The Blue Candle Society

So I’ve been checking out the test over at writer’s diet, plugging in a few bits of my prose, and you’ll all be happy to know that I am certified as “lean and fit”.  Sadly, the same cannot be said for Neil Gaiman and Ernest Hemingway, who “need toning”.  H.P. Lovecraft occupies the lofty “lean and trim” zone with me, but a glance at the test results indicate that it is missing at least half of his adjectives, presumably because they are a bit baroque by today’s standards (although I might be tempted to use “rotten” and “wooded” and “cursed” myself, which the test didn’t think were adjectives – and hell, it caught “orgiastic” and “amigerous”).  So I suspect his true score really ought to be more along the lines of “flabby”

This is the problem with prescriptivism, of course – these days it is just too easy to test the iron-clad rules, what with the internet and all, and they invariably seem to return comical results.  And when you up and actually place the very means for testing your rules on your own website, you’re just asking for trouble.

I suspect that Dr. Sword has never actually checked her own prose with her test, because she “knows” it is fine (and heck, it probably is), just like E.B. White never checked to see that he used more adjectives than most authors before telling the rest of us not to use them.  But if she did, she might get a nasty surprise.  An article of her’s in the New York Times already got the Language Log treatment, demonstrating that she is a bit shaky on exactly which nouns are derived from verbs and which aren’t, after all.

Posted in Grammar Gripery

Long-time readers will recall that I have previously blown the lid off the the roaming accent of the Travelocity Roaming Gnome.  Well, a quick listen to the current incarnation of the very commercial that set me off in the first place (the one where the gnome goes on about a swimming pool) demonstrates that while the visuals haven’t changed, the gnome is currently being voiced by someone who has changed the accent again (the nice thing about a mascot whose lips don’t move, I suppose, is that this sort of thing is easy to do).  It is still a Cockney accent, unlike the original gnome, but it has been dialed back to be less aggressively over the top.  The inescapable conclusion is that someone at Travelocity world headquarters was reading my blog and saw my post on their commercials, which made them realize how silly they looked.  I assume that they didn’t go all the way to a ridiculous Scandinavian accent as I suggested simply for fear of causing a bit too much confusion among the public, but perhaps the dialect will wander across the North Atlantic in time.

Anyway, seeing as how I apparently wield great influence through this blog, I am open to suggestions for my next crusade.

Posted in Uncategorized

Jefferson turned to gesture to Temperance, but she was already stepping to one side to set up a good field of fire.

Jefferson opened the door to reveal an unassuming man slouched in a brown suit, hands in his pockets. There were a pair of spectacles perched on his nose, with a chain running from their arms around the back of his neck.

For a moment, neither of them spoke. Then Clyburne’s nostrils flared. “You’ve got company, Mr. Quinn,” he said. “My apologies.”

“We were about to step out, Mr. Clyburne. But you’ve been trying to catch up with me for a while now. Why don’t you come in, and tell me what I can do for you?”

Clyburne nodded, and stepped into the room, hands still in his pockets. “Je Reviens,” he said, looking over at Temperance. Continue reading ‘Serial Saturday: The Figurine, Part 17’

Posted in Serials

I’m jumping off a post over at Delusions of Grandeur to mull over something I think about now and again: the compensation writers get for their labors.  As I understand it, pro markets for short stories pay pretty much the same rate as they did 100 years or so ago, which makes short story writing something less than a path to riches – selling a story a week to a pro-paying magazine would be enough to let one hover around the poverty line.  Granted, anyone who could turn out that many good stories that fast might be able to get special rates of compensation, but then anyone with that combination of creativity and discipline would probably be able to make more money in a dozen other fields.

Novels are obviously where the big bucks are, comparatively speaking, but as the typical advance hovers around $5,000 this is all very relative.  Ah, but what of indie publishing, you say?  Don’t talk to me of meager advances given by hidebound traditional publishers, you say (I’m imagining you pounding your fist on the table as you say this, just so you know – you might want to take it down a notch).  Well, as near as I can tell, your typical fairly successful indie author makes about $5,000 per book.  Granted, they may be able to churn them out faster without someone else holding them up on the way to publication, but if they go too fast they end up turning out unedited train wrecks, which presumably cuts down on sales.  Naturally, there are examples of wildly successful indie authors, your Amanda Hockings and so on, but they should be legitimately compared the likes of Susanna Clarke or whoever, not anonymous mid-list authors (and anyway, in either case a little digging usually reveals years of toil before sudden success).

What it boils down to, I think, is that supply and demand are all out of whack.  There are so many people out there who want to be authors that readers have more things to choose from than they could possibly read in a lifetime, and thus have little incentive to pay a lot for it.  That, in turn, means neither self-publishers nor traditional publishers can charge much for any book and it takes wild success to get a something that ends up being decent compensation, when looked at as an hourly wage.  That all really means that the only people who end up being authors, for the most part, are those can’t help themselves and would be writing even if they knew there was no chance of being paid.  I know that personally I used to write without even the notion of getting published, and now I’m more concerned with getting my writing in front of the most people than making money off it.

Of course, if I meet one of those people who blunders into success writing because he thought it would be a quick way to make a buck and happened to luck into a successful formula at the right time, I will still cheerfully punch him in the nose.

Posted in General writing things

By popular demand, I’m doing another in my series of posts where I rant about some mis-applied cliches that was inflicted on me.  This one may be controversial, since a little research reveals that there are a few confused people out there, but allow me to lay out my case.

Boys prior to becoming old boys

Traditionally, those who attended your fancier male-only British public schools were called “boys” (presumably for the very good reason that they were boys – I’m not sure how this was supposed to set them apart from male children who attended less exclusive schools, but that is a subject for another post).  Of course, you can’t go calling them “boys” after they graduate and get jobs as stockbrokers government ministers or whatever, so they were called “Old Boys”.  Naturally, these Old Boys would tend to remember their old chums with fondness, and lend each other a hand out in the worlds of government and high finance and so on, forming a “network” or “club” of sorts.  This term has gained wider usage, as such terms will, and now “The Old Boy’s Club” or “Old Boy’s Network” refers to any old group of old white men, born to privilege, who keep things moving along the way they always have so as to maintain their traditional advantages.

Good old boys

Good Old Boys (or Good Ole Boys, really), on the other hand, are a very different thing.  It is one of those interesting terms that is applied with varying degrees of perjoritiveness (perjorivosity?  Pejorivication?) by different people.  It has connotations similar to “redneck”, but some people choose to shade the term to emphasize the conviviality of the good old boys (like the Dukes of Hazard, say), while others emphasize their racism and anti-intellectualism.  Whatever you think of them, though, it does seem that while rednecks don’t necessarily have to be from the southern U.S., good old boys do.

So I submit to you that while it is possible that a collection of good old boys might stick together, and might even form some sort of network or club, they pretty much by definition never got anywhere near the halls of Charterhouse or Eton.  More to the point, they really aren’t striding the halls of power, or in any position to help others into those halls.  Hence, the term “Good Old Boys Network” is not a useful one.

Of course, then there are the Good Old Blues Brothers Boys, which is a whole different thing.

Posted in Grammar Gripery, Metaphor!

“What have you been telling people about me?” Temperance asked as the entered Jefferson’s room. “That boy behind the desk nearly had to pick his eyes up off the floor when we walked by.”

“Aw, don’t tell me you ain’t used to that,” Jefferson replied, tossing his hat onto the bed. He followed it with his jacket. “I just told him a gorgeous woman might come calling, and I reckon he didn’t believe me. Give me a sec to wash up here.” His holster rig felt strange and out of balance without the Colt on the left side, and he grimaced as he stripped it off and hung it on the bathroom’s doorknob.

When he emerged a few minutes later, toweling off his face, Temperance was lying on the bed, propped up on the headboard and flipping through a paperback.

“Really interesting books you read, Jefferson,” she said. “Keep you warm on those long cold nights, does it?” Continue reading ‘Serial Saturday: The Figurine, Part 16’

Posted in Serials

But I’m a little weirded out by my high search ranking for “Madison County candles”.  Probably not as weirded out as the people trying to find a place to but hand-made candles to give to their aunt in whichever of the 83 Madison Counties they happen to live in, but still.  The good news is that I seem to have gained in search rank on that person who’s been camping out on the dot-com version of my pen name for a few years without actually making a page.  I think that’s only fair, given that I have actual posts and commenters and all.

Posted in Uncategorized

In this week’s complaint about mis-applied cliches, I’ll just say that if you’re giving a presentation about the rollout of a new company-wide, synergistic website system and you want to point out how all the changes were driven by the hoi-polloi of the corporation rather than imposed by the suits in the corner offices, the term is “bottom-up” (the opposite of “top-down”), not “bottoms up” (the opposite of “not drinking”).

A figure, which I assume took hours of careful thought, used to explain bottom-up in a marketing sense

The term “bottom-up” is a bit trendy, having started, I believe, in the programming world before being appropriated, as so many things from the programming world are, by MBAs.

“Bottoms up”, of course, has a much older and nobler pedigree.  It primarily involves drinking, naturally, but the phrase has a nicely salacious flavor to it as well.  All of which means that if you use it during a marketing presentation I may giggle.  I present this as a public service, since given the aforementioned trendiness of the non-pluralized version I see a lot of potential for confusion.

Posted in Grammar Gripery, Metaphor!

The clicks proved to be coming from a fashionable pair of black pumps, which paused just inside the doorway. Jefferson hauled his gaze off them, up the nylons and dress, all the way up to the woman’s face. She looked a bit like Chipper Tacy, he supposed, and people often mistook them for sisters, though Jefferson thought Chipper had a harder look in her eyes. And of course Temperance was blond, and the two made sure their haircuts weren’t quite identical, even if they occasionally traded off from what he could tell.

Temperance was lowering her chrome Super .38 and she stepped closer. “Jefferson, are you all right?” She had the same patrician Boston accent as Chipper, though without the patronizing edge.

“Just jake, now that you’re here.” He began to struggle to his feet, finally managing when Temperance gave him an arm. Continue reading ‘Serial Saturday: The Figurine, Part 15’

Posted in Serials

From the cover letter guidelines off the submission guidelines for Strange Horizons:

Address your cover letter to all of the current fiction editors rather than just one of us, and don’t imply that we’re all male. In particular, don’t use “Dear Mr. Hartman” or “Dear Sirs” as a salutation. Also, don’t address your cover letter to Niall Harrison, who is not a fiction editor. And remember that chances are good that your story will be read by a First Reader instead of an editor. The following salutations (among others) are fine:

• “Dear Editors” (this is the one we prefer)
• “To Whom It May Concern”
• “Dear Brit Mandelo, Julia Rios, and Jed Hartman”
• “Dear Ms. Mandelo, Ms. Rios, and Mr. Hartman”.
• “Greetings”
• There are plenty of other acceptable options.
• It’s also fine to leave off the salutation entirely.

So…after reading that first bullet, why exactly would anyone keep reading along there and pick one of the other salutations?  I mean, they do say they prefer that one, right?  Now, I know what you’re going to say, and no, I read all the way to the end and there is no final entry that says “congratulations on passing the test and reading all the guidelines, author!  What we really want you to do is ignore all the previous guidelines and start off with ‘Yo, Horizons:’ – that will move you to the top of the list.”  That was my first thought, too, but as near as I can tell they are playing this straight (unless they are using that old trick of concealing text by making it the background color.  Hang on…nope.)

Strange Horizons may be the most striking example, and they may stand out for telling you exactly what they want before providing several examples of other things you could do, but there are many magazines that point out the obvious, and they make me weep for magazine editors.  Because you know they wouldn’t write out 4,000 words of submission guidelines that reiterate points over and over and mention obvious things like suggesting you proofread your story if they hadn’t encountered everything they mention many times.

Of course, as much as magazines like this get me down when I start thinking about the hard lives of their editors, I prefer them to the places that are just vague in their guidelines, since I always have a sense they are not vague at all about what they want to see.  “How dare they start with ‘Dear Editor:’?” I can see them thundering, pounding their desk hard enough to make their coffee splash on to the the day’s stack of rejection notices, “Can’t these lazy bums look up the names of the editorial staff on our website?”

Posted in General writing things