Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 273

Copy edits and marked-up manuscripts

This, by cartoonist Grant Snider, is funny, even though these days at least half my copy edits are to Word documents with Track Changes turned on.

I particularly like the “Set in Italy” and “Horribly wrong font.”

Anyway, copy edit marks are kind of a thing of the past, or heading that way. I’m not fond of track changes — when you change something and then change it back and then adjust it again, it winds up looking really confusing on the page. But it’s okay for copy edits, where mostly you can either let the copy editor’s change stand or else comment “Stet” and seldom need to do much else.

These marks are still worth a giggle, though.

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Could this really happen?

Via File 770, I noticed this:

Firm Floats Plan to Hang Colossal Skyscraper From an Asteroid

Click through to see the amazing artist’s rendition of how this might look.

Don’t expect it to go up anytime soon, but a New York City-based design firm has floated a mind-bending plan for the erection of a skyscraper it bills as “the world’s tallest building ever.”

Dubbed Analemma, the fanciful tower wouldn’t be built on the ground, but suspended in air by cables from an asteroid repositioned into geosynchronous Earth orbit just for the purpose.

Over the course of each day, the floating skyscraper would trace a figure-eight path over our planet’s surface, according to plans posted online by Clouds Architecture Office. It would swing between the northern and southern hemispheres, returning to the same point once every 24 hours.

The speed of the tower relative to the ground would vary depending upon which part of the figure eight it was tracing, with the slowest speeds at the top and bottom of each loop, the plans say. The asteroid’s orbit would be calibrated so that the slowest part of the tower’s path would occur over New York City.

That’s … mind-boggling, both in itself and for the statement it would make. (LOOK, WE ARE IN THE FUTURE!)

a) I trust planes could avoid this structure?

b) Birds would be okay, I guess? It’s hard to see how anything could accidentally hit a thing as large as this.

c) Wow, talk about totally being safe from earthquakes and stuff, maybe they should hang one up over California?

d) The concern expressed in the article, that people who live in a tower literally separated from the Earth would feel disconnected and psychologically separate, I don’t know, could be. It would depend on how easy it is to go back and forth, probably.

e) This is just … really cool.

The future, we are in it.

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How many books will you read before you die?

Via the Passive Voice, I happened across this intriguing post about how many books you will have time to read before you die, based on actuarial statistics and average numbers of books read.

Twenty-five-year-old women, for example, have 61 years left to live according to the Social Security Life Expectancy Calculator. Assuming they live that long, average readers in that group have 732 more books to read in their lifetimes. “Average” in this case means people who read 12 books per year.

Okay, twelve books per year is pathetic, but the post also provides numbers for “voracious” and “super” readers, neither of which actually comes close to the number of books most of us read per year (the numbers provided for those categories are 50 and 80 books per year respectively.)

Let us call ourselves . . . super-duper readers? No. Prodigious readers? Hah, how about compulsive readers?

Anyway, I, at very far from the top of the heap, read about 100 books a year. That’s a nice round number, but assuming I keep reading about that many books per year also presumes I will continue writing about two books per year, which may not be accurate. But never mind, never mind. Assume 100 per year.

I expect life expectancy will continue to rise, hopefully precipitously and soon and with a commensurate improvement in the overall health and vigor of old codgers, but assume for now that women’s life expectancy remains constant at a fairly pathetic 86.

I am, of course, a good deal over twenty five. That gives me . . . let’s see . . . let’s assume I live past 86 so I can round up to 4000, which is a nice attractive number. So something like 4000 books are left in my reading life.

The number that floats through my mind for “number of English-language novels published per year” is 400,000, with about three quarters of those now being self-published. If you know that’s way off, let me know. And I expect the number of novels published per year will only increase. But for now I’ll go with that.

So if 1.6 million novels are published in the next 40 years and I can read only 4000 of them . . . that would be 0.025%.

Wow. Of course a large majority of those novels wouldn’t appeal to me for one reason or another, but still. Better get busy.

Also, I’m going to cite these numbers next time someone raises the question of DNFing books versus finishing everything you start. Because as you can see, life is truly, objectively too short to read books you don’t like.

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Amazing News Tuesday

Good heavens, people. What are we going to find out about next? First we have this:

This Gigantic Ring of Galaxies Could Bring Einstein’s Gravity Into Question

Scientists have discovered that a gigantic ring of galaxies stretching 10 million light-years wide is speeding away from our own galaxy so fast, our current physics models can’t explain it.

Describing the structure as expanding rapidly like a “mini Big Bang”, the team thinks it was formed by a near-miss between the Milky Way and our neighbouring galaxy, Andromeda, which created a ‘sling-shot’ of several smaller galaxies. The only problem is the result is at odds with the conditions predicted by Einstein’s theory of relativity….

And then closer to home we have this:

World’s biggest dinosaur footprints found in north-western Australia

The footprints were found on the north-western coast of Western Australia, where Dr Salisbury’s research project has revealed the journeys of dinosaurs up and down the coast.

“We’ve got several tracks up in that area that are about 1.7 metres long,” Dr Salisbury said.

“So most people would be able to fit inside tracks that big, and they indicate animals that are probably around 5.3 to 5.5 metres at the hip, which is enormous.”

Yeah, click through and admire the picture of the guy lying next to the footprint. The most delightful detail is that for a long time the footprints were overlooked because they’re SO big, they’re outside the normal search image a paleontologist has in mind when looking over the landscape for things of interest.

The animal was a sauropod, like Brontosaurus, but waaaay bigger. That is so cool.

And then for new developments in technology, I must say, this is astonishing:

Spinach Leaf Transformed Into Beating Human Heart Tissue

Using the plant like scaffolding, scientists built a mini version of a working heart, which may one day aid in tissue regeneration…. “The main limiting factor for tissue engineering … is the lack of a vascular network,” says study co-author Joshua Gershlak, a graduate student at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) in Massachusetts, in a video describing the study. “Without that vascular network, you get a lot of tissue death.”

One of the defining traits of a leaf is the branching network of thin veins that delivers water and nutrients to its cells. Now, scientists have used plant veins to replicate the way blood moves through human tissue. The work involves modifying a spinach leaf in the lab to remove its plant cells, which leaves behind a frame made of cellulose….. The eventual goal is to be able to replace damaged tissue in patients who have had heart attacks or who have suffered other cardiac issues that prevent their hearts from contracting. Like blood vessels, the veins in the modified leaves would deliver oxygen to the entire swath of replacement tissue, which is crucial in generating new heart matter.

Astounding.

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Inspiration to finish

Here’s a great post over at The Book Smugglers: ROSHANI CHOKSHI ON THE INSPIRATION TO FINISH A NOVEL

I saw the title and instantly thought: what a great idea for a post. Yes yes yes, starting a novel is easy. I did that yesterday and after the initial ten seconds of gazing at the completely blank screen, it was fun. Beginnings are always fun! I started this one in first person, only the second time I’ve ever tried that, and so far I’m liking the feel of it. We’ll see how it goes.

Anyway, how about when you’ve gotten stuck, or busy with other things, and leave a fragment of a novel sitting in a drawer for a year or two or ten … how and when and why can you be prodded into taking it out and finishing it?

That’s what I figured this post would be about. And I was right, or partly right. Chokshi is mostly talking about finishing a book when you have a deadline and no real inclination to write. That’s another important topic, to be sure.

She says:

To start a story feels innocent. It’s lovely and new. It’s a lace of snowflakes on flowers. Swift and delicate. It fills you with urgency to bottle up this feeling and get thee to a laptop/notebook/writing apparatus of choice because Ah, Fate, there is a story within you!

But that’s not what this post is about.

This post is about the inspiration to finish something.

Chokshi does offer the all-important caveat that this post is personal; ie, different writers are going to experience writing differently. That’s important. Here is her take on the experience of getting stuck and then unstuck:

I used to dream of writing for a living, only to find that somewhere along the way I lost wanting to live for writing.

I found that once more. But it was painful. I had to pluck every voice from my head. I had to write for the sake of the story and not for anything else.

Honor your voice. Honor your story.

That was my rallying cry, and it became the soul of A Crown of Wishes. At its core, A Crown of Wishes is a story about the power of stories. In writing it, I found joy and, honestly, peace. That the story itself was inspiration and reason enough to finish.

A nice conclusion to the post, and nice when it happens. I’ve also just bulled through and finished manuscripts on nothing but determination to meet each day’s minimum wordcount. It’s certainly more fun when it’s not such a slog.

Let’s see, let’s see … okay, I see Roshani Chokshi wrote A Star-Touched Queen, which came out about a year ago, so in the post she’s talking about the sequel. Let’s check out the first book:

Goodreads says:

Maya is cursed. With a horoscope that promises a marriage of death and destruction, she has earned only the scorn and fear of her father’s kingdom. Content to follow more scholarly pursuits, her whole world is torn apart when her father, the Raja, arranges a wedding of political convenience to quell outside rebellions. Soon Maya becomes the queen of Akaran and wife of Amar. Neither roles are what she expected: As Akaran’s queen, she finds her voice and power. As Amar’s wife, she finds something else entirely: Compassion. Protection. Desire…

But Akaran has its own secrets—thousands of locked doors, gardens of glass, and a tree that bears memories instead of fruit. Soon, Maya suspects her life is in danger. Yet who, besides her husband, can she trust? With the fate of the human and Otherworldly realms hanging in the balance, Maya must unravel an ancient mystery that spans reincarnated lives to save those she loves the most…including herself.

Sounds intriguing so far! Reviews are mentioning . . . let’s see . . . sounds like some reviewers wish the book had stuck more closely to Indian mythology, so it’s probably an Indian-flavored secondary world fantasy. Or even a Greek-and-Indian flavored sort of story, I’m seeing references to Persephone.

Some readers are finding the prose elegant and lush, others purple. Some love the romance and some find it to insta-romancy . . . the usual wide range of opinions. I’m just glancing through reviews, you understand, not really reading them. I don’t want a ton of spoilers, just a notion whether this book might be my thing.

Looks promising! Adding a sample . . . now.

After which I may not have time to read it just yet since I should probably finish writing some book or other . . . lots of started manuscripts around here!

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Children’s Books by Celebrities

I happened to notice this post today: Does celebrity sell?

If you thought the children’s books market had reached peak celebrity then look away now for there is a veritable deluge coming in 2017. This includes, though is by no means limited to, David Walliams, David Baddiel, Tom Fletcher, Clare Balding, Adrian Edmondson, Julian Clary, Christian O’Connell, Mo Farah, Greg James, Chris Smith, Dermot O’Leary, Miranda Hart, Danny Baker, Dara O Briain, Fearne Cotton, Jessica Ennis-Hill, Chris Hoy, Isla Fisher, Gemma Cairney, Frank Lampard, Chris O’Dowd, Brooklyn Beckham, various YouTubers and rather curiously, George Galloway.

In a culture where celebrity sells I understand why publishers go down this route. The phenomenal success of David Walliams has put every publisher under pressure to have their own chart-topping version….

And so on.

I had two immediate thoughts:

a) I’ve heard of only maybe one or two of those people, and

b) Who is it that finds a celebrity author a plus?

I’m probably being unfair, but my assumption when I see a book “by” a celebrity is that it was ghost written. I mean, I KNOW I’m being unfair in some cases — sure SOME of them must write the books that come out under their names. I guess. But honestly, I doubt the authenticity of basically every book supposedly written by a celebrity, whether an actor, a comedian, a politician, or whatever else.

Not Winston Churchill. I’m sure he wrote his. But basically everyone else, I’m pretty skeptical. But who would look to modern-day celebrities for articulate, intelligent, charming children’s books? Or any other kind of books?

Well, maybe that’s just me, because of my near-total disinterest in celebrities. It just seems strange.

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Cursing in fantasy novels

Here’s a great post by Sherwood Smith at Book View Café: Worldbuilding: Curses and Cusses .

How many Sf or fantasy novels have you read, or shows have you watched, that toss you right out when the characters started cussing and the made-up words, or euphemisms, sound totally fake?

Some writers solve the problem by ignoring it. American writers use American slang, metaphors, and cusswords, even in invented worlds full of dragons and magic…

SOME American writers certainly do, and wow can that seem jarring, speaking of tossing the reader out of the story. It depends. American modern idiom sounds really strange in some fantasy worlds. Fake words that sound fake, not great; but there are (I’m sure) examples of fake words that don’t sound fake. Feel free to mention examples. The examples I personally can think of right offhand are in SF stories, not fantasy.

Anyway, this is an issue that I have had to deal with every. single. time. I write a book set in a brand-new world. You may well not have noticed, but there is zero cursing in House of Shadows. Nada.

If you look, you will see that there is no cursing or cussing of any kind in the Griffin Mage trilogy either. Yes, I did find that a little confining.

Remember the cursing in The City in the Lake? “Cracking ice!” and like that. I don’t remember, but things like that. There are no references to gods or God in that world, so I had to come up with something else.

In many fantasy worlds, including one of mine — the Floating Islands — people swear by “the gods,” right? I don’t do a lot with religion in that world — nothing much at all, in fact — but people do say “We thank the Gods!” and “Gods preserve us!” and stuff like that.

In The Mountain of Kept Memory, of course the gods are all dead. So curse are things like “Gods dead and forgotten!” That worked well for that world.

There’s just one God in The White Road of the Moon, and there religion is important. But did you notice the God is genderless? If the copy editor and I caught everything, you should never, ever see a gender reference in relation to the God. In that world, the God is not really personified at all.

So, let’s see what Sherwood Smith has to say about this topic. … Ah, as one might expect, we get a good deal of historical context in this post. Thus:

Another worldbuilding curiosity to keep in mind is how words can alter in meaning and effect over time. … “Plaguey” is merely a quaint adjective, … no one anymore says, “Plague take you!” which was an extremely serious imprecation indeed after the mid 1300s, when half the population of Europe died within about a year. “Zounds!” was “God’s wounds!”–one of those expressions one swore by, incomprehensible now.

In some cultures, people swear by something, usually deities or leaders, either their own or someone else’s. In our history, for example, a hundred years ago it was okay to swear by the Greek or Roman gods: “By Jupiter!” was all right for gentlemen to say (though not for ladies) but “By God!” was considered blasphemous by either sex. …

Lots more in the post. Well, it’s an interesting topic, and yes indeed it is an fundamental part of worldbuilding. Are there gods or aren’t there, and is it safe to swear by them or isn’t it? Fundamental, indeed. And that’s before we get to cussing based on excretion or sex — which is, I would argue, more important for tone (gritty or not?) than for worldbuilding per se.

I will add, yes, Winter of Ice and Iron treats gods in a completely different way again: real, but removed from human society, potentially dangerous, not entities to pray to or curse by… well, you’ll see this fall!

BTW, click on the newsletter link above and sign up to be automatically entered in a drawing for an ARC of Winter, and you could get a look at the Fortunate and Unfortunate Gods well in advance of the release date.

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Friday Puppy Post

Friday’s dose of cuteness: Kimmie in a basket.

Someone asked me the other day:

Do you pose your puppies in these baskets/on dog beds/on bookshelves?

Nope. It’s not that I’m above posing puppies, I just don’t need to. They climb into these places by themselves. My role is to coo at them or make duck noises or whatever, so that they will look up at the camera.

However, sometimes when some shrub is blooming especially beautifully, that will cause me to go get someone photogenic and set them up for a photo.

Here is Pippa years ago with a great rose called ‘Renee’ —

Unfortunately ‘Renee’ died — we have trouble with rose rosette disease. But at least I got some nice pictures first.

Now we have a different climbing rose on that gazebo. Below is ‘Cameo,’ a polyantha. The polyanthas so far seem much more resistant to rose rosette than other roses.

Of course you recognize Ish posing in front of ‘Cameo’ —

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Good heavens, didn’t see this coming: An opera based on Butler’s The Parable of the Sower

Via File 770, this:

Science fiction, black music meet in Toshi Reagon’s opera-in-progress

In the parable of the sower in the Gospels, Jesus tells his followers about different outcomes from scattering seeds. Some are cast to the side and eaten by birds, some are planted in rocky soil or among thorns and fail to grow, but the seeds sown on “good ground” will take root and provide a bounty.

Science-fiction author Octavia E. Butler called back to that allegory about the word of God with her 1993 book “Parable of the Sower,” about a young woman in an apocalyptic future America who wanders a drought-stricken landscape, planting the seeds of a new religion fueled by empathy.

Now Butler’s book is adapted into an opera that synthesizes a wide range of musical styles culled from its creators’ deep reservoir of knowledge about black music in America.

Yeah, hmm. The new religion was by far the least persuasive thing in Butler’s Parable of the Sower as far as I was concerned. SF writers often seem pretty convinced that people would mostly be quite willing to ditch their original religion and dive right into whatever brand-spankin’ new religion.their protagonist is offering. Several thousand years of recorded history suggest this is not the case.

Still. Butler. Opera isn’t something I usually like all that much . . . and this book might be too grim for me to want to encounter it in any visual form, but . . . Octavia Butler. Yeah, I’m interested.

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Ooh, actual data! About back cover copy and what works.

Via The Passive Voice blog, this fascinating study by Book Bub: 8 Book Description A/B Tests You Need to See

Here’s what they mean by A/B tests: they offer a book with two different blurbs. The original is A. Then a tweaked version is B. Then they count click-throughs.

They also have the basic sense to explain the caveats: Book Bub’s readership may not map all that well with any other particular readership; Book Bub writes blurbs in a particular format, and so on. Still, these data are very suggestive.

1. Mentioning author accolades is a plus. Specific phrases like “Bram Stoker Award-Winning Author” help. This makes sense. It helps a lot, so well worth including.

2. Including the names of too many different characters hurts. This makes sense to me. Too many names just sound cluttered and confusing, imo. The example in this post is really interesting because the A version includes four names, whereas the B version says “Four friends.” B won by a mile.

3. Specifying subgenre helps. Saying “psychological thriller” is better than just saying “thriller.” However, they mention that it depends on what the Book Bub readership is into, which is not necessarily indicative of other readerships.

4. This one is interesting because it seems so random. M-dashes, exclamation points, and question marks don’t help. But ellipses do. How mysterious… Actually I’m pleased by this because I find myself reaching for ellipses all the time when writing one-sentence or two-sentence pitches. On the other hand, I’m not TOO smug about my liking for ellipses, because I see that it helps in horror and suspense, but not fantasy. Phooey.

5. Not relevant to me, but naming recipes included in a cookbook hurts, while calling out the number of recipes included helps. Hmmm. Not sure I get that.

6. Calling business books “accessible” hurts. I can see that. Everyone probably thinks they’re an expert and so they don’t bother with “accessible” books.

7. Mentioning the protagonist’s specific age helps in chick lit, but not erotic romance. Hmmm. Yeah, that makes no sense to me. But then I don’t think I read much chick lit, so maybe it makes more sense to any of you who do?

8. Mentioning specific aristocratic titles helps in historical romance. Yes, that I understand. The Marquis of This or the Count of That sounds more intriguing to me than just using the character’s name. Though so can non-aristocratic tags, like The Dread Pirate Roberts or the bold thief Robin Hood or whatever. Anyway, as I do read some historical romance, I guess I’m just another sheep following the herd on that one.

Very interesting if you like that kind of thing; click through if you want to read the whole post, including examples.

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