Brad's Reader

Friday Link Love (After Dark)

Brad Vertrees — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 03:46:23 +0000

Welcome to the very late edition of Friday Link Love. I had a busy day of trying to get stuff done that I neglected throughout the week. Time somehow slipped away from me and I’m finding myself needing a few more hours each day. So without any further distraction, here are some great links for you to check out. And as always, have a safe and happy weekend!

A dream interpretation: Tuneups for the brain

Enter the Nook

Lies told by the self-publishing industry

Writing without chapters

Reach out and touch an editor today (no, not like that!)

Are you afraid of success? We bet yes.

Paper outs “anonymous” commenter, job loss ensues

Embracing lifetime value

Digital Rights Management – A wrinkle or an opportunity

Dyslexia and the cocktail party effect

17 Resources to awaken your right brain

Never mind the bad sex award – where’s the good sex in fiction?

The Law of Attraction for Writers and Authors

Random Post from Brad’s Reader

Breathe life into your characters using action

Brad Vertrees — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 02:49:29 +0000

Action makes your characters come alive in your fiction. Think how boring it is to read boring descriptions and dry narratives without the character actually doing anything. When I find this in my own writing and have to go back and and put my characters into action.

This boils down to that old saying ’show, don’t tell’ (I wrote about this earlier Stephen King offers a ’show, don’t tell’ lesson in new novel). There are effective ways to do this, and when done right, your characters will jump off the page and be more realistic.

This post has been inspired by another post I read from The Techtiggers’ Soapbox called The Human Touch: Using Body Language in Writing. The post offers a great example of how using action really does liven up your characters:

For example, you can say ‘she whispered seductively in his ear’ and you’ll get the point across. The problem is that your brain thinks only about how the voice sounds, the rest of body is left out. Now, try this: her lips brushed his ear as she whispered, “yes.” Yeowza, fireworks! Your body reacts in a more visceral way to the physical interaction.

A perfect contrast between showing vs. telling. There is technically nothing wrong with the first way of writing the scene (she whispered…), but you are merely telling. But when action is added “her lips brushed his ear” you get a more vivid picture of the characters and scene.

Thinking and Doing

Another trick I’ve learned in my own writing is to use action when characters are doing mundane things like thinking. Since I like to get inside my characters’ head and reveal their thoughts, I need a way to do this without putting the reader to sleep. Here’s an example:

Without Action

This is a really boring lecture, John thought.

Boring, right? Yeah, it gets the point across but it’s not very effective.

With Action

John shifted in his seat and yawned from the endless lecture.

Much better. Instead of just telling what John thought, we are showing it by his actions. It’s much easier to imagine John yawning and getting restless than just imagining him sitting in his seat think ”this is boring.”

Action drives your story forward. Don’t let your character sit around as talking heads, breathe life into them using action. Your readers will thank you for it.

Nook vs. Kindle: Sharing ebooks with others

Brad Vertrees — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 02:05:23 +0000

One of the features touted by Barnes & Noble about their new Nook ebook reader is that users can share ebooks with others. If I have an ebook, for example, that I loved and told you that you have to read it, I could send you that ebook via my Nook to your Nook, computer or mobile device with the B&N ebook software installed. The catch is that you can only ‘keep’ my ebook for 14 days (starting when you open the ebook) and during that time, I can’t read the ebook.

However, some are pointing out that the Amazon Kindle already has this sharing feature without the restrictions that Nook imposes. I knew this before, but didn’t think of it as a competitor with Nook until I read this Teleread post which was taken from this Dear Author post. The Kindle allows users to register up to six devices on one account. Ebooks can be shared freely, without restriction, among those six devices.

That sounds great, right? I don’t think it does and here’s why. The key is that the 6 Kindles must be registered to one account (credit card information and all). I don’t see a lot of friends sharing one account simply to share a few ebooks. Sharing among family might be a more realistic.

Nook, on the other hand, lets you share any ebook for two weeks to anyone with a Nook or the free B&N software on a mobile device or computer. The 14 days does not begin until the person ‘borrowing’ the ebook actually begins reading it. This does not require sharing an account and does not limit you to only 6 other users.

Is Nook perfect in regard to sharing? No it’s not. But I think B&N is heading down the right path. The biggest reason why sharing ebooks isn’t easier is because of the publishers. The Kindle isn’t perfect in this regard either. And as the Teleread post points out, Amazon keeps this sharing feature a little hush so publishers don’t get too nervous. I’ve also heard rumblings that publishers might disable the sharing feature for Nook on certain titles.

In an ideal world I’d like to see ebooks be freely shared among all devices – just like you can do with print books. For now, we’re going to have to take what we can get and hope publishers realize the best way to prevent piracy of ebooks is to make them more widely available.

Who do you think has the better ebook sharing feature: Amazon or Barnes & Noble? Leave a comment and share your answer.

Video: Ebook reader comparisons

Brad Vertrees — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 20:56:10 +0000

Today I’m posting my first video. I decided to do a short comparison (about 8 minutes) of the experiences I’ve had with different ebook readers. I talk about the Sony PRS-500, PRS-300 Pocket Edition, and iPhone.

Again, this is my first video attempt for this blog. Please ignore my crappy editing skills. And when comparing the sizes between the 500 and 300 I stumble around – let’s chalk it up to stage fright. Yes, the 500 is bigger than the 300, but not by much.

Enjoy!

5 Ways Cory Doctorow is scaring traditional publishers

Brad Vertrees — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 16:26:18 +0000

For many people, it may seem wrong that one can get rich by giving stuff away for free. This is exactly what one science fiction writer and digital evangelist is doing – and he’s the traditional publishing industry’s worst nightmare. I’m referring to Cory Doctorow, a fellow at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the co-editor of the blog BoingBoing and a science fiction author who sells and gives away his novels for free.

In this article Meet Publishers’ Enemy No. 1: Cory Doctorow from the Globe and Mail website, Doctorow takes direct aim at the traditional publishing industry:

“Right now, we have this vision of the publisher as a monolithic service entity that proves everything from typesetting and printing to distribution to sales support, marketing and PR,” he said. “But there’s no reason it has to do all those things in one go.”

Before the internet and the digital technology that has turned ebooks into a formidable force in the publishing world, traditional publishers were the gatekeepers to becoming a successful author. Cory Doctorow is changing that. He puts his money where his mouth is. Here are the many methods Doctorow uses to spread his work among readers:

Print publishing: His books can be found in regular bookstores in traditional print format.
Ebooks released at the same time as print books.
Under a creative commons license he allows readers to produce derived works based on his writings, such as fan fiction (he does not allow commercial usage under the CC license, however).
Also allows readers to circulate his ebooks freely under the CC license as long as it’s not for commercial purposes.
Records and posts an audio version of his work on his blog, free for anyone to listen to.

And Doctorow claims his ‘free’ strategy is working. He says giving away ebooks is boosting his print book sales. Doctorow also says that the problem for writers is not piracy, it’s obscurity. I agree. If no one knows who you are or your works, then you’ll always be a living example as the cliched starving writer.

Placing Cory Doctorow’s strategy into practice

Any author should take a serious look at placing Doctorow’s strategy into practice with distributing his/her own works. I’m vigorously working on finishing up a few short stories, which I plan on giving away for free on Smashwords, as well as a free download on my blog.

Heck, if people can stand my screeching, broken record of a voice, I might just record an audio version of my fiction. But I don’t want to get ahead of myself – one step at a time.

If you’re a writer and you use the ‘free’ model to distribute your work, leave a comment below and let us know how it’s working out for you (good or bad).

Stephen King offers a ’show, don’t tell’ lesson in new novel

Brad Vertrees — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 20:34:19 +0000

Stephen King’s latest magnum opus, Under the Dome: A Novel (aff link), has recently been released. If you haven’t yet made it down to your local bookstore, you might want to take a look. The novel is a brick, weighing in at a whopping 1,074 pages. I plan on reading King’s latest work eventually, but I’ll probably wait until the ebook edition is released later on this year (I only have so much shelf space and I don’t want Stephen King hogging it all).

The premise of the novel is interesting: A clear dome falls over a town and they must somehow survive the consequences of being cut off from the rest of the world. There is a great book review in the NYT – and the review is also where I got the inspiration for this post.

You probably remember from your English classes or creative writing classes to show, not tell. This means that instead of simply describing attributes characters, settings, etc. you should show these attributes through action. Long narrative can be boring. Certainly, there is a place for narrative but it’s not always the best way to pull your readers into your fiction.

Stephen King’s Under the Dome is a great example of how King shows without telling, and without taking anything away from the story. Here’s an example from the NYT book review:

Consider the book’s step-by-step way of defining the Dome. Mr. King isn’t about to do the easy thing, which would be to give a straightforward description of what it is and how it works. Instead he offers a textbook demonstration of how to make action and explication one and the same. First step: A woodchuck on the ground and a pilot in the air named Chuck are sudden victims of the Dome’s guillotinelike slicing descent.

A transparent dome that falls over a town could be hard to describe. But showing the effects of the dome is a much more interesting way to describe the dome without a long narrative.

Another more subtle example of showing and not telling in King’s novel is how he handles the reaction of the town citizens and those on the outside the dome. Again, King could have easily just described the heartache and panic that sets in, although that is not effective:

News crews (notably CNN’s) arrive at the perimeter of the Dome to stake out this colossal human-interest story. And what they observe, on a visiting day when loved ones outside of Chester’s Mill are allowed to venture near the Dome’s dangerous surface, conveys genuine tragedy. As Mr. King puts it, describing what the TV cameras see:

“They observe the townspeople and the visitors pressing their hands together, with the invisible barrier between; they watch them try to kiss; they examine men and women weeping as they look into each other’s eyes; they note the ones who faint, both inside the Dome and out, and those who fall to their knees and pray facing each other with their folded hands raised…

While this is a narrative, it’s not a straightforward description of people feeling lonely and isolated because of the dome. Instead, King gives concrete, realistic examples of how people are reacting to the dome through the eyes of a news crew (CNN) that captures the drama as a human interest story.

The ability to ’show and not tell’ effectively can be challenging, especially for writers just starting out in the world of fiction. Like everything else, it takes a lot of practice.

Friday Link Love 11/13

Brad Vertrees — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 17:28:05 +0000

First I’d like to wish everyone a belated Happy Veteran’s Day. If you haven’t yet thanked a veteran for his/her service, it’s never too late.

There is really not much to report for this past week. A lot of you are in the middle of your NaNoWriMo projects and sweating because November is just about half way over. If you need a break from writing, I have some great links below for your reading entertainment. If you’re not participating in NaNoWriMo this year, then you should have plenty of time to check out these links.

It’s Friday (the 13th) and you know what that means – have a happy and safe weekend.

68% won’t download pirated ebooks

Girly stuff

Artists’ eBooks

Barnes & Noble seeing heavy demand for Nook ebook reader

Management lessons from airplane crashes

StAnza virtual poetry fest

It is the length that kills

iTunes of poetry

AMA backs medical marijuana

Recalling James Dickey Poetry on Veteran’s Day

An author’s credentials

Latin American fiction doesn’t exist

Be paid like F. Scott Fitzgerald

On the difference between science and philosophy

NaNoWriMo encourages almost everyone’s inner novelist

Health care reform and Harry Potter

Random Post from Brad’s Reader

Why poetry matters

Brad Vertrees — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 17:43:38 +0000

Of all the literary forms that have fallen out of fashion, I think poetry suffers the most. The mainstream public simply doesn’t have an interest in poetry, and it shows in the painfully low sales numbers of compilations of poetry books. I think a large reason for the miserable popularity of poetry is because reading a poem is not a passive activity. It takes work. A poem needs to be read over and over again for the reader to even begin to understand it.

If reading a novel is like wandering through a museum, with all the exhibits neatly organized and laid out with a tidy explanation written for each specimen, then reading poetry is like being an archeologist at an excavation site – slowly sifting through layers of earth and piecing together meaning from the mounds of rubble. In a world that demands immediate gratification through computers, video games, movies and the like, poetry seems like an ancient relic that has lost importance.

Still, there are people who actively engage poetry every day, either by reading or writing it. Maybe poetry is a hobby. Or maybe a person is lucky enough to scrape out a living by writing line after line of verse. But what’s the point? If poetry rates so low on society’s scale that it barely registers, then why even bother? The answer, in short, is because poetry matters.

I found an excellent blog post about the importance of poetry written by Timothy Green. In his post, Timothy compares the utility of poetry to that of science. For obvious reasons, science beats out poetry every time. Science cures diseases, prolongs life and answers the mysteries of the universe. What about poetry?

Why is always more important to a consciousness than how, and I began to see science as the how and art as the why. What value is there in living a longer life, if it’s lived poorly? If I could dedicate a writing life to the ideals of collectivity and kindness, if I could help illuminate the interdependency of individuals and the moral power of self-created meaning, then I could do more good than the invention of a million pain killers.

Poetry illuminates the human condition and exposes certain truths about our existence that cannot be expressed any other way. But Timothy argues that the poems themselves, as individual works aren’t important:

But that doesn’t mean that poetry isn’t important. Poems themselves are inconsequential, but poetry — as an activity, as a mindset — is central to all that is important. The pursuit of poetry is the distillation of that critical Why – it’s what we live for, what can “make us bear any how.”

Timothy continues:

Poetry isn’t a career, or a passion, or a form of entertainment. It’s a lifestyle. It’s an entire doctrineless philosophy that we reconfigure into each of those things. To engage in poetry, whether reading or writing, is to practice an enriching attentiveness. To practice poetry is to pluck detail from the surrounding world — to see things more clearly, to recognize beauty, to experience pain, to struggle to connect.

My understanding of Timothy’s blog post is that understand why poetry matters requires a fundamental rethinking about poetry. Instead of concentrating on certain poems and how they might change the world, we should concentrate as poetry as a whole, as a philosophy.

On a personal note, I enjoy reading individual poems. I like to ponder their potential meaning, even hidden ones that the poet never thought of when composing the poem. I admire that craft of poetry and how each word is important and contributes to the poem’s overall meaning. For me, reading and writing poetry is cathartic, releasing emotions and thoughts I never knew were possible.

What value do you gain from poetry (from either reading or composing your own poems)? What do you think is the utility of poetry? Leave a comment below and share your thoughts.

Book Review: ‘The Terror’

Brad Vertrees — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 17:25:51 +0000

When I first picked up the book The Terror (aff link) by Dan Simmons off the shelf at my local Barnes & Noble, I automatically thought it’d be yet another novel based on some sort of nefarious international terrorist plot. I was both right and wrong.. I read the synopsis on the inside cover and realized that the novel had nothing to do with terrorism. The story takes place in the cold Arctic Sea, explorers aboard two ships from the Royal British Navy are trying to find the northwest passage. And the terror the men of the two ships face is literally and figuratively quite chilling.

The Arctic is one of the most inhospitable regions of the earth with constant snow storms, temperatures dropping to -50°(F) and colder. During the long winters the sun never makes an appearance for months at a time. This is the environment that the crews (126 men total at the beginning of the novel) of the ships HMS Terror and HMS Erebus must endure. For two years they have been stuck in the ice. Their rations are dwindling and the coal that heats the ship is quickly running out.

Captain Crozier of the HMS Terror is very much the lead character. However, the third-person narrative jumps from character to character with each chapter, providing the reader with many different perspectives on events as they unfold. This use of limited third-person is a clever way to present this epic adventure to readers.

Much of the time spent by the crew is just trying to survive. They hunt polar bears and other wildlife to extend their rations and try to conserve as much coal as they can to heat the two ships, turning the ships into virtual freezers. Yet as far as daily life on the ships go, it is as if they are out at sea and not stuck in the ice. Men still stand watch around the ship. The officers struggle to maintain order and discipline by enforcing the Royal Navy’s rules and regulations.

Life on board the HMS Terror is made more interesting by an Eskimo girl (spelled ‘Esquimaux’ in the novel) who lives aboard the ship. The crew named her Silent because her tongue had been removed sometime before she was found. She can’t understand any English and the sailors have no way of communicating with her. Captain Crozier ensures she is fed and assigns one of his officers to see that she is safe. Most of the crew despises her, calling her a savage, mostly because she is not Christian and is much different than them.

At one point, a group of sailors make plans to kill Silent. Captain Crozier quickly puts an end to the near-mutinous plan by telling the crew that Silent is the only one among them who knows how to survive on the ice. They need her. If Silent is killed, then they have almost no chance to survive when they must abandon ship because of the crushing ice.

But Dan Simmons does not let the plot limp on by writing only about daily life aboard a naval ship. To further complicate the plight of the sailors, a monster lurks on the ice. No one has really gotten a good view of the Thing, and those who have met a violent death. The vague descriptions of this monster make it sound like a polar bear on steroids – one that can bite off a man’s head with one bite. The monster terrorizes the sailors, snatching them up one by one on the ice, and then on the ship.

This mysterious beast is never fully explained or described.. Other than making for some action-packed reading, I think the beast serves another purpose – to act as a metaphor for the dangers of life in the arctic. Furthermore, I think the beast also represents the way the sailors think of the Eskimos, as savages with no moral conscience. Every time the crew tries to foil the monster, it somehow manages to outsmart them and survive the barrage of bullets. As the novel progresses, however, the beast becomes less and less of an issue as scurvy and freezing temperatures become more of a killer than any monster on the ice.

I’m not going to give away any further plot details. I also won’t spoil the ending for those who want to read this novel. I will say, however, that the ending left me unsatisfied. There are too many unanswered questions by the time I reached the last page of the novel.

The ending was interesting and kept me hooked until the end. I just didn’t get the closure a lot of other novels provide by the end. Other readers might find this vague ending as another one of the novel’s fine brush strokes that make it so interesting to read. Indeed, the ending is as mysterious as the beast on the ice. There is a huge surprise at the ending, though, that is totally unexpected. I never saw it coming.

I am definitely recommending this novel to all. The hardcover version is long, coming in at 766 pages. Don’t let that deter you, the story clips right along and you’ll find yourself shivering at the descriptions of the cold arctic weather like I did.

Friday Link Love 11/06 (Late Edition)

Brad Vertrees — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 23:05:48 +0000

This has been a busy week for me. I’m sure those of you participating in this year’s NaNoWriMo marathon are even busier than me, so I’ll keep things brief. It’s Friday, the weekend is here. Have fun!

Seriously though, if you need I quick break from your writing, I have some great links for you to check out, just like every Friday. As always, have a happy and safe weekend!

Response to Amazon/Wal-Mart price wars over books

More on Indie Publishing and Poetry Community

Breaking down the wall between readers and writers

How to read the people in the poetry

Plug into Electric Literature

Is your boss killing you?

Giftmas will tell the tale on ebooks

‘Almost isolated, Strongly Individual, Things’ (about collaboration)

Publishers and booksellers rally to support eBooks and eReaders

Students suspended for racy slumber party pics, file lawsuit

One is a lonely number – why you need a writing mentor

Choosing your genre