Alex Torres's Blog: The View from Woolmers
January 21, 2019
Coincidence? Predestination? Randomness?
“Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.”
In the aftermath of self-publishing my first novel, I came across one of these strange life moments when you wonder if this is all really real or perhaps just a dream, or some bizarre VR computer game.
My novel falls into the broad category of general/literary fiction. It’s a genre that’s unlikely to sell many copies, particularly as it’s not being pushed by a major publishing house.
Self-publishing carries a number of unwelcome burdens for writers: promotion, publicity and distribution among them. But, before all of those bite, there is the decision that, so people say, can make or break a book: the cover.
How much to spend on the cover when you’re not going to make much, if anything from the book? It’s a difficult balance. I actually knew with a strong conviction how I wanted my cover to look, so decided to attempt it myself. The image in my mind was inspired by one of my favourite scenes from the book, in which one of the two main protagonists, who happens to be a dog (!), is meditating and allows his mind to reach out into the universe, where he feels himself surfing among the stars and galaxies.
Choosing the first image was straightforward. NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope site provides even the poorest fantasist with day-dream material to last years.
More tricky was finding a surfing dog. Remember I didn’t want to spend a whole load of money. I’d loved the cover of my first book but paying the photographer seriously dented the possibility of any profit.
I trawled the internet for copyright-free images, selecting about a dozen to work with. Most were photos of a dog with a man and a surfboard. In principle those fitted my mental image because, in the book, the dog forms a very close bond with a man. However, I couldn’t work out how to integrate those images successfully with the images of space.
I eventually settled on an image of a dog breaking through the surf and formed a composite image with one from the HST. It might not be a purists’ book cover, and perhaps being off-norm it won’t sell many books, but the cover fits the story and my mind’s image, so I’m happy.
After the book had been published, I contacted the image copyright owners to let them know that I had used their original images.
I received a heart-warming reply from the photographer, Ulrike:
“You took the right dog! Our dog is very sensitive, she is deaf and very much able to read her beloved ones. We found her on the streets in Cape Town almost dead as a 10 week old puppy. Starved, no hair, full of tics and flees. She was probably abandoned because of her deafness. White fur dogs with different coloured eyes carry the Merle gen. People try to play God and design dogs and sometimes things go wrong and the unperfect results are left to die. So we have been at the right time at the right spot.”
Well, that’s a pretty accurate description of Willow, the protagonist dog in the story who is abandoned as a pup and left to die in a wheelie-bin. He is male and is not deaf but is extremely sensitive and develops special powers of being able to read moods by seeing auras in different colours.
Choose a copyright-free image of a dog for your cover that exactly fits the spirit of the book and the nature of the protagonist. Easy, isn’t it?
So: coincidence, predestination or just plain old random?
You decide.
In the aftermath of self-publishing my first novel, I came across one of these strange life moments when you wonder if this is all really real or perhaps just a dream, or some bizarre VR computer game.
My novel falls into the broad category of general/literary fiction. It’s a genre that’s unlikely to sell many copies, particularly as it’s not being pushed by a major publishing house.
Self-publishing carries a number of unwelcome burdens for writers: promotion, publicity and distribution among them. But, before all of those bite, there is the decision that, so people say, can make or break a book: the cover.
How much to spend on the cover when you’re not going to make much, if anything from the book? It’s a difficult balance. I actually knew with a strong conviction how I wanted my cover to look, so decided to attempt it myself. The image in my mind was inspired by one of my favourite scenes from the book, in which one of the two main protagonists, who happens to be a dog (!), is meditating and allows his mind to reach out into the universe, where he feels himself surfing among the stars and galaxies.
Choosing the first image was straightforward. NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope site provides even the poorest fantasist with day-dream material to last years.
More tricky was finding a surfing dog. Remember I didn’t want to spend a whole load of money. I’d loved the cover of my first book but paying the photographer seriously dented the possibility of any profit.
I trawled the internet for copyright-free images, selecting about a dozen to work with. Most were photos of a dog with a man and a surfboard. In principle those fitted my mental image because, in the book, the dog forms a very close bond with a man. However, I couldn’t work out how to integrate those images successfully with the images of space.
I eventually settled on an image of a dog breaking through the surf and formed a composite image with one from the HST. It might not be a purists’ book cover, and perhaps being off-norm it won’t sell many books, but the cover fits the story and my mind’s image, so I’m happy.
After the book had been published, I contacted the image copyright owners to let them know that I had used their original images.
I received a heart-warming reply from the photographer, Ulrike:
“You took the right dog! Our dog is very sensitive, she is deaf and very much able to read her beloved ones. We found her on the streets in Cape Town almost dead as a 10 week old puppy. Starved, no hair, full of tics and flees. She was probably abandoned because of her deafness. White fur dogs with different coloured eyes carry the Merle gen. People try to play God and design dogs and sometimes things go wrong and the unperfect results are left to die. So we have been at the right time at the right spot.”
Well, that’s a pretty accurate description of Willow, the protagonist dog in the story who is abandoned as a pup and left to die in a wheelie-bin. He is male and is not deaf but is extremely sensitive and develops special powers of being able to read moods by seeing auras in different colours.
Choose a copyright-free image of a dog for your cover that exactly fits the spirit of the book and the nature of the protagonist. Easy, isn’t it?
So: coincidence, predestination or just plain old random?
You decide.
September 2, 2018
Lyrics Copyright: The Challenge
The Law is an ass. Sometimes.
In the case of lyrics copyright: always.
My first book, “The Fifties Child: A Social History Through the Songs of Barclay James Harvest”, would have made a profit – not enough to live by, you understand, just enough to buy a round of drinks for some friends – had it not been for the fact that the song copyright holders insisted I pay a fee for quoting from the song lyrics. Half-truth: one particular copyright holder insisted I pay fees and, because of a bizarre “me too” clause in law, this meant that three of the other four also claimed fees.
But why did they insist? After all, quoting poetry in a literary analysis does not incur licensing costs. The value of my book was not in the lyrics quotations – which, by the way, are freely available on any number of internet sites, as is the band’s music, all for free – it was, just as in poetry criticism, in their analysis. Over a period of more than four decades, these songwriters’ lyrics, suitably analysed, told the social history of a whole generation from he United Kingdom.
Of course, I could have paraphrased the lyrics, as John Blaney did in his 2016 “George Harrison: Soul Man”. That is a drudge, both to write and to read, and not to my liking.
So, why did they insist? The answer is, basically, precedent.
However, no-one to my knowledge has challenged this precedent. Precedents are there to be broken, and it is time that it happened.
After all, did Bob Dylan not win the Nobel Prize for Literature? He won it for his lyrics. The lyrics of many songwriters have literary value, not just Dylan’s.
The blood red rose of summer
Grows elegant and tall
In memory of the green grass
Beyond the guardian wall
The green grass grows forever
Beneath the bloody sky
In memory of the martyrs
She'll cover when they die
We are love, we are, we are love
We are love, we are, we are love
When I publish the second edition of “The Fifties Child”, I’m not paying for lyrics excerpts.
In the case of lyrics copyright: always.
My first book, “The Fifties Child: A Social History Through the Songs of Barclay James Harvest”, would have made a profit – not enough to live by, you understand, just enough to buy a round of drinks for some friends – had it not been for the fact that the song copyright holders insisted I pay a fee for quoting from the song lyrics. Half-truth: one particular copyright holder insisted I pay fees and, because of a bizarre “me too” clause in law, this meant that three of the other four also claimed fees.
But why did they insist? After all, quoting poetry in a literary analysis does not incur licensing costs. The value of my book was not in the lyrics quotations – which, by the way, are freely available on any number of internet sites, as is the band’s music, all for free – it was, just as in poetry criticism, in their analysis. Over a period of more than four decades, these songwriters’ lyrics, suitably analysed, told the social history of a whole generation from he United Kingdom.
Of course, I could have paraphrased the lyrics, as John Blaney did in his 2016 “George Harrison: Soul Man”. That is a drudge, both to write and to read, and not to my liking.
So, why did they insist? The answer is, basically, precedent.
However, no-one to my knowledge has challenged this precedent. Precedents are there to be broken, and it is time that it happened.
After all, did Bob Dylan not win the Nobel Prize for Literature? He won it for his lyrics. The lyrics of many songwriters have literary value, not just Dylan’s.
The blood red rose of summer
Grows elegant and tall
In memory of the green grass
Beyond the guardian wall
The green grass grows forever
Beneath the bloody sky
In memory of the martyrs
She'll cover when they die
We are love, we are, we are love
We are love, we are, we are love
When I publish the second edition of “The Fifties Child”, I’m not paying for lyrics excerpts.
February 5, 2018
Death of the exclamation mark!
So what has the poor old exclamation mark done to deserve its banishment into obscurity?
As you can see, it’s still acceptable to use a question mark. A full stop is also acceptable. And if you were to start a sentence with “and” then that also seems to meet with the exacting standards set by agents and publishers. But if I’d done that at school, I’d have been marmalised for it. Because it means that you’re not really constructing sentences properly. And heaven forbid if you write a sentence that is more than twelve words long: that, and the use of colons and other such punctuation marks, is totally abhorrent in today’s writing.
I recently read a book called “Annihilation”. Well, I tried reading it, to be exact. I gave up about fifteen pages from the end because I just wasn’t enjoying it. The writing seemed so one-dimensional, despite the fact that the setting was dramatic and the action horrific in places.
In one scene the protagonist is walking back to base camp at night. She has seen two out of three of her companions die. Her body has been invaded by an alien entity. She is alone. She is scared by strange noises all around. She has little light to see by but, with what illumination she has, she sees a disembodied face staring up at her out of the ground.
Apparently, “Annihilation” has been made into a film. I haven’t seen it but I imagine that the director would ensure that the score would punctuate the appearance of the disembodied face with a musical exclamation to reflect the horror that it portrays. So why is there no exclamation mark in the text, either there or in other places where the action clearly demands it?
Seems like the exclamation mark has been well and truly killed off.
What a lot of tosh!
As you can see, it’s still acceptable to use a question mark. A full stop is also acceptable. And if you were to start a sentence with “and” then that also seems to meet with the exacting standards set by agents and publishers. But if I’d done that at school, I’d have been marmalised for it. Because it means that you’re not really constructing sentences properly. And heaven forbid if you write a sentence that is more than twelve words long: that, and the use of colons and other such punctuation marks, is totally abhorrent in today’s writing.
I recently read a book called “Annihilation”. Well, I tried reading it, to be exact. I gave up about fifteen pages from the end because I just wasn’t enjoying it. The writing seemed so one-dimensional, despite the fact that the setting was dramatic and the action horrific in places.
In one scene the protagonist is walking back to base camp at night. She has seen two out of three of her companions die. Her body has been invaded by an alien entity. She is alone. She is scared by strange noises all around. She has little light to see by but, with what illumination she has, she sees a disembodied face staring up at her out of the ground.
Apparently, “Annihilation” has been made into a film. I haven’t seen it but I imagine that the director would ensure that the score would punctuate the appearance of the disembodied face with a musical exclamation to reflect the horror that it portrays. So why is there no exclamation mark in the text, either there or in other places where the action clearly demands it?
Seems like the exclamation mark has been well and truly killed off.
What a lot of tosh!
