Space Case - A Visual guide of what NOT to do.

Space Ark

Wow. Just...wow. This is pretty much a textbook teaching tool of what NOT to do.

Check out that website design circa 1993. Difficult to read turquoise text. Funny shapes in the text, RAINBOW text...

And that's before you even get to the excerpt. I dare you to read past the first sentence. DARE you. Double dog stick your tongue on a frozen flagpole dare.

Demanding that agents pay $35.00 to read a copy is a nice touch, too. I'm not sure which is the best part of this, though the artwork is up there in caliber with the text, which is equal to the web design.

This is pure comedy gold, and made my evening.

Your old writing

People often ask about one's old work - if they can read it (I'm not that evil), what it was like, how long you've been writing. Not one writer has ever sprung fully formed from the first sentence - we all have trunk novels, stories, and whatever else is formed of words on paper, in varying degrees of awfulness. Through a series of moves, my old work is long lost, and mostly forgotten.

I can, however share this 'gem' from memory:


My best friend and I were huge ghost story and Twilight Zone fans, and decided to become 'rich and famous' or somesuch by writing our own. (We were six or seven at the time, I suspect 'rich' included such things as getting our own pony.)

The memory is a bit fuzzy, but I believe the story had to do with a woman reading about a train crash and then perishing a few hours later the same way. Nothing wrong with the basic premise - the writing?

All I can clearly remember was the debate about the title, remedied by using both ideas. This masterpiece was called:

'The Fantom book of Fate/The Phantom book of Phate'

We thought the spelling change was terribly clever, but couldn't agree on which to use - so of course we used both.

I suspect the rest of the writing was equally inspired.

Putting the work away for a while

I was cleaning up an older short I had written for submission, and much of my original perception of it had changed.

The dialog was far stronger than I remembered (go me!) and flowed believably and beautifully - what a thrill!

On the other hand, the descriptive and action passages clunked harder than an engine with no oil - right before it throws a rod, leaving you stranded on the side of the interstate at three a.m.

When I originally wrote this piece, I was under the mistaken impression that both aspects were decent, if not glowing. Surprise...

It's always a good idea to put that piece away for a little while after you write it. The good bits are never quite as good, and the bad never quite so horrid, as they first appear.

Harlequin puts on the Evil Clown Mask

Holy Moly, do interesting things ever happen when you're off doing something else!

I just popped into (onto?) some of my favorite writing forums and message boards, only to be confronted with the Harlequin Horizons thing.

What is this thing?

Romance giant Harlequin is putting out a new line, called Horizons. That itself odd (publishers run new lines all the time), but the details?

Harlequin has partnered with Author Solutions (that's vanity press AuthorHouse, guys) and this ENTIRE line is going to be pay to play.

Hoo Boy!

For only $1500, give or take, any writer can now say they've been published by Harlequin, regardless of whether that manuscript is publishable, or even functionally literate. (That's the beauty/horror of vanity presses, innit?)

Of course, these books will not be on the shelf at your local bookstore - like any other vanity printed manuscript, all sales are left up to the writer.

Which is a HUGE stain on Harlequin's reputation. Do they want to remain a legitimate publisher, or become yet another vanity press?

Update: Apparently the backlash was violent enough that HH changed it's name to DellArt press. Smart move guys - I bet the RWA would have had fits about a thousand vanity press writers claiming Harlequin publication!

For more conversations about the entire mess:

http://www.smartbitchestrashybooks.com/index.php/weblog/comments/want-to-self-publish-how-about-harlequin/

http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=162391&page=1

For the vanity site:

http://www.dellartepress.com/


They also seem to have taken a cue from other vanity presses by using a name that could be confused with a standard publisher (Dell) which is still incredibly underhanded - but at least Harlequin gets to try and dust off its reputation.


Update/Edit:

Even the New Yorker got in on the scent of this rat:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2009/11/harlequin-hacks.html

How come THEY got published??

Everybody(well, every writing body) goes through that moment:

You pick up a copy of the thing everyone is raving about. A few pages in, you want to hurl the book against the wall in sheer frustration - it's bad. REALLY bad. Head crushing, vomit inducing, mind numbingly BAD. Not long after that, you want to cry, because this thing got published. Then you go through the emotional steps...you get depressed, get mad, incredulous...finally accepting that bad books can, and do, get published.

Below are just my own thoughts - to my knowledge, no in depth study has ever been done about any of these.

There seem to be basically three things that will have a less than stellar book on the market.  

The first is a writer with a huge following, that's now pumping out books that aren't as great. It happens, but that first couple of manuscripts still had to be great.

The second, is that there's some aspect of the work that's so strong, it overshadows a lot of the problems. I'd put Dan Brown in this camp. Hated his sentence structure, oversimplifications, weak characterizations, and flagrant disregard for facts and history. But damn - I had to know what was going to happen next. That's what I'd call a weak writer and a great storyteller. And the simplicity of the prose helped keep the pace fast, though I still wish he'd thought a little more highly of his audience.  

The third, is filling an empty niche. I'd put twilight here. Every eight to ten years, there's a new, hot vampire hero for the latest group of teen girls to swoon over (am I the only one who noticed that?).

Maybe even less time.  

When I was a small bit, there was a tv show called Forever Knight. Horribly cheesy. Had the fan base from Beauty and the Beast (another tragic male lead). Though Lestat was around before then, he caught on big in the early 90's, replacing Mr. Knight. After Lestat, came Angel, and then Spike. 

Now those two are still running around, but the bloom is quite off the rose, particularly for girls who don't want to like what their older siblings did - and want something new. 

Charlaine Harris and Laurell K. Hamilton have been about for a while, but those (especially Hamilton) are not written for a teen audience - unlike Buffy, where teens were the primary target, or Knight, who had more of a Barnabas thing going on, and sex was implied rather than implicit. 

I noticed one other vamp series aimed at kids, but it glosses over the romance aspect.

So there's this fresh generation of newly hormonal tweens, starving for their slightly dangerous, oh so sexy, bad boy with a heart of gold. Enter the ultimate wish fulfillment character, with the ultimate self insert blank slate. Had another teeny bopper bloodsucking hunk hit paper first, that would have been the hot thing instead.

What does all this mean to you? Besides that some luck can be quantified when analyzed far enough, not much. Keep working to write the best book you can, because it's better to rely on strong writing than good timing.

Agh, my eyes! How NOT to write a screenplay

I just got sent a short script that is a nightmare.  Sparing y'all the pain of slogging through this mess, here are a few tips. WRITE IN THE PRESENT TENSE.  Whatever is going on, even in flashback, happens right in front of your audience. If a character's 'eyes well with sympathy' chances are he's not going to throw the other guy to the ground yelling 'What the hell are you doing you basted!'.  And it's bastard. Unless you are covering the stewing character in his own juices to make a tasty roast.  Which could be interesting.... An upper crust exec would probably not wax poetic about how his lost love 'hypnotized him with obsession, created a love beyond ages'.  This is the over poetic hype of an angsty, psudo artsy college student.  If that's your guy, fine.  Otherwise, the leave the antequated prose to Yeats and Poe.  It lacks authenticity. Vietnam vets will rarely just sit down and say that thier experiences were anything like yours.  Especially to a stranger.  If you are lucky to find one of these back porch story tellers, the level of detail in the storytelling will be amazing. not 'I lost a lot of people in 'nam, it get's easier'.  Sheesh.  If you have no idea what went on, or have never spoken to a veteran, don't put that there.  It makes you sound like an idiot.  And the vagueness of the statement in this script will merely confuse the viewer. NARRATION.  There have been great films that use it.  Probably not yours. Especially when the narrator is talking about exactly what's happening in your frame. REDUNDANT. The whole medium is 'show'.  If your audience can't tell what's going on by the action, or the narration doesn't take us farther into the character's head, lose it.  Remember fight club? The narration brought us deeper into the character's mind, enhancing the relationship with the viewer.  It was not there to tell us 'so and so was on his way home from work when....' If you can't show that, you have no business directing. I'm sure I will be subjected to many more miserable scripts before even the end of the year.  If anyone has a specific question, feel free to shoot.

The Land of Dead Novels?

I got sick from holiday stuff (kids mutate common colds into nastiness that could fell an elephant), as apparently did my 'cool old house' connection, so one concept shall have to wait a little while. (Though the house is uber-cool, and I want to take advantage of it for the very brief time I have access - AAAAAAAAGGH!) While on one of my virtual jaunts, I came across perhaps one of the odder literary ideas so far: www.trunknovels.com It's exactly what you think it is. People upload and display 'trunk novels' - those sorta mostly finished but for whatever reason no agent or publisher will touch it - stories that every writer has sitting either somewhere in the house or in a hard drive(in my case, a drive that died about eight computers and more than ten years ago). What I dig about the site - the 'about us' page is refreshingly up front, basically 'don't go to us unless you've exhausted every other outlet', and 'all we do is host the work'. They charge nothing, and promise nothing. Well, almost. They do say 'hey, at least you'll be read'. I tried, I really did. Started five or six of these books. Each one, I gave up .. the end of the first paragraph. I will not disclose what part of their library I tried to read. There's a damn good reason that nobody wanted to pay for these. Across the board problem: lousy writing. Passive, mostly. Cliched, purple, and some turns of phrase that would have impressed even the immortal Travis Tea. (If you don't know what I'm talking about, do google Atlanta Nights - it's worth it in so many ways!) The problem is, these weren't writers trying to write badly to a particular end. Atlanta Nights is so purposely bad, that it becomes a really fun farce. Take out the fun, and all you have is a bad book.