Joe Clifford Faust's Blog, page 14

Exclamation Point Points

After thirty years of my wife insisting, I am now reading Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean Auel. And it's a wondrous thing. For a first novel, Auel created a rich world based on sound (at the time) scientific speculation, bent the rules within acceptable parameters, expertly manipulated plot twists and turns for maximum effect, and created a modern classic that can be read as a great adventure or as something much deeper (I could make a great argument for its being the ultimate feminist novel). It's a Great American Novel.

I only have a few minor quibbles with what she's done with the book. I'm wondering if the dialogue is a little too rich for being sign language. She ends one chapter too many with antagonist Broud plotting to get even with heroine Ayla (as my wife puts it, it's almost like he's twirling a mustache while he thinks these things). And Auel uses exclamation points in action scenes on occasion.

Not a lot. I've noted two or three instances. Not enough to drag her down into L. Ron Hubbard pulpdom, but enough to make me think about the subject.

My policy on exclamation points is that I never use them in narrative:

The cars collided.

- not -

The cars collided!

There are a couple of reasons for this. First, when you put an exclamation point at the end of the sentence, it adds an enormous amount of emphasis on what is being said. It had better be darn important if you're going to do it!

Second, when you put an exclamation point at the end of narrative, it feels final. Like there's nothing else that needs to be said beyond that point. You've made the ultimate statement on the subject!

Back to our car accident description above. If I dared to write The cars collided! I would not follow it up with anything else. The emphasis would all be right there in one sentence, which, like haiku, had better say exactly what you wanted to say on the subject since you punctuated it thusly.

However, without the exclamation point, I would go on, perhaps turning the accident into a ballet of broken glass and bending metal:

The cars collided. The grille of her car went first, shattering, blowing back against the wall of the radiator, which bent and burst, hemorrhaging sticky green fluid across the asphalt road. The hood crumpled up, bending into a tent as it was pushed up over the engine. Then the windshield webbed and gave way into thousands of jagged pieces, spraying in on her as momentum carried the car forward. By this point the airbag on the steering wheel was just a memory, having caught her head as it whipped forward, collapsing as the seat belt caught her and threw her back.

Now go back and imagine that with an exclamation point after the first sentence. It breaks breaks up the rhythm of the words, too much of a full stop to allow anything else to proceed.

I should note here that if you're writing a novel for young readers, all bets are off. Exclamation points in narrative bring a different tone and add a sense of excitement to the proceedings. That's probably why, when I see exclamation points in narrative, it comes across as having a juvenile feel.

On the other hand, I have no problem using them in dialogue – just not all the time. Again, it has to do with the rhythm of the words. There are times when I might want to write:

"Get out of my house," screamed Kate.

and there might be times when I want to express it this way:

"Get out of my house!"

To me, either is acceptable. It just depends on how you want the dialogue to flow.

So my advice is don't use exclamation points too often!

What, are you kidding? We got ourselves an e-book here!

It's live on Amazon.com.

You can get it for the Amazon Kindle, and if you don't have one, you can read it on a PC, Mac, iPad, iPhone, Blackberry, Android or Windows Phone 7 with Amazon's free Kindle Application.

And it's only $0.99, for a limited time.*

So check it out on this site's new Store page or on Amazon itself.

And remember: You folks are my 401(k)!

—

* That is, until Desperate Measures is released.

Little Moments

SPOILER ALERT!

DO NOT READ THIS ENTRY IF YOU HAVE NOT READ A DEATH OF HONOR.

Payne caught up as a uniformed man with a megaphone announced that boarding was closing to check for last-minute cancellations. Trinina looked harried. The steward guarding the path looked stern.

He handed her Nathan's suitcase. "What's the problem?"

"He won't take this paper," Trinina sobbed.

"It's torn," the steward said in a thick accent. He studied Payne and cocked his head.

"You see this?" Payne shouted, touching the cloth around his head. "Somebody tried to kill us for these papers. You're telling me that she can't get on because somebody made off with the corner?"

"It's your paper," Trinina said weakly.

"Those are the rules," the steward said.

Payne put his hand between Trinina's shoulders and shoved her up the path. "Go!" he shouted. "Go!"

She looked at him, eyes wide.

"Go!"

"I love you, Payne."

"Go on! Get the hell out of here!"

She turned and ran up the path.

Yeah, I have to get used to putting spoiler alerts up now since hopefully lots of new people will be reading Honor in the near future.

My wife and I were proofing this book last week to make sure all the formatting was where it was supposed to be. I was having her read the first and last word of each paragraph to make sure they had all been broken up properly. Nearing this part, she was reading, "Payne, stern. He, problem. He, paper. It's, head."

She got to Payne's line, "Go, here" and I stopped her.

"This is my favorite line in the book," I said, having recently discovered that during an earlier pass throught the book – when I was scanning it, I think. "'Go on. Get the hell out of here.'"

My wife asked, "Why?"

I said, "Because this is the moment when Payne becomes a human being."

"Sacrifice," she said.

"Yeah. For the first time in the book, his actions aren't all about him."

Which is true. Payne becomes a human being at this moment in the book, which incidentally, was being made up on the spot by yours truly. At this point in the story, the mystery is solved. However, as I was writing I said to myself, "All they need to do now is get on the boat and leave." Then I stopped typing and said, "Boy, that's really boring. Let me see what I can do to spice up that ending."

But the whole point of this exercise is that Payne's humanity came back to him not in a bang, but in a whimper. In a little moment. There's no blood rushing to his head, the jetty to the boat is not spinning around him, there's no white-knuckled grip on Nathan's suitcase. There's no interior monologue debating the wisdom of his next action. It happens naturally. And that's the way I think it should be.

I think there's a tendency among us to overplay big moments, but I'm starting to realize that they're best underplayed. For one thing, the reader has to think about it more, and I'm always for that – which is why I tend not to reveal everything about the world, its circumstances, and the people who inhabit it. Readers have thanked me for this.

There are times when it's appropriate. However, since life itself is made up of little moments, I think revelations like this seem to ring truer when they're not so broadly played.

My wife and I were watching The Blind Side again the other night, and there's that moment in the first football game when Michael Oher grabs his coach and pulls him away to keep him from decking an unfair referee. Oher looks at him and says, smiling, "That's okay, coach. I've got your back." That's the moment when you know that Oher has come to understand not just the game, but the fact that he can trust his coach and teammates and sees them as family. There's no clap of thunder, no reverbed words ringing in his ears. It just happens.

Welcome to life. It's full of stuff like this.

So the next time you want to show that change is in the air, turn off the thunder machine and draw a line through the histrionics. Turn the volume down and let it whisper.

It'll be loud and clear to the reader.

Murder by Deed

Murder by Deed

by

Marie Cox

* *

Readable but ultimately unsatisfying murder mystery with an animal rights twist – aspires to be a thriller, a romance, and a travelogue but fizzles at all three.

The Mercury 13: The True Story of Thirteen Women and the Dream of Space Flight

The Mercury 13: The True Story of Thirteen Women and the Dream of Space Flight

by

Martha Ackmann

* * * 1/2

Highly readable account of 13 women who trained and tested for the Mercury program, only to be snubbed by NASA and assorted politicians.

Wanted (No Questions Asked)

Have you seen me (in HTML or Plain Text)?

Walter Jon WIlliams is looking for pirated scans of his novels. In this article on Torrent Freak, he explains his rationale, and it's a good one.

Having recently scanned and coded the forthcoming ebook issue of A Death of Honor, I can see the genius of this move. Why bother scanning when there's someone out there who may have already done it? Or somebody who can be bribed with autographed books, a mention in the appropriate ebook edition, or perhaps even small amounts of cash to produce a new scan?1

So if any of you ace searchers out there can point me to a torrent where any of my titles (except A Death of Honor – done already) can be downloaded, let me know. Or if anyone out there is willing to do an OCR scan of one or more of my titles (preferably into html format), get in touch also.2

As I said, bribes are definitely in order. Although baked goods might be a bit hard to ship.

—

Hey, we are in a recession, folks. If I were Stephen King, I'd be more generous. But then, if I were King, I wouldn't have this issue.

To answer an obvious question – I do have electronic copies of all my novels except Honor (which was written and edited entirely on an old device called a typewriter). The problem with these is twofold – one, they are all stored on 5 1/4″ floppies. Two, they are not the edited version as produced by the publishers.

Piracy on the High E's!

I'm not sure where you come down on the issue of piracy. Not the Somalis in a speedboat with some vintage Soviet RPG type. The new-fangled method of copying intellectual property that has been the bane of folks from the members of Metallica to J.K. Rowling.

And to show that nobody is safe, even I have been pirated. That's right. No sooner were the Angel's Luck novels in print over in Russia than somebody with a scanner and some OCR software gutted copies and converted them into files for the RocketBook – a late 1990′s eReader that is so vintage that there's almost no information on them out in Internet land… not even on Wikipedia. All I could find is this rather odd video.1 Apparently it never took off here, but was popular in Europe, judging from the accents on the video (and the Russian piracy).

It's probably also worth mentioning that if you're Russian, you can also read the Pembroke Hall series online – here and here. More wonders from scannerland. I suppose if you're a dab hand with cut and paste, you could bring up the pages and put them piecemeal into one of the many online translation apps out there and read yourself the books for free. Sorry, I can't guarantee it'll be an effective use of your time, but the many quirks of online translation are guaranteed to make the story more amusing than it already is.

So where do I come down on the side of such hijinks?

It doesn't bother me. Maybe if I were an impoverished musician like the members of Metallica, I'd have a different attitude toward it – after all, what do you do when your "loyal" audience is cheating you out of the money you desperately need to feed your family? But in the case of a writer, the objective is to be read – and judging from the glowing reviews Ferman/Boddekker have gotten, Russians are reading the books.

Plus, to be honest, if I complain about this, shouldn't I be complaining about that grandaddy of file sharing schemes, the public library system?2

Also, I have a day job that helps me feed my family. Maybe those tapped-out souls in Metallica should look into getting one themselves. Hey, a man's got to do what a man's got to do.

The Russian Cover for Harry Harrison's "Galaxy Hero Returns"

What's particularly fascinating about piracy of intellectual property is how it seems so boundless. For example, here's the cover of a Harry Harrison novel that was recently brought to my attention. It's a version put out by a Russian publisher. Looks pretty exciting – but then notice the odd resemblance between Harry's Russian cover and this American one by yours truly.

What's interesting is that we're getting into a whole different field of piracy here. I'm not sure it was out of laziness (although the artist did take the time to replace the green hologram on my cover with what looks like a full color holo of what might be a pole dancer – although that image might be nicked from somewhere, too.

While I find this amusing, I feel bad for David Mattingly, the artist who did the work on my original cover. Unfortunately, like the online version of Ferman's Devils, there's not a lot I can do about it were I so inclined. It's what comes from dealing with countries with a more relaxed attitude towards intellectual property than ours.

Meantime, I guess we can take consolation in the fact that it ain't just me and it ain't just Russia. Witness this cover spotted by my son in a bookstore in Hangzhou, China:

Photo courtesy of my globe-hopping son.

It's for Uncle Tom's Cabin. I suspect Harriet Beecher Stowe would be amused and even flattered by this whole thing, but no guesses where Mr. Freeman or Ms. Judd would come down on this whole thing.

Oh, and three words of advice for the malnourished members of Metallica: monster dot com.

—

Although, admittedly, I only spent about five minutes looking.

Which I once attempted to satirize here… but nobody got the joke.

A Chat About Place

I'm going to try something here. A few days ago, a friend of mine who has decided to try and write a novel popped up in my chat window to ask a couple of questions. Instead of writing at length about the subject, I'm going to just put the transcript here and see what happens. If you have any questions or followup on the subject, feel free to comment:

Brian: how much detail do you put in your environments?

Brian: I sprinkle some of it here and there, but don't go overboard

me: depends on how important it is to the story

me: the next novel I'll be converting for Kindle [The Mushroom Shift]

me: is set in Wyoming in the winter

me: and the setting and the weather play an important part of the story

me: it's oppressive to characters in an already oppressive situation

Brian: how do you pick cities for your stories?

me: well

me: if you're Stephen King you stick to places where you've lived

me: ; )

Brian: I am going to just use this area… I can change it later if I want

me: I tend to pick places that I think are interesting

Brian: there are a million of those types of areas

me: What suits the story? The Company Man and Drawing Down the Moon are both travelogues of sorts, bouncing around different versions of the US. The shifting locales helped shape the stories.

me: Sometimes the story dictates the location – Wyoming for The Mushroom Shift, New York for the Pembroke Hall novels.

me: Then sometimes it doesn't matter. When I wrote A Death of Honor, I deliberately did NOT mention a specific city, and have had people assume it was New York, LA, etc.

me: There's another book I've gotten a lot done on that is set in a Canton-like milieu, and needs to be that way for a couple of reasons. And the UFO novel has to take place in Gillette, Wyoming because Gillette is the perfect place for it to occur.

Brian: My story will take place in a canton like area.. more rural though…

me: See? Based on what you've told me, it needs to set there. It's dictated by the story.

One thing I will add that I didn't say in the chat is that sometimes Place can be as much a character as any of the people in your novel. I'm thinking of films like Body Heat, Do The Right Thing, and just about any movie by the Coen brothers, who have taken Place As Character to a whole new level.

Have I missed anything? Grab your atlas and check.

Strip

Strip

by

Thomas Perry

* * 1/2

Predictable novel from a contender for the title of "The Next Elmore Leonard." He isn't.

Spook: Science Tackles The Afterlife

Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife

by

Mary Roach

* * *

Not as satisfying as Roach's other books, but still an interesting read nonetheless.