Complaining

My sister-in-law said I left out the word "his" near the ending of my first book.  My brother said some of the sex scenes were a little strong for him. My nephew mislabeled one of my scenes as erotica  (The distinction is really not that fine of a line.  I do not write erotica.  I would be making way more money if I did.)  Another person asked if thus and such a book was the one about life on a military base.  Well, one is, kind of about military life for about an eighth of the total,  and most mention it, but none are about life on a military base.  I don't even know what that would be like.  I have reread some of my books and gone back and changed all the backward quotation marks that no one mentioned.  I took down a book and republished it because a huge errant numeral "4" was in the middle of a random page.  Glitches happen between me and the finished product.  I find mistakes if I wait a while to read through.  I made a boy child the eldest in the middle of a book and he was the second child at the beginning.  I changed a neighboring family's surname half way through one book.  This family played quite a large role at one point, and I am glad I caught that as no one would have a clue as to who I was talking about.

A beta reader was very helpful with general proofreading and language problems but she wanted to change all my colloquialisms to proper English, and I have to write in my speaking voice or my character's speaking voice.  I had specifically asked if the love scenes were too graphic for the market I hoped to reach.  She said they were fine, very true sounding. She also mentioned that the terrain in a part of the country I described was not like I described it. (She did not live there.) I had researched this with photographs in order to trace a path for the character to fit the story and I questioned her remark saying I had back up info.  The person became a snake and said the person was carrying too much, the person couldn't have walked that far in one day, etc. She finally said  even my love scenes could use a little improvement.  I still wonder if I should have thrown out all the advice and haven't come up with a final choice on that.

One reviewer said my Point of View changes were distracting.  I write third person omniscient and that is the point of view.  I did notice in one edition where I had someone's thoughts going on.  I usually do that in Italic and sometimes that doesn't carry through to the finished product.  In this book, that I think printed out the very best of all, there were sections where the Italics didn't hold and I thought maybe a reader would become confused.  But that one particular book is, in fact, the only one that has had only positive things said about it so far.

Today I was reading a blog or post or website that I have been subscribed to for quite awhile.  I seldom have time to look at it, but I have noticed it has evolved.  I was at one time invited to write a guest blog, but did not have the confidence to do so. I did mention they were free to copy any of my words they wished to, but just let me know.  Well, it started out as a helpful spot for writers who were publishing electronically, but it has become  a vanity publisher.  You give them this much money and they do this for you,  It seemed today's blog was only about trying to weasel out of being called a "Vanity Press" -- a phrase that is anathema to an e-pubber. The irony was that, not only were there mistakes such as the wrong "their" being used, but there were clear run-ons that were unquestionably supposed to be two sentences. There is a huge on-going debate about the Oxford comma, and I am a die-hard comma lover, but the Oxford comma question is use it or don't use it and has nothing to do with joining a clearly declarative sentence to a clearly interrogative sentence.

I have not yet re-read one or any of my blog posts that I didn't find some error of some sort.  One I copied to WordPress and the entire blog was there twice.  Some of this I catch.  Of course some of it I do not.  But when a person is offering me services at a price, then their work better be up to snuff.  For the most part,  I have found  that I would not trust my words to any of these people that have variously approached me at different times.  Tell me what is wrong and I will fix it and thank you.  But don't go tooting your horn or calling me out for my errors unless you are producing material worthy of illumination by the ancient monks, okay?  I will forgive people their errors, overlook most.   I expect some.  I know no one is perfect.  But don't pretend you know more than I do when you don't.  Actually, that doesn't just apply to book publishing in my philosophy.

But, yet again today, I read an article where two people were arguing over past and passed.  Other people were ringing in on both sides of it.  I still get it wrong most of the time.  You would think it would have to be correct occasionally just due to the odds, but I always get it wrong.  I also struggle with affect and effect, but I check if I have a doubt.  One very popular mommy blogger wrote a huge diatribe about something and used effect over and over instead of affect.  Well, that is a toughie, but look it up if you are going public.  This was a person who describes herself in her profile as "over-educated".  In what?  Karate?

I think I have gone on and on before about the pot calling the kettle black, etc.  (I suppose that is a racist remark nowadays.) And I know I am too sensitive to criticism.  I find it impossible to accept my own human frailties, the source of most of my major difficulties. But it just seems to me, in general, the definition of quality is becoming more and more vague.  Well, I will never get over the typo in the two page Chanel ad in Vanity Fair magazine.  I try.  Honestly.  I think it is insulting to expect people to accept an inferior product, so I try very deliberately not to present that.  And my point here, even though I am coming off as confusing, is let's brush it up a little.  Let's not try to sell someone a book cover that looks like it was drawn by a marmot.  And, especially, let's not then criticize someone else for an amateurish cover.

And let's not take someone's hard-earned money because of outright subterfuge, or if one is suffering from honest self-delusion, then let us follow through on delivering the product offered.  What did that famous and attractive person say about putting lipstick on a pig?  It is still a pig, but sometimes there just ain't nuthin' cuter than a little baby pig.

Photo Attributions:  Google image

Y'know?

This is all a little confusing.  I hate promo, and when I am doing it, I am doing it on a surface level.  It produces meager results, but it produces results so I have to keep doing it until the right person reads the right words. Then I am home-free, money in the bank, genius acknowledged.  Well, no.  Probably not.  But what I was saying about doing it on a surface level--

There are many helpful sites.  There was one on Goodreads that had a list of places to post your freebie promotion.  These are very helpful.  I use more each time, and the downloads of my freebies are phenomenal, thousands, actually.  If one percent of those bought the thing or even read it, it would be sweet.  But anyway--

I get mixed up about which sites said which thing, and I do not have the mental ability to keep track of it.  I have notebooks full of web addresses and where my last chapter ended and I will post a whole promo and realize, thank God usually before hitting PUBLISH, that I have used the wrong book.  It is one of the others that is on freebie this time.  Seriously.  I have done that.  I try to watch it and supervise myself, but I guess I am just not that vested. It may be age related, but it is certainly, let me assure you from the lofty viewpoint of my aging reputation,  not an IQ problem.

I think it is mostly Linked-In, a site of spurious reputation.  It seems to generate lots of hits and downloads, but it is always full of people offering their editing services and someone from a distant Nation offering conversion services which is a laugh and a half.  If I can do it, and I have done it beautifully, anyone can.  But maybe they buy those conversion services because they are not that vested in their projects. But the site to which I give  vague and unreliable reference constantly has people mouthing off about editing.  How you are just plain stupid if you do not at least invest the money in a good editing service.  (What money?)  I retort constantly about the complete superfluity of conversion services,and I retort frequently about the unnecessary expense of purchasing editor services.  Most of us have no way to discern the reliability of such services, and I kind of think if we did have that ability, or that much familiarity with the process, we would not be sitting in our dining rooms at our PCs uploading our "work" all by ourselves.  Maybe that is just me.

I was used as an editor in an unofficial capacity at Contemporary books some years ago.  To explain that, I was given unedited manuscripts and expected to return printer ready galleys with all the errors edited out and corrected. This was only after I had worked there for a number of years and proved my abilities.( By the way, I would only want a proofread from anyone.  I don't want my peculiar style edited away.)

But today I followed a link to a site that had an excerpt from a book about the Iraq War.  It was labeled humorous, a biting satire.  No.  The excerpt was not humorous.  It was a dead on narration of the way things are.  There were problems I had with the story.  The person who printed the excerpt on this blog was an editor at Grove Atlantic.  He did admit this was his first project (or, at least, his first in that capacity at that company) and he was infatuated with it, (his included remarks about the moral or practical elements of that war being waged  may have influenced his attitude,)  but he mentioned, when expounding about the work, several times, military officials sitting in the safety of the FOB and making decisions and giving commentary about the actual battle front of which they had very biased views.  FOBs are most definitely NOT havens of safety.  They are shelled all the time.  They are targets.  Big targets. So that was wrong.  Then I read the excerpt which was well written and a powerful narrative.  But he would use a phrase and you couldn't get whether he had the reference wrong or if he was being facetious.  I read a lot.  I get irony, sarcasm, jokes, etc.  Seriously.  I get it. I can even write it.  I guess you have to take my word for that cuz you haven't read any of my work yet, have you?  And this guy's attempts at acerbicness (acerbicity?) (being acerbic!) or wryness (being wry) or direct humor fell short a few times, just in the excerpt.

THEN, one of my bigger concerns because I deal greatly with dialogue, some say successfully, but there again you will have to take my word--there was a paragraph with quotes from two different people in the same paragraph.  Does that seem like nit-picking to you?  It wouldn't if someone had said to you that they had trouble figuring out who was speaking at the time.  (I don't go for that "he said" "she replied" "he retorted" stuff, probably to a fault.)  My grand daughter, darling though she is, has no interest in writing so much as a grocery list, but is able to quote that rule to me.  A new paragraph for each speaker, even if it is only a one word quote. Crap. That's hitting the return key once.  Now this was an excerpt that was presented for our viewing by the guy who edited it for Christ's sake.  This, to me, is up there with the typo in the New Yorker cartoon (yeah, I saw that) and the typo in the two page, glossy, perfume ad spread in Vogue Magazine.  Yeah.  That was real.

I just don't like the pot calling the kettle black, so to speak.  Getting an MFA in fine arts, or writing, or literature, or what ever they label it, does not indicate anything but some writing on a fancy piece of paper for which you paid great sums of money.  More to be said for epublishing.  That editor is the one that would be selecting your offering from the bunch of offerings presented to him by the agent that won't even reply to your query.