Where's the Party?

The writing blogosphere has been in a bit of an upheaval lately. First, Bookseller Chick lost her job. Then Nadia Cornier retired her blog, followed by Miss Snark and now Squawk Radio.

Yesterday I went to Romancing the Blog and randomly clicked some of the side links. In fifteen minutes I found four blogs that hadn't been updated in over a month. One of them still floated a post a year old. (Those guys really should check those things.) RTB has added so many links in the year I've been reading them that the page is now freakishly long. But an actual perusal of some of these links shows the two real truths of blogging, the ones that no one really wants to talk about:

1. Blogging is a timesuck.

2. There's only so much to say.

It sounds like such a great idea to the unititiated - it's free marketing, after all. Get your name out there! Gain momentum in your career! But most writer blogs end up as either blatant promo (a post every few months when a book comes out) or aspiring writers logging on every six weeks to complain about how they can't finish anything. And eventually, most people just give up.

Writing a blog, it turns out, is like publishing a magazine. By yourself. In which you come up with all the articles, do all the research, find all the visuals, and create all the content. Every day. It's a lot of work, especially for the people who are good at it. The Squawk Radio writers could easily - easily - put out an actual magazine and sell lots of copies. That's how good they are at blogging. But magazines aren't their business; writing is their business. So see point 1 above.

Everyone wants to know how to make a successful blog. But that's the wrong question entirely. Here's the real question: What is a successful blog?

Is it frequency of content? Quality of content? Marketable names in the title? Or is it just numbers? 'Cos numbers only matter if you're trying to sell something to your readers. And as soon as you try to sell something to your readers, they know it. The Phony Radar is never broken. Readers always know when there's nothing in it for them.

After doing this for a year and a half, I have only come across two rules on how to keep blogging:

1. Like it.

2. Forget numbers.

I actually don't know how many readers I have, and I don't really care. I log into my stats about once every four or five months. All I know is that Megan sends me lots of readers (thanks Megan), and the posts with "sex" in the title got lots of people looking for porn, and the one I did about internet flame wars got the most hits of any post I've ever done. I blog because I like it. That's why I don't quit.

Two more tips on blogging:

1. See my sidebar for a few who do it really well.

2. Pictures help.








Enjoy,
Abby

Three Books

Up here in frigid Toronto, it was an absolutely beeee-yutiful day. The Guy went canoeing with his best buddy and I did the following:

-wrote six pages

-finished reading The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak (it was supposed to be brilliant, but I thought it was meh)

-came up with three books because Megan tagged me.

The challenge is to think of three of your favourite books that other people might not be familiar with. Here are mine:




Patricia O'Brien: The Glory Cloak - Historical fiction, a story woven with Louisa May Alcott and Clara Barton as characters. I'm not as well-versed in Civil War history as I could be, and this book felt like a living history lesson - just pulled me right in. The descriptions of Andersonville and the conditions in a Civil War hospital are still with me to this day. By the way, a much-lauded and better-known companion piece to this one is Geraldine Brooks' award winning March, which is also amazing.




Alan Moorehead: The White Nile - The first history book I ever read about nineteenth-century African exploration, and it got me completely hooked. All the stories are here: Burton, Speke, Baker, Gordon, Stanley. Burton fighting with Speke, Burton fighting with everybody, Speke dying mysteriously, Stanley finding Livingstone, the whole deal, told larger than life, which is the way these men lived. I am eternally fascinated with explorers and this is the book that started it.




Valerie Martin: Mary Reilly - Historical novel told from the perspective of Dr. Jekyll's lower-class maid. Creepy and imaginative, but there are two reasons I like it so much: One is that Mary's voice is so completely convincing as a lower-class servant of the time, and the other is that it puts a female lens on what is, as it stands, a male story. This is one of those books that makes me say, "Damn, I wish I came up with that."

Thanks for the tag, Megan - that was a fun one.

Off for a walk,
Abby

Late to the party, book 2

Another book that got rave reviews months ago, that I've just gotten around to reading:




In this one, a respectable widow works as secretary to a pox-scarred earl. They have an attraction, but he needs to marry in his own class and of course she is respectable, so they don't act on it. When he goes to London to work off his frustrations with a courtesan, she secretly follows him and takes the courtesan's place under a mask to be with him.

Sounds silly, doesn't it? Like sort of an erotica-y plot. I mean, really, it takes some serious plot contrivances to get a lady into a hooker's bed for a night, and would he really not recognize her under the mask? And what historically-correct lady would act this way in the first place? There's no way Hoyt could pull it off, right?

Well, she does. I'm still not sure how, but I think it has something to do with the psychological realism of the characters and how they think. When you're in the heroine's head, you can see why she does what she does. And the aftermath of the deception is, surprisingly, played out in a realistic way. These aren't just cardboard characters walking through a plot:

And there were other thoughts he could not stop. Had she met other men at Aphrodite's Grotto? Had she shared her beautiful, lush body with men she didn't even know?... Impossible to wipe the obscene images from his mind of Anna - his Anna - with another man. His vision blurred. Christ. He was crying like a lad.

I also liked Hoyt's realistic use of language, especially for the hero. He is pretty profane, and he uses anatomically stark words when he's thinking about sex, which makes sense, as I don't think too many men think of women's "feminine petals" when they're turned on.

Hoyt does far better with the central plot than with the subplots, which are sort of tacked-on and predictable. The last 50 pages is a little overcrammed with Obviously Bad Villains and their comeuppance, but that's only a little to forgive. I'm glad I came to the party for this one, even if I was late.

Living with Junk

In my business with The Guy, we do product photography. People give us merchandise they want shot for their catalogue, website, or whatever, and we shoot it. It's all well and good, but you would be amazed how many customers just never pick up their stuff after the shoot.

Over the years we've scored good stuff occasionally - a load of nice smelly candles once, and a couple of really nice kitchen pots - but most of it is useless junk. I have found, in my house, my basement, or my garage, the following items:

• a box of metal gauges (I think) with weird silver octopus wires
• some sort of horse blanket - hideous and stinky
• a box of hospital scrubs, size XS
• samples of wedding favours, tied with ribbon
• 20 doormats
• a plastic belt you can put your beer cans in
• a football that glows in the dark

And so on. I really should give the guy who picks up my recycling a Christmas gift.

I'm 50 pages from finishing my work in progress. It's only the first draft, and that means I have to live with the following junk in my novel:

• historical anachronisms I don't know the answer to
• scenes that are mostly dialogue with no description
• one honking unresolved subplot that is driving me crazy
• a couple of plotting shortcuts I told myself I'd fix later
• obscure action and probably some sloppy dialogue tags
• scenes that are just sort of there

Last year, Nora Roberts wrote an article for RWA in which she said frankly that she calls her first drafts POS, for Pieces of Shit. I think I've seen that article either quoted or referred to at least thirty times since she wrote it - it's like every writer who read that article, including me, really took that tidbit to heart. It's just so comforting to know that Nora's first drafts are as crappy as mine or yours.

We beat ourselves up over crappy first drafts. We tell ourselves they're awful, they stink, that we need to make everything right the first time. The strange thing about the Nora article was the underlying assumption we all had, conscious or not, that her books just come out perfect.

But everyone's first draft is full of junk. The trick is to step over the junk, pile it in a corner, ignore it, and keep writing. The junk in my house is a sign that we're productive, that real people live and work here. The mess is what we create.

The junk in my book is a sign that I'm living there, writing there, learning there. It's the sign that I've taken the dive into my book and splashed around, made a mess. I've tried things this way and that to see what works. I've strung words together a hundred different ways to express myself. Sure, I'll clean it up properly, but my book will never be sterile, and neither will my house. Life is just too short to beat yourself up over a glowing football.

Now I'm going out to my garage, to get dirty.

Late to the party, book 1

I try and stay current on the books that are getting big buzz in the industry, but like most big readers I'm a bit behind. I actually keep my to-be-read pile under a semblance of control, but it still gets away from me and I end up reading the latest Big Thing like, six months or a year late. So it goes.

A few weeks ago I was chatting with my local librarian (I know that sounds like I have no life, but too bad suckas, her name is Kathleen and she's awesome) and she recommended Warprize to me. I seemed to remember a lot of readers raving about this book so I tried it out.




The basic plot is this: in a sort of alternate-history fantasy land, a woman (in a very flimsy dress apparentlyl, lol) is taken as a warprize for a barbarian king, who promises peace in the newly-conquered kingdom if she is given to him as a slave.

As premises go, it's a good one. For the first hundred pages I was very interested to see where the author would go with it. Would the heroine (Xylara, for pete's sake) submit or fight back? Will the barbarian king be brutal or merciful? What will be the consequences if they don't get along? Will the author actually go where everyone is thinking - into forced-sex territory? Lots of potential for conflict here.

But this is a romance novel, so the answers are 1) submit, 2) merciful, 3) it doesn't matter because they do, 4) no. As the plot unwinds, the darker potential in the main setup is very neatly disposed of, and we end up with all of the nicer options taken so that no readers will end up disturbed. In the hands of George R. R. Martin, this book would have been 500 pages and left the reader begging for mercy at the end. But this is a very different story.

I didn't like the heroine much - she's a bit dense, and I'm so over the Heroine Who Must Heal Others At Any Cost Because She Is So Noble - and the hero, except for the odd battle, was pretty soft for a warlord, but overall I was entertained. How can you not be entertained by lines like: "'The bitch will die!' he howled like a dog gone mad."?

I took a look at the second book - called Warsworn - and when I discovered that the plot hinges on Xylara bringing plague beause she Must Heal Others At All Costs Even Contagion Because She Is So Noble, I decided I couldn't stomach it. There's a third one, I think.

I wasn't swept away, I wasn't overwhelmed, but I was entertained for a few hours. On to the next book in the pile.

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