Archives for November 2010

Maintaining Voice on a Character Blog

November 29, 2010 By Mark 2 Comments

What is an author’s voice?* I think a lot of people see voice as synonymous with style, and I can understand why. Many authors one might point to as having a strong voice are also strong stylists. But I’m not a big fan of authors who are stylists, in large part because their manner of writing tends to overshadow whatever story they’re telling. That’s a generalization to be sure, but it’s founded on my belief that nouns and verbs matter more than adjectives and adverbs, that less is usually more, that all (or almost all) darlings should be killed, and that unless the author’s presence is critical to the story the author ought to get out of the way. But that’s just me.

Coming at the question from a direction both more illuminating and a great deal less cranky, think for a moment about any writer you love, and ask yourself what it is that is irreducibly distinct about the way that writer writes. What is it that makes Dickens different from Tolstoy or Jackie Collins, as well as readily identifiable in his own right? Whatever that is — however you might describe it with examples or rules — that’s what I think of as voice.

I don’t think any author’s voice is so distinct that it can be identified in every word or turn of phrase. When Tom Clancy or William Faulkner or Flannery O’Conner has a character say, “Hello!”, I don’t think you can conclude a whole lot about the author’s voice from that one-word sentence. Pull back far enough, however — taking into account the surrounding sentences and paragraphs, as well as the narrative context — and at some point you’ll be able to distinguish between the three authors. And I think that’s probably the most important point thing I can say about the subject of voice: it’s more easily identified by considering the whole of an author’s work rather than looking for specific markers.

One thing I can say with absolute certainty is that I myself do not think about my own voice at all, ever. To do so would be quantum authorship, in which identification of my voice would necessarily change it. I write the way I write, and I encourage other authors to adopt this same hands-off attitude. As far as I’m concerned, nothing good can come of attempts to manage your own authorial voice.

Which is why I’m now quite consternated by the fix I’m in.

[ Read more ]

To Crimp or to Cramp?

November 22, 2010 By Mark 16 Comments

A couple of days ago I was proofreading a chapter and came across this phrase:

…that were cramping their style.

Even though I’d written the words I was suddenly unsure whether the correct word was cramping or crimping. To cramp means to have a painful muscular contraction, among other things. To crimp means to bend or deform, among other things.

After trying to reason it through I could see utility in both terms. So I did what any good 21st century writer does: I asked the internet to solve the problem for me. Which led me to this useful (and often hilarious, if not absurd) list of common usage errors. The list clearly states:

What was said: crimp my style
What was meant: cramp my style

I was so happy to have this instant answer available to me, and so glad to have a long list of similar gotchas compiled for ease of search, that I Tweeted about the list.

Except…something about the answer bothered me. Maybe it was the degree of certainty implied. Maybe it was the fact that there was no sourcing of the opinion. I don’t know. [ Read more ]

Google Mail #825 Error | 2 Workarounds

November 18, 2010 By Mark 2 Comments

A few days ago I started getting an error at the top of my Google Mail page. The error displays after I look at any message in my inbox, then attempt to return to the inbox. The error reads as follows:

Oops… the system encountered a problem (#825)

The error also displays a countdown notice that it will retry the operation in five seconds, and a button to retry the requested operation immediately. Neither waiting for the clock to count down and retry or retrying on command resolves the problem.

Workaround #1
I do not allow third-party cookies on my machine. Until recently disabling third-party cookies proved compatible with Google Mail. Now that seems not to be the case.

Changing my cookie settings to allow third-party cookies resolves the problem. Because I do not want to allow third-party cookies, and because I don’t think you should either, I do not recommend this workaround.

Workaround #2
When the error displays, clicking the refresh button will load the requested window, and seems to resolve the problem for the current session. Leaving GMail and returning reproduces the problem, but it can again be resolved with a single refresh of the window.

I don’t what change Google made to prompt this behavior. I found a thread on Google’s support site earlier today but both then and at the time of this posting no explanation was given for the error, or for any third-party cookies that Google may be allowing on Google Mail.

Update: I am no longer getting the error message as of 11/18. Hopefully the issue has been resolved, if not explained.

— Mark Barrett

Site Seeing: Zoe Winters

November 15, 2010 By Mark 6 Comments

I’m extraordinarily late to the party here. As Zoe Winters seems to be pulling back from the web, I’m suddenly taking appropriate interests in her posts:

In coming back and not wanting the break to end, I’m making some adjustments to how I do things. It’s pointless to take a break like this, then come back and be crazy again. Being crazy sucks. Being stressed and depressed and wanting to quit because you’ve sucked all the fun out of what you’re doing sucks also.

As I said in retweeting this post, almost all relationships require boundaries, and the internet is a relationship. To whatever extent a computer terminal and access to virtual distractions might be a threat to anyone’s productivity, for a writer the seductions can be almost overwhelming.

Zoe’s voice is the voice of a working writer trying to grapple with all of the changes happening in the publishing space. Hers is also a voice devoid of the auto-branded corporate tone that some writers seem to gravitate to with frightening ease.

I don’t know Zoe, but when I read her posts I feel like I do. Enough said.

Update: Zoe seems to have wiped her old WordPress blog/site, which this post originally referred to.

— Mark Barrett

Current Events

November 13, 2010 By Mark Leave a Comment

In several of his more recent posts, my eponymous character on NeilRorke.com has been talking about events in the news. The first post or two felt a little odd — almost like an out-of-body experience — but in retrospect the resistance I felt fell away quickly.

One big advantage I have with Neil is that he’s a contemporary character. He lives in the now, alongside events as they happen. I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about how a period character might integrate with the web, but obviously there are some issues. Not only can’t an 18th-century vampire hunter link to contemporary sites without some sort of narrative explanation (time travel?), but linking at all from a walled-off period site might be enough to shatter suspension of disbelief.

I don’t know where the line is with Neil or any contemporary character. Maybe there’s some subject matter that would blow readers out of the fictional world Neil lives in. Maybe he can’t comment on stories that are too real or visceral or traumatic. I can imagine him having something to say about 9/11 on that day, but the very idea of having a fictional character speak to something like that seems either trivializing or exploitative. Then again, if Neil was a well-known character — more like an old friend — that might not be the case.

So far, all I can tell you is that this is interesting stuff. At least to me. 🙂

My Aeron Chair

November 11, 2010 By Mark 8 Comments

I live in my office chair. Live in it. It’s where I do my work. I’m not saying that’s a good thing, or even good for me. But it’s a fact.

Having a comfortable seat to work from is a big deal. In the early days I used an orphaned kitchen chair. It was great for tipping and teetering, but hell on my back. When I moved to L.A. and started screenwriting I bought myself a cranberry ergonomic office chair that looked like it meant business. In less than a year it broke me down until I had to sleep on the floor in order to be able to function the next day.

By the late 1990’s I’d gotten to the point that I hated the idea of working. Not because I didn’t have things to say or ideas percolating, but because work was physically painful. Like a jackhammer operator with white knuckle, the repetitive stress of sitting had worn my body down to the point that I couldn’t sit.

So I did some research. I looked at chairs as devices, looked at ergonomics as science and art (and marketing fraud), and looked at my personal needs, which included being able to slump, slouch, and otherwise fidget while lingering over a sentence or word. After a while, no matter where I started my search on a given day, I kept coming back to a chair that had been brought to market in 1995. The Aeron. [ Read more ]

The CreateSpace Calculator Fail

November 8, 2010 By Mark 7 Comments

After looking at the available print-on-demand (POD) options I decided to go with CreateSpace. This decision was not unqualified, however, and there were certainly things about CreateSpace that gave me pause.

Chief among them: the CreateSpace Royalty Calculator. While it is possible to get a rough sense of the royalty splits for a hypothetical title, the calculator’s utility for the work I want to produce seems dubious, it not utterly useless.

And CreateSpace essentially admits this. The title above the calculator reads as follows:

Royalty Calculator*
Use the royalty calculator to figure out how much you’ll make every time your book is manufactured.

Clear enough, right? You plug in data and the calculator tells you how much you’ll make with every sale. Except…when you follow that nagging asterisk, here’s the text you find immediately below the calculator:

* Figures generated by this tool are for estimation purposes only. Your actual royalty will be calculated when you set up your book.

Okay. So the calculator won’t so much help you “figure out” what you’ll make, but rather give you an “estimation” that is both unreliable and non-binding. I guess I have to give CreateSpace points for being honest about the calculator’s lack of utility — after proclaiming its utility — but the clarifying and contradictory information doesn’t inspire confidence. And it gets worse. [ Read more ]

Washing Chicken

November 3, 2010 By Mark 1 Comment

Decades ago it was commonly understood that ulcers came from stress. Where parasites or other nasties were suspect in ailments of the lower gut, it was obvious that nothing could live in the toxic soup of human stomach acid. In the early 1980’s, however, it was discovered that a specific bacterium was alive and well in the stomachs of many people suffering from ulcers:

Although stress and spicy foods were once thought to be the main causes of peptic ulcers, doctors now know that the cause of most ulcers is the corkscrew-shaped bacterium Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori).

More recently, the conventional wisdom that human beings need to drink eight glasses of water each day in order to be healthy was also challenged. Having heard this advice most of my life, and having generally ignored it except during an epic mid-July crossing of the Mojave Desert in a non-air-conditioned vehicle, and having known of no human being who did follow that advice, I often wondered about its basis in fact.

Apparently I wasn’t the only one. Physician Heinz Valtin,…

…a kidney specialist and author of two widely used textbooks on the kidney and water balance, sought to find the origin of this dictum and to examine the scientific evidence, if any, that might support it.

In 2002 he released his finding that there was no evidence to support said dictum. In 2008 a follow-up study reached a similar conclusion:

“There is no clear evidence of benefit from drinking increased amounts of water.”

So where did this belief come from? Valtin believes it may have have….

…originated from a misunderstanding. In 1945 the Food and Nutrition Board, now part of the National Academy of Sciences’s Institute of Medicine, suggested that a person consume one milliliter of water (about one fifth of a teaspoon) for each calorie of food. The math is pretty simple: A daily diet of around 1,900 calories would dictate the consumption of 1,900 milliliters of water, an amount remarkably close to 64 ounces. But many dieticians and other people failed to notice a critical point: namely, that much of the daily need for water could be met by the water content found in food.

Oops.

And what about the vaunted appendix? Hasn’t it been proven beyond any doubt that the appendix does absolutely nothing? That it is, in fact, an evolutionary remnant of some long-lost bodily function?

Well, no. Recent research indicates the appendix may actually be doing the job it was designed for: repopulating the gut with critical bacteria after a riotous bout of Montezuma’s Revenge:

William Parker, Randy Bollinger, and colleagues at Duke University proposed that the appendix serves as a haven for useful bacteria when illness flushes those bacteria from the rest of the intestines.[6][10] This proposal is based on a new understanding of how the immune system supports the growth of beneficial intestinal bacteria, in combination with many well-known features of the appendix, including its architecture and its association with copious amounts of immune tissue.

Okay: so what does all of this have to do with storytelling in the digital age? Well, I’ll get to that in a moment, but first I want to talk about chicken washing. No, not that kind of chicken washing. The kind you do when you’re about to cook chicken. [ Read more ]