ve heard someone tell their dog “Lay down, Sadie!”

I used to train dogs — more precisely, I used to run occasional classes in which I taught people how to train their own dogs, which is 95% of what we mean by “training dogs.” So I heard this a lot. Since, as I said, I don’t like to correct anyone’s grammar, I solved the problem by saying, “One word commands really work best. Put the name first and say, “Sadie, down,” and she’ll hear that better.”

Which is true, incidentally, and yes, at the time — this was a good while ago — Sadie was a very common name for female dogs in this area.

But of course that solution doesn’t do anything to get people to really believe that subjects lie down, and subjects lay objects down. Or, similarly, that subjects sit down and subjects set objects down.

Someday, in the blissful utopian future, we may once again arrive at a situation where grade school English teachers actually explain the difference between grammatical subjects and objects to their students rather than utterly failing to explain this,* and at that point, possibly the lay/lie and sit/set problems will disappear.

In the meantime, I will continue to see ads for t-shirts that confuse the words, such as one I saw on Facebook recently that said, “I’m sorry I’m late, my cat was laying on me.”

Interesting, when I just followed the link right now, I see the mistake has been corrected on the t-shirt.

"My Cats Were Lying On Me" Unisex Tee

I hereby take credit for that, as I reposted the Facebook ad with the comment, “I admit I can’t wear a t-shirt that says “laying” when it should by “lying.”

Now that printing on the t-shirt no longer contains a grammatical error, the shirt is actually pretty cute. And I do know someone who just got a new kitten. Maybe I’ll get her one, just to encourage correct grammar on t-shirts.

Aside from lay/lie, the linked post points out an error that I’m aware of, but not as sensitive to. It’s this one:

[H]ere’s an issue raised by a professional writer about something he heard on the TV news: “The reporter said he’d heard ‘nothing but superlatives.’ He then listed four adjectives, ‘terrific, wonderful, beautiful, fantastic,’ none of which is a superlative.”

True! Those aren’t superlatives; they’re just positive terms. A superlative would be “This is the MOST beautiful city in the world!” But I wouldn’t have thought anything of it personally. I believe the back of my brain has accepted “superlative” as a synonym for “highly positive.” Now that someone else has pointed to this mistake, maybe I will start to notice it as a mistake, but even in the utopian future, I don’t think I’ll care about this one that much.

Though I grant, if we lose the word “superlative,” we will need a different word for that. “Most positive” is an amusingly meta construction that might do.

*I know some grade school teachers somewhere must still teach basic grammar and punctuation, perhaps by diagramming sentences, which is imo the best way to learn what the parts of a sentence actually are. If you’re one of those teachers, good for you, and keep up the good fight! But at least in my area, this seems an area neglected by 100% of grade schools. Never mind grammatical subjects and objects, the college students I see generally do not know** what a noun or a verb is.

**Yes, I mean literally do not know. If you ask, “Does this sentence start with a noun?” they can’t tell.

I ask that question because if the sentence does NOT start with a noun, it has started with an introductory clause, and you will put a comma after that clause and before the grammatical subject — which, no, they can’t identify, but everyone puts the comma in the right place if they know they should put a comma somewhere.

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Penric and Desdemona

Okay! Has everyone read the latest Penric novella by this time? Is it okay to talk about it, with perhaps one or two mild spoilers?

So – better than the last one, imo, but a basically minor novella overall.

The pluses: More fun than endlessly pouring uphill magic into a lot of plague victims and then staggering off to collapse in exhaustion. That is, considerably more fun to read than the Physicians of Vilnoc story, with a fun setting and a lot more chatter from Desdemona. I liked the saint. I liked the parenthood theme, and has anybody else noticed that LMB has hit that theme pretty hard lately? I’m thinking of Knife Children here, which, btw, you should certainly read that story if you haven’t yet. Anyway, the tendency for Bujold to hit that theme recently just struck me a bit when I read this one.

The minuses: I was sorry for the poor demon, who just could not catch a break when it came to hosts. What a sad, um, life, or whatever. I was sorry for the dolphins, too.

The rest of the minuses: So, did everyone else yell, “Come on, Pen!” at multiple moments during this story? I have seldom read any story in my life where the so-called plot twist was so screamingly obvious. Even if Penric did not realize the truth – for some reason – way in advance, what’s Desdemona’s excuse? With all her experience, you’d think she’d twig right off.

Also, without checking the page count, I also got the impression this was a short novella. That may just be the simplicity of the plot compared to some of the other Penric stories.

If I were ranking these novellas … let me see … I believe I would put them in this order, from top to bottom:

“Penric’s Demon” — it’s hard to beat the very first one.“Penric’s Mission” — Nikys is such a wonderful character.“The Prisoner of Limnos” — Nikys continues to be wonderful. Lots to like about this novella; plenty of plot twists and great supporting characters.“Penric and the Shaman” — I didn’t care as much for this story the first time I read it, but it’s grown on me since. “The Orphans of Raspay” — good pacing, fun story, plenty of nice details, great ending.“Mira’s Last Dance” — this story bugs me because it seems to re-cast the various memories contained within Desdemona as more like actual personalities than generally seems consistent with the metaphysics of the world. I like lots of things about the story, though.“Penric’s Fox” — I like this story, but it’s always seemed forgettable to me. “Masquerade in Lodi” — exactly like the one above, this is a perfectly nice but minor story. Also, the “plot twist” is astoundingly obvious.“The Physicians of Vilnoc” — as close to boring as a Penric story can get; not nearly enough of Desdemona.

How about it? Agree/disagree about these rankings?

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Horror baking for Halloween

Horror … baking. These are not words I normally think of coming as a set. Nevertheless, here is a post at Book Riot, detailing eighteen … cookbooks, of a sort. Some look like they’re more cookbooky and some perhaps less so. Here’s the first one on the list:

CANNIBAL KITCHEN: A HORROR LOVER’S COOKBOOK BY SHANNON RULLO

Hmm. From Amazon, this list of categories included in the Cannibal Kitchen cookbook:

Frightening FingerfoodsSadistic SidesSlasher SoupsParanormal PastasZombie-Plagued PizzasManiacal Main CoursesB-Rated Desserts

Okay, that … could be fun? I am a bit concerned about what sort of pizza might be offered. Actually, the reviews indicate that the recipes are just normal recipes with cute names. I do feel the author of a horror cookbook should go to some trouble to create weird but tasty recipes, or write normal recipes in a weird way, or choose recipes that really suit the theme, or all three.

DECEPTIVE DESSERTS: A LADY’S GUIDE TO BAKING BAD BY CHRISTINE MCCONNELL

In Deceptive Desserts, each dessert is a work of art—some a little twisted, others magical—but every recipe inspires readers to create their own rules without spending a fortune. Why can’t crab cakes be a delicious pink-frosted dessert? And if you’re stuck hosting a bridal shower, why not create an actual Bridezilla cake to match the bride’s ego?

“Hmm” is going to be my response to a lot of these books, I guess. I’m trying to decide if the crab cakes are made of crab or if we’re talking about a cake that looks like a crab. Given the title of the book, I guess the latter is more likely.

THE WALKING DEAD: THE OFFICIAL COOKBOOK AND SURVIVAL GUIDE BY LAUREN WILSON AND YUNHEE KIM

Hmm. Evidently this one includes sections on foraging for wild foods after the zombie apocalypse, which is a fun idea to include in this kind of book.

There are a bunch more. A zombie-themed cookbook. A book called “The Wicked Baker.” A book called “A Little Kitchen of Horrors.”

Okay, that is amusing. Gross, but amusing.

I wondered if this post would include the one book that sprang to mind for me when I saw the them:

And yes, there it is! This is a very funny, very well-written cookbook that I actually own. In this case, the recipes are written in a Lovecraftian style (and rewritten in a more normal style in a long index, in case you can’t interpret the instructions).

I’ve made several recipes from Necronomnomnom, and all of them have been quite good.

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