Jack Hardway's Web Log

Borders Bites The Dust

2011-07-19T19:15:00.002-04:00

I read yesterday that Borders, having failed to find a buyer, is preparing to liquidate its remaining 450 or so locations and go the way of the dodo.

My original speculation 8 or 9 years ago that electronic publishing would replace paper publishing as the dominant written-word medium within 30 years, the one everybody had such a laugh over, might turn out to be about a decade too long in its predicted fruition. The changeover is occurring even faster than I thought. I now feel pretty comfortable with the notion that we'll be doing most of our reading on some kind of viewing screen instead of some kind of paper in no more than 10 years.

Untreed Reads and Copyrights Redux

2010-10-25T13:21:00.038-04:00

I was already aware of Untreed's policy of inserting itself into all works' copyright claimant statements; that's supposed to be, per the disclaimer below all of them, just to protect the authors' copyrights. I knew about this peculiar and seemingly oxymoronic policy--I say "peculiar" only because I've been unable to find another publisher, big or little, that does this--but I was still a little surprised to see that Untreed had gone to the trouble of seeing that it was inserted into every one of the copyright claimant statements in the contributors listing in the front matter of "Discount Noir," a new crime fiction anthology. For example, J.T. Ellison's "Have You Seen me?" is credited thusly:

"Have You Seen Me?" Copyright 2010 by J.T. Ellison and Untreed Reads Publishing
and not, as one might expect, as
"Have You Seen Me?" Copyright 2010 by J.T. Ellison

All 42 included works have this joint attribution. Below this list is a disclaimer:
The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright, and has granted permission to the publisher to enforce said copyright on their behalf. That, I suppose, means the copyright attributions don't mean what they say. You can look for yourself here:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/39856590/Discount-Noir

------------------------
UPDATE 1 NOV
If you clicked on the link above and DIDN'T see the shared copyright attributions I've been ragging about and are now wondering whether I've lost my mind, here's why...
In the ensuing week since I wrote this blog post on 25 Sep, Untreed has changed the credits page of DISCOUNT NOIR so that all of the copyright notices are now in the authors' names only, and the link above to the sample at Scribd.com now reflects that change. You can still see how the copyright notices were previously recorded, though, by clicking here:
http://www.jackhardway.com/Image51-smashwordsepubsample.jpg
or here:
http://www.jackhardway.com/amazonkindlesample.jpg
And now, back to the original 25 Sep blog
------------------------

Every novel, novella, or short story published by Untreed Reads gets the same treatment.

Why a publisher would think having itself on a copyright notice is necessary to enforce an author's copyright is a poser. I mean, I'm sure M.C. Beaton's publisher has a huge and keen interest in seeing that her copyrights (and its profits) are safeguarded and has lawyers to do that, yet her new book, BUSY BODY, says simply
(C)2010 M.C. Beaton
not
(C)2010 M.C. Beaton and St. Martin's Minotaur
and so do all of her other books. Go figure.

I understand that Denise Dietz (THROW DARTS AT A CHEESECAKE, others) now has some works in the preliminary stages for publishing at Untreed Reads. It'll be interesting to see whether her work actually shows up there and, if so, how well she takes to her next pubbed work saying
(C)2010 by Denise Dietz and Untreed Reads Publishing

If anybody knows of another publisher that requires a credit in a book's or short story's copyright line for anything but a work-for-hire, let me know. I haven't found one yet.

Spinetingler: Magazine or Not?

2010-09-09T12:02:00.003-04:00

In today's topic at
http://www.jungleredwriters.com/
mystery author Hank Phillippi Ryan, who, if you've never seen a photo of the author, is not only not a man but way not a man, interviews Sandra Ruttan, a pretty good crime fiction author herself but at Jungle Red today wearing the hat of Spinetingler's Editor-In-Chief.

Within this interview is a brief discussion of Spinetingler's transition from issues to fluid, uninterrupted publication. There, Ms. Ruttan said Spinetingler is no longer published as issues, but is instead now manifested in "...an ongoing, continuous publishing format...." Earlier in the interview, she refers to Spinetingler as an e-zine.

As a point of order, I submit for consideration the proposition that Spinetingler is no longer a magazine. I've consulted Merriam-Webster's Unabridged and 11th Collegiate, the Oxford English 11th, and the American Heritage 4th, as well as some lesser references, and I've yet to encounter one that doesn't define a magazine as a periodical, i.e., published as issues. When a site doesn't have issues, when it's a single continuing entity at which material arrives, departs, or hangs around forever as the editors choose, then that site isn't a magazine. It's a theme website.

There's nothing wrong with that. Beat to a Pulp and A Twist of Noir are great crime fiction sites, and for all I know they might consider themselves to be web magazines because they publish fiction, but they're not magazines. They--and Spinetingler--can call themselves magazines, but they're not. Personally, I like them better than many magazines because I don't have to navigate around a lot of content I don't care about to get to the stories.

Even If You Don't Follow the Rules, You Need To Know What They Are

2010-09-07T10:56:00.010-04:00

In response to an email I received last evening, one of many such emails I've gotten over the years telling me that fiction writers are not grammarians, that they're not writing refrigerator manuals, and that they're supposed to be breaking the "rules" of grammar, I'm reprinting the Introduction from my little ebook Elements for Fiction Writers. I'm doing that because I don't think I can put it any better than I did there, so I'd just be repeating myself, and the email sender is probably not going to listen anyway, so why waste the fingertip wear and tear making a brand-new case to try to convince him to learn to write if he doesn't want to?

Virtually all language textbooks, grammar-and-style guides, and so-called “handbooks for writers” omit a bit of information: the precepts of current standard English they lay out, while largely bulletproof in journalism, academics, and other nonfiction, cannot be applied dogmatically to works of fiction. In essays, magazine articles, academic theses and dissertations, how-to books, and most other nonfiction, good reasons for not using correct English are almost nonexistent, but fiction writers play fast and loose with the rules of standard grammar and usage all the time. Indeed, creative writing wouldn't be very creative if novelists and short-story authors couldn't leave out a conjunction, use a dependent clause as a sentence, or commit any other crime against grammar, be it misdemeanor or felony, any time they think it's called for.

So, do you as a creative writer have to know how to write correct English? Absolutely. Do you have to conform to the rules of correct English when you write? Not if you have a good reason not to. Who decides what's a good reason for you? The only person who can—you. Who will ultimately decide whether you did a good job or not? Your editors and, most important of all, your readers.

There's an elemental difference between the grammar-and-usage departures you make for whatever deliberate literary purpose you have in mind and the ones you make because you don't know any better.

The goal of this guide is not to hand down prescriptive edicts that must be obeyed at the risk of being cast into grammar hell; you're a fiction writer, a storyteller, and by that virtue you're not obligated to follow any style guide anywhere—including this one. But you need to understand that using nonstandard English constructions will have consequences, either favorable or otherwise.

We're all educated throughout 13 years of schooling in the structural order, spellings, punctuation, and more-or-less universally used idioms and slang (idioms and slang that we all know and occasionally use no matter what region of the country we call home) of what the linguists and grammarians who write Language Arts textbooks call “current standard American English,” and we expect to hear or see it when we listen to or read what others say or write. It's what makes bayou Cajuns and West Virginia mountain people—me, for example—and Texicans and all of the other speakers of the 26 distinct dialects of our United States able to step out of those dialects and communicate with one another in a common flavor of English. No matter how unintelligible some our regional slang, idioms, constructions, and pronunciations might be to some folks in some other region, we can all speak and write the standard American English we were all taught in school, and we can understand one another via this common medium of cultural communication.

When a writer does not present our language to us in the standard way we've been taught, we can get lost, confused, or, worst of all, irritated with the writer unless it's done skillfully. For example, English adjectives come before their nouns. We say “black crayon” or “long speech,” not “crayon black” or “speech long” (as Spanish speakers do). Now, when songwriters write about the “river wide” or the “mountain high,” we get along well enough with that nonstandard arrangement in the literary and poetic environment of the song. However, if, in an ordinary social setting, you were to say your friend Tim arrived in a “car black long,” the person you were talking with would probably make a face and say, “Huh?”

When you play around with the standards, know there will likely be some effect because you've stepped out of the language structures readers have been taught and are familiar with; depending on how well you pull it off, their reactions might range from “Say, that was an interesting way of putting that” to “How am I supposed to follow this story if the writer can't make any better sense than this?” Know, too, that before you can have a reasonable idea of what effect breaking any grammatical or stylistic “rules” will have, you first have to know what those grammatical and stylistic rules are. You have to master the elements of conventional grammar and style in order to know what you're doing when you bend or break any of those elements at the behest of your literary muse.

Finally, this book is not intended to be a grammar manual to teach English from the ground up. If you're reading this book, you're presumed to think of yourself as a working writer. Certainly, if proficiency in the language isn't important to you and you don't work hard to excel there, why in the world are trying to insinuate yourself into an area of endeavor where language expertise is as elemental as a painter's brush and palette or a sculptor's chisel. The best story idea in the world is useless if you don't have the language skills to tell it. If you don't believe that, don't read any further because I'm wasting your time.
This little book is a compilation of things grammatical that bedevil even the best authors, advice about how to fix the goofs you don't mean to make. All of the stuff you do on purpose, well, that's on you.

"Eye Dialect" in Dialogue: A Totally Pointless Writing Technique

2010-09-06T12:43:00.015-04:00

Before I get into all of the stuff that only some of you will find interesting enough to stay with, let me define eye dialect. It's the practice of writing with nonstandard spellings that do not result in any pronunciation changes whatsoever. Like spelling "was" as "wuz" or "went" as "wint" or the like. This is different from pronunciation spelling, a dialogue technique where words are written with nonstandard spellings that result in nonstandard pronunciations, such as "goin'" instead of "going" or "git" instead of "get."

Here's an example of pronunciation spelling in dialogue:
"Ah'm gonna git you, suckah."

The writer has used a bunch of nonstandard spellings, and readers, including you just now, hear inside their heads a bunch of nonstandard vocalizations. Read the line out loud and you'll literally hear the nonstandard pronunciations. This is obviously useful to storytellers.

Now, let's look at a line of eye dialect:
This iz my dotter's kar.

The writer has used some nonstandard spellings, ostensibly to represent nonstandard speech. When you read it, though, you see that the phonics are exactly--and I mean exactly--the same as the standard phonics for the words. The line is pronounced precisely the same as
This is my daughter's car.
You don't have to take my word or your own brain's word for it. Grab the next person who walks by you and read both lines out loud, then ask your conscripted associate which line was standard English and which was eye dialect. They won't be able to tell the difference because there isn't any.

Okay, now envision "This iz my dotter's kar" as a line of dialogue in your Great American novel. Not narrative, where nonstandard spellings with standard phonics can effectively communicate a writer's limited spelling skills, as in Huck Finn or Flowers for Algernon, but dialogue, where the listener character can't see how anything is spelled. All a listener can do is, well, listen, and if he hears exactly the same thing as he would were the spellings the correct ones, then what in the 7th Circle of Hell's good does it do to misspell them?

Oy.

Second-Person Answers, Provided by Al Leverone

2010-09-05T10:13:00.045-04:00

Yesterday, I lifted a paragraph from a webzine as an example of mixing up "your" and "you're." Mr. Leverone ID'd the three prescriptive mistakes in short order. For those who did not, here's the paragraph with the goofs underlined:

The example:
Note: We don't care if you¹ name is Stephen Janovski or Stephen King. We don't care if your² friends with the editors at The New Yorker or Cemetery Dance. What counts with us, is³ the merit of your story, so please don't expect us to accept your work simply because of who you are or who you know.

1. your Pretty obvious.
2. you're Contraction for "you are"...not "your," a possessive.
3. us is No period between the subject and its verb. Just say it inside your head; do you hear a pause between "What counts with
us" and "is"? Of course not. To tell the truth, though, I've seen this
a lot lately, and I'll be damned if I can figure out why people are
doing it. Sunspots, maybe.

Second-Person Forms

2010-09-04T10:24:00.011-04:00

This blog entry's example is from the Submissions page of a new webzine called Bete Noir. You can see it at
http://www.betenoiremagazine.com/submissionguidelines.htm

The example:
Note: We don't care if you name is Stephen Janovski or Stephen King. We don't care if your friends with the editors at The New Yorker or Cemetery Dance. What counts with us, is the merit of your story, so please don't expect us to accept your work simply because of who you are or who you know.

The pale blue paragraph above has 3 prescriptive grammar mistakes. Now, I know a lot of writers—mostly fiction writers—start belching Volkswagens when anybody says "prescriptive," as in "you shouldn't ever do this." Well, too bad. We're outside the creative writing environment here. Here, we're not looking at anything written deliberately in hot pursuit of some literary purpose. Here, we're looking at things people have written because they just didn't know any better. Anyway, there are 3 prescriptive mistakes up there. Do you see them?

The Difference Between "Imply" and "Infer": It's Okay...Professional Writers Screw It Up, Too

2010-09-03T18:30:00.029-04:00

This is from the Examiner website at
http://www.examiner.com/writing-in-las-vegas/wait-that-s-a-noun-masquerading-as-a-verb
Recently I read a court document where the court reporter used president instead of precedent..
Pretty funny, but sad, too. Now the official court minutes of that hearing infer that a president was set. Hmmm? Last time I looked, there hadn't been any changes of command.

The court minutes don't infer anything. A reader of the court minutes might infer something, but all the minutes themselves can do is say things in a written form.

Explanation

A speaker or writer--or in this case, a body of writing--says something outright or implies something, which means to suggest something in an indirect way. Nothing was implied here; a wrong word was used that might, to the eyes of a moron who couldn't figure that out, convey the wrong meaning mentioned up there. I bring up imply only because infer and imply are often confused with each other and are therefore usually discussed together.

Readers of these court minutes who are, as I mentioned above, imbeciles, might infer, or conclude from information received, that an actual new president was seated, but we don't care bout that. All we care about here is understanding the difference in meaning between imply and infer.

IMPLY: to insinuate...to suggest in a roundabout way
INFER: to conclude or deduce from information received

Jim didn't make any negative remarks outright, but by repeatedly mentioning Linda's youth and deliberately avoiding any acknowledgement of her leadership skills, he was implying (insinuating) she wasn't ready for the management job. At least, that's what I inferred (concluded) from his comments.

Copyright Statements at Untreed Reads Publishing

2010-09-01T10:22:00.025-04:00

Untreed Reads, an e-book publisher, has an unusual copyright statement policy, one that I've been unable to find at any other publisher. The editor-in-chief there has said that Untreed doesn't claim copyright ownership of anybody's work, that it recognizes authors' copyrights and that it notes the copyrights in the manner it does strictly as a protective measure for its authors; according to Untreed's editor, a publisher has more clout in enforcing a copyright in case of an infringement than an author on his own, so Untreed lists copyrights as shared by the author and publisher for this purpose.

The copyright statements in Untreed offerings are broken down below. They appear on the publisher's page in the excerpts, which are available at Scribd.com and are linked to at several places below for your convenient reference.

Of the 43 titles (32 short stories, 7 novellas, 3 novels, and one nonfiction title) that comprised Untreed's inventory as of early Wednesday morning, only one was stated to be the sole copyright property of the author. You can view it at
http://www.scribd.com/doc/32683466/At-the-Diner

Thirty (30) of the titles were stated to be the joint copyright property of the author and the publisher. You can view a typical one at
http://www.scribd.com/doc/32998204/Burma-Girl

The remaining 12 titles were stated to be the sole copyright property of Untreed Reads. You can view a representative statement at
http://www.scribd.com/doc/28773861/How-To-Eat-Fruit

Here's a link to Untreed's Titles page, from which you can look around for yourself:
http://www.untreedreads.com/?page_id=2