Writing, as We Know it

Leave a comment

Times New Roman, I believe, is the font of this blog post.  I grew curious about how our fairly long-lasting Roman letters came to be in this form we use today.  The Romans, like the Greeks, tended to write in uncial form—what we call “upper case” because printers literally kept them in a case above the “lower case” or minuscule type.  Apparently the reason all caps faded from popularity wasn’t that people felt they were being shouted at all the time, but they took too long to write.  You’ve probably seen examples of medieval manuscripts where the letters are an odd mix between uncial and minuscule forms.  These eventually settled into what is called Roman half-uncial, a font that eventually favored minuscule to majuscule—a name for uncial that has very small, or no, ascenders (as in lower case b or d) or descenders (like lower case p and q).

As the power of the Roman Empire waned, a variety of scripts developed in different parts of Europe.  One that eventually came to have influence on the nascent Holy Roman Empire was scriptura Germanica, or the German script.  Under Charlemagne, the Holy Roman Emperor, the favored, and widespread form of writing Roman letters was carolingian minuscule.  This isn’t too difficult to read for modern people but it’s not the script we use.  Carolingian minuscule was eventually replaced by blackletter.  This heavy, Gothic-looking script isn’t always easy to read.  (It was used for German publications until 1941; I used to have an old German book written in blackletter.)  Keep in mind that during all this time there was no printing press in Europe; manuscripts were handwritten and read by few.  Literacy was rare.  Even so, the difficulty of reading blackletter eventually led writers to go back to carolingian minuscule to develop a new writing style, influenced by blackletter as well.

Blackletter. Image credit: Arpingstone, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The new writing style, called humanist minuscule, also known as “whiteletter,” is basically what we use today.  It comes in several different fonts, of course, but the basic idea of capital letters beginning sentences and proper nouns, but most letters being minuscules, has become the standard for most typefaces based on Latin letter-forms.  This history of writing, let alone individual scripts, is amazingly complex.  Today fonts have to be licensed to be used by publishers of print materials and techies can invent new fonts to license or sell.  I still have a soft spot for the “Roman” style, which is why this blog post, at least on my screen, is in Times New Roman. 

Editorializing

Leave a comment

One of the realities of being an editor is that you have authors consistently ignore your advice and then ask you for solutions when what you predicted would happen does.  Oh, that sentence!  Let me put it this way: there used to be a time when simultaneous submission was frowned upon.  Even “forbidden” by some publishers.  The internet has changed all that.  Publishers who won’t accept submissions if anyone else is also considering them, lose out.  There are lots of publishers out there.  Many more than most people think.  Some of them are small and fly-by-night, but others are also ultra-specialized so they can hit their markets.  Even among academic publishers there are many to choose from.  If you submit to only one, wait to hear, and then get a “no,” you have to start all over again.  Or submit simultaneously.

Peer review can take a long time.  I mean a l-o-n-g time.  Especially since the pandemic, but even before, overwrought academics have trouble committing to adding one more thing to their plates.  If they do accept a review offer, the response is likely to be quite late; more often after the deadline than before.  I’ve been an anxious author waiting.  It’s the kind of limbo few actually enjoy.  It’s a reality, however.  If your book is about current events, or something trending, well, godspeed.  That’s a tough place to be.  Submitting to more than one publisher at a time gives you the leg up of not losing time if someone turns you down.  Some authors prefer a certain publisher and want to hold out for them.  Publishers get lots of proposals.  If I had so many proposals when I was in college I wouldn’t have been nearly so lonely.  Holding out is bad dating advice.

The best piece of editorial advice I can muster is to research publishers.  Academics are researchers by nature, but few take the time to research publishers.  There’s plenty of information out there.  When I couldn’t get an agent interested in Holy Horror, I turned to McFarland.  Why?  Because I’d familiarized myself with the kinds of books they publish and mine seemed a good fit for them.  Sure, there were more prestigious places to go, but I’m a bit too busy to bang my head against that wall all day.  Even a little bit of web searching on publishers can pay off.  Publishing is a business.  Never forget that.  If you only want to get your ideas out there, starting a website (which isn’t expensive) is probably a better way than getting a book published.  Writing books is great, and getting them published is incredibly validating.  But do yourself a favor, if your editor suggests a course of action to you, take it.

Being Perceived

2 Comments

The philosopher George Berkeley argued that to be is to be perceived.  This perspective goes by the name of immaterialism and I have to admit to being sometimes seduced by it.  The real question comes down to who counts as a perceiver.  In any case, as a book author there’s always a worry that the book sent to the publisher isn’t real until it appears in print.  I’m Berkeleyian enough to think that ebooks aren’t really perceived, and so I mean in print.  Until I see a copy of the book, I don’t really believe it exists.  This entire week I’ve been waiting.  Sleepy Hollow as American Myth was released on either Monday or Wednesday, depending on who you believe about such things, and my author copies have been on their way.  At last, the book exists!

In the publishing industry there are those who consider a book like a box of puzzle pieces.  They often refer to books as “content,” or “product.”  Something that can be divided up and sold piecemeal in electronic form.  A chapter at a time.  Never mind what the author was trying to do when s/he wrote the book.  Such people, it seems to me, should be forced to spend several years working on an integrated project only to see the producer of said product take it apart and sell insubstantial pieces of the whole.  It feels like being eviscerated.  Books are objects and those who love them form cultures.  I know there are people who read ebooks, and I don’t judge them for it—readers are readers and we need more of them!  But for me, book culture involves, well, books.

One of the greatest thrills a writer can know is opening that first box of their author copies of a book.  Many academic publishers are cutting down the numbers, to save money, of course.  McFarland, I’m happy to report, still provides ten, which used to be standard.  So before I start doling them out, I have, for the moment, ten copies of my sixth book.  I have only one copy of the second edition of A Reassessment of Asherah and two copies of Nightmares with the Bible.  They’re both too expensive for me to buy more.  (Income from writing books may bring images of Stephen King or J. K. Rowling to mind, but they’re household names because their situation is so exceptional.)  Right now, however, I’m bathing in the glow of knowing, at least at the moment, my latest book is being perceived.

Publish, Perish

Leave a comment

Publish or perish has been around for quite a while and I feel for younger scholars who are trying to publish their collected essays as their second book.  Collected essays, in case you’re not familiar with dark academia, are generally what senior scholars do before they retire and they can’t be bothered to rewrite everything into a proper book.  Or maybe the topics are disparate and don’t easily fit together in one category.  When I was teaching the general rule was an article a year and a second book for tenure.  I was able to do this without a sabbatical, and with a heavy teaching load and administrative duties at Nashotah House.  It’s a lot of work.  My biggest challenge was coming up with ideas for new books.  Eventually I published my collected essays on Asherah in the second edition of my dissertation.

I’d written a 50-page article on Shapshu, the Ugaritic sun deity, that was intended to be my second book.  Then J. C. L. Gibson retired and I had to have something for his Festschrift.  There it went.   It was about that time that I started Weathering the Psalms.  That was my “tenure book.”  There was over a decade between that and Holy Horror, for a number of reasons.  The main one was that I was trying to cobble together a career between Gorgias Press and moonlighting as an adjunct at Rutgers University.  There was no time for research and publication.  Ironically, that only came after I gave up academia to enter the commercial world of publishing.  I see younger scholars now expected to produce that second book, and some of them go for the collected essays approach.  I understand.

Back when I was applying for first jobs—and the scene was already very tight, I assure you, despite promises just a few years earlier—I applied for everything.  One search committee chair wrote a scolding letter saying I wasn’t senior enough to apply.  By the end of his dressing down, he concluded with something along the lines of “unless you’re applying because there are so few positions, in which case it’s understandable.”  He was right.  So few jobs and so much student debt!  I landed at Nashotah and began cranking out the articles.  In a moment of weakness I offered to write some further academic treatments after my horror movie books appeared.  They don’t do anything for my career, of course.  And they take away time from popular writing practice.  Who knows?  Maybe some day I’ll gather them into a book.  Then again, maybe I’ll find myself growing younger too.

More Writing

Leave a comment

I keep a list.  It includes everything that I’ve published.  It’s not on my CV since I keep my fiction pretty close to my vest.  The other day I stumbled across another electronic list I’d made some time ago of the unpublished books I’d written.  Most were fiction but at least two were non, and so I decided that I should probably print out copies of those I still had.  As I’ve probably written elsewhere, I started my first novel as a teenager.  I never finished it, but I still remember it pretty well.  Then I started another, also unfinished.  After my wife and I got engaged and before we moved to Scotland, I’d moved to Ann Arbor to be in her city.  Ann Arbor, like most university towns, has many overqualified people looking for work and I ended up doing secretarial support for companies that really had nothing for me to do quite a bit of the time.  I wrote my first full novel during dull times on the job.

My writing was pretty focused in Edinburgh.  My first published book was, naturally, my dissertation.  I started writing fiction again when I was hired by Nashotah House, but that was tempered by academic articles and my second book.  An academic life, it seems, doesn’t leave a ton of time for writing.  What really surprised me about my list was what happened after Nashotah.  In the years since then I’ve completed ten unpublished books.  Since my ouster from academia I’ve published five.  I honestly don’t know how many short stories I’ve finished, but I have published thirty-three.  What really worries me is that some of these only exist in tenuous electronic form.  I guess I trust the internet enough to preserve these blog posts; with over 5,700 of them I’d be running out of space.

I see a trip to buy some paper in my future.  For my peace of mind I need to make sure all of this is printed out.  My organizational scheme (which is perhaps not unusual for those with my condition) is: I know which pile I put it in.  Organizing it for others, assuming anybody else is interested, might not be a bad idea.  I know that if I make my way to the attic and begin looking through my personal slush pile of manuscripts I’ll find even more that I’ve forgotten.  That’s why I started keeping a list.  Someday I’ll have time to finish it, I hope.

Mass Market

Leave a comment

The mass market paperback.  This may very well be one of the best symbols of my younger years.  One of the largest distributors of mass market paperbacks (Readerlink) has announced that it will no longer distribute them.  It seems that the writing, instead of in readers’ hands, is on the wall.  Mass market paperbacks are the least expensive formats of books to buy.  Publishers have increasingly been tending to push trade size (about 6-by-9 inches)—they can charge more for them.  They don’t fit easily in your pocket, however, and well, they cost more.  Often, as someone who reads in public, I find myself wishing more literary fiction was still produced in mass market form.  Only the best selling authors ever make it down to that size.  I miss being able to stick a book in my pocket.  

The mass market paperback’s story began with railroad books, once innovated by my erstwhile employer, Routledge.  The form we recognize today only really took off in 1935.  When I was growing up, I considered all other formats somehow too big.  My book collection and reading habits began with mass market size.  When we moved to our house a few years back, I repurposed an old dresser as a bookshelf.  The top drawer slots were just tall enough for mass market books.  I discovered that I really didn’t have enough of them to fill that shelf.  Books have grown bigger.  Now, working in publishing I realize profit margins are thin in this industry.  Many publishers need the big sellers to help make up for disappointing sales of other titles.  (You have to have thick skin to be an author, I know from experience.)  They need to stay solvent.

But still, this feels like the end of an era.  Books in this format have been around really only less than a century.  Literacy—reading for pleasure—among the masses hasn’t been around much longer.  Books were expensive and were afforded by the elite, then cheaper forms and formats became available.  The electronic revolution has made much of life more convenient but some of us miss the challenge of having to fold a road map and never really knowing, for sure, where we are.  We’re also the ones who likely have a book in the car.  On the occasions when I don’t, I often regret it.  And one of the ways to encourage people to take books with them is to make them of a size that would sell thousands.  So many, in fact, that they would be given the title “mass market.”

Proofing Yourself

Leave a comment

Some publishers give you advance warning.  Many do not.  As a struggling writer, after I submit one manuscript I move on to the next project, knowing proofs will eventually come.  The thing is, I’m obsessive.  When I’m in the middle of a project I can think of little else, thoughts of it leaking into other activities throughout the day.  I’m in the middle of one such project, as I have been for at least three months now.  Then the proofs came.  If you write books you know that proofs always come with deadlines.  You need to drop everything and prioritize them.  I read many academic books with tons of errors, and I think I know why.  If proofs come at an inopportune time, you read them as other required activities (I’m looking at you, 9-2-5) permit.  For me, it’s difficult to let go of my present project.  My current fascination.

The proofs for Sleepy Hollow as American Myth arrived yesterday.  I’m excited for this book.  I have hopes of reaching out to local magazines and pitching stories about the Legend this autumn.  But I’m red hot into a new project.  My mind is of an age where there’s no guarantee that I’ll remember precisely what I was thinking if I lay aside my present project for a week to read the proofs.  Indeed, the last two weekends have been so busy with other things that I haven’t had time to watch any horror movies at all.  Just yesterday I awoke at 4 a.m. feeling hopelessly behind already, a feeling that lasted all day.  Then at 4 p.m. the proofs arrived. ( For context, 4 a.m. is late for me.  I’ve been waking up later due to that pointless ritual of annual time changes which, like everything else, the government can’t seem to get right.  In any case, proofs trump all.)

My time is extremely regimented.  I had to drop all committee work at our local faith community because the meetings were all in the evening, scheduled for after when I’d normally be asleep.  I wake early to write and read before the snowplow of the 9-2-5 throws me off the road for another day.  Everyone who talks to me feels that they don’t have time for what’s important any more.  The proofs are here and I’ll get them back by the deadline.  I’ve never been late once told when they have to be in.  My accountant tells me that anything that leads to royalties, no matter how small, counts as a second job.  I hope this one sells well enough to make it feel like that.  In the meantime, please don’t come knocking because I’ll pretend I’m not at home.

In Praise of Paper

Leave a comment

I write quite a lot.  I’ve done so for decades.  As I’ve tried to carve out a writer’s life for myself I noticed a few things.  I’ll start a story or novel and put it aside.  Sometimes for a decade or more, then come back to it.  I recently found what looks to be a promising novel that I began writing, by hand, back in the last century.  As electronics forced themselves more and more into my life, I began writing it on my computer.  I must’ve picked this story up a few years back because I clearly began revising it, but I ran into a problem.  The program in which I’d written it—Microsoft Word—was no longer supported by Apple products.  I eventually found a workaround and was able to extract a Rich Text Format from files that my computer told me were illegible.  If you want illegible, I felt like telling it, go back to the original hand-written chapters!

I dusted this off (virtually) belatedly, and started working again.  Then I reached chapter four.  That’s where I’d stopped my most recent revision.  Then I discovered why.  Near the end of the chapter were two paragraphs full of question marks with an occasional word scattered in.  A part of the Word file that the RTF couldn’t read.  Frustrated and heartbroken—there’s no way I can remember what this said some thirty years after it was initially written—I simply stopped.  This time I went to the attic and found the hand-written manuscript.  I went to the offending chapter only to find that the corrupted passage was missing.  It was what we used to call a “keyboard composition” and it was eaten by the equivalent of electronic moths.

Photo by Everyday basics on Unsplash

Now, I’m no techie, but I just don’t understand why a word processing file can no longer be read by the program in which it was written.  Publishers urge us to ebooks but how many times in my life have I seen a new system for preserving electronic files fold, with the loss of all the data?  It’s not just a few.  And they’re asking us to make literature disposable.  If I have a book on my shelf and I need to look up a passage, I can do so.  Even if I bought the book half a century ago and even if the book had been printed a century before that.  I’m aware of the irony that this blog is electronic—I used to print out all of the posts—and I have the feeling that my work is being sacrificed to that void we call electronic publication.  That’s why I keep the handwritten manuscripts in my attic.

Writing Academic

Leave a comment

One of the things that Stephen King detests (or at least detested back in the seventies) was academic literary criticism.  Perhaps you’re more normal than King or I, but if you read such things you find yourself immediately sucked into a world where the writer seems determined to demonstrate their erudition by splicing together words that shouldn’t really sleep together and then throws theory at you until you fall off the cliff.  It can be a frustrating experience for the reader, even as the writer is granted tenure for it.  One of these days I’ll learn my lesson.  Buying books by academics is dicey prospect.  I’m drawn in by the ideas, and the early pages, then I’m soon in the deep end remembering that I never learned to swim.

Is it really fair, I wonder, to begin a book—the first one or two pages impossibly engaging—then start winging ponderous, theory-laden words at the reader?  Your publisher paid for an attractive, inviting design and the reader, lured like a child to a candy store, thinks this will be sweet.  Then the sugar coating wears off and you’re faced with another 253 pages of clawing at words you recognize, hoping to make some sense out of what seemed, and still is, an engaging idea.  This has happened to me multiple times.  I live between worlds.  Even when I was an academic, however, I eschewed theory-heavy language.  I had nothing to prove, other than the point of my article.  And to prove a point, it seemed to me, people have to understand what you’re trying to say.

Higher education is in crisis mode.  Among the various fields you can study, the humanities are under especial scrutiny.  Have you read a book by an English professor lately (present company excepted!)?  Although their title is “English” you can be left wondering what language it actually is that they’re writing.  And they are capable of plain speaking.  Those first two pages demonstrate that.  They are capable, but are they willing?  I begin to understand Mr. King’s reservations.  I’ve run into books even in the field in which I have a doctorate that I can’t understand.  I find myself tentatively cracking open the Oxford English Dictionary to see if perhaps I’ve misunderstood the connotations of that word for my entire life.  I don’t mind a challenging read now and again.  At the same time, I mourn the loss of something beautiful when I can’t make out what the author seems to be saying.  Perhaps such books should come with warning labels.  I suspect Stephen King would have a good turn of phrase for what such a label should say.

Academic Publishing

Leave a comment

I had lunch with a friend a couple months back.  He is one of the few people who’s read The Wicker Man (the Devil’s Advocate version).  Not many reviews appeared and no royalties at all have yet followed its publication.  The funny thing is, when I search for reviews I notice that the book is “for sale” on far more websites than copies actually sold (I’m assuming).  You see, one of the best-kept secrets in publishing (both trade and academic) is the number of copies sold.  Publishers are terrified of poachers after their authors, and don’t advertise actual sales figures.  For an author only the royalty statements reveal just how many (or few) copies ever made it to the hands of potential readers.  We’re all adults here; we know that not every book purchased is read.  I do wonder if there has been any interest in this little book at all.

My friend actually went and watched the movie because of my modest little book.  The film The Wicker Man is widely known in certain circles, but it is still a movie with a cult following.  Horror fans know it, of course, with some declaring loudly that it’s not horror.  It gets referenced all the time in more mainstream media.  I occasionally read quirky little books like Your Guide to Not Getting Murdered in a Quaint English Village.  I wasn’t surprised to see The Wicker Man (the movie) referenced there.  As I discuss in the book, it’s even the subject of a Radiohead video for their song “Burn the Witch.”  Beyond a few academics, however, nobody’s really interested.

My friend suggested a topic for a new book for me to write.  I didn’t have the heart to tell him that, barring a teaching post coming my way, I’ve given up writing books for academic presses.  I’m pleased McFarland accepted Sleepy Hollow as American Myth, but the crude cost-benefit analysis that I do tells me writing books for academic presses, without library access, is always a money-losing venture.  Remember those old Guiness Book of World Records paperbacks?  I recall seeing, as a child, the least successful author listed.  Of course I don’t remember his name.  I now know that at least that record hasn’t been broken.  Not officially, but when books cost so much to write… Academic publishers are facing hard times but I don’t see the wisdom in pricing your books so that nobody can afford them, just to scrape in a few university library sales.  Not to sound as mercenary as a Hessian, but what’s in it for me?  Certainly not tenure or groundskeeper Willie’s retirement grease.  I’m not paid like a professor. Right now, though, I’m wondering if maybe I’ve broken that record after all.

Publishing Deportment

2 Comments

I don’t know if anybody reads this blog for publishing advice (editors are easily edited out, I know!).  But still, here goes.  It pays, in many ways, to research your targeted publisher.  And no matter which publisher you decide to approach, do it professionally.  “Friending” an editor on social media and then asking her/him to consider your book on said media is not professional.  Many publishers don’t allow any kind of business to take place through social media.  Be smart about it—go to a publisher’s website and follow their instructions.  Or email an editor.  At their work email.  Again, many publishers do not allow business to be conducted through private emails.  I may be an outlier editor for trying to build a social platform, but if you want to talk business, please use my work address.

More books are being published now than ever before.  Even small presses are closing submission windows because too many people keep trying to get published.  As someone who’s published a few books, I would urge you to ask yourself: why do I want to publish this?  Is it just because you wrote it?  Then look for a press that publishes that kind of thing.  Be prepared to face some frustration, but homework is never easy.  Is it because you think publishing a book will lead to fame?  Adjust your frame of reference.  The vast majority of authors are, and remain, obscure.  It is possible to make some money in publishing, but most of the time it’s not very much.  If it’s money you’re after, you need to get an agent.  It might seem as difficult to get an agent as it is to get published.  That should tell you something about the possibility of making money from books.

I’m no publishing guru.  Editing’s my day job.  One thing I’ve learned, however, is that publishers like to see that you’ve taken their guidelines seriously.  A quick social media introduction isn’t the same thing as an email that shows someone at least looked you up at work.  And most publishers have descriptions of what they want to receive on their websites.  This applies both to fiction and non.  I get it.  I remember being a kid in high school dreading all that homework—all those books I’d have to haul home day after day.  But that’s the tried and true way to learn something new.  And if you want to get published you do need to learn how to do it.  And just like in high school, deportment counts.

Personal Publishing

Leave a comment

I recently joined the Greater Lehigh Valley Writers Group.  I haven’t really met any other members yet, although I know one from another local community.  By my reckoning, this is the fourth writers’ group I’ve joined and I do hope it leads to some friendships.  I like talking about writing.  I read Blurred Lines by Scott Christian because he’s a person I recently met and he kindly gave me a copy.  A collection of poems and stories, it’s a small book but a deeply personal one.  I guess that’s one reason that I like talking about writing with other people—it is deeply revealing.  There are those who write as a job, and there are those who write because they must.  This book falls into the latter category.  Some of us are compelled to write down what we experience, whether it be in poetry, fiction, or fact.

Self-publishing can be a way of expressing what the publishing industry suppresses.  I once told a group that it’s a little disturbing how much power publishers have in determining what people can read.  I write “can” intentionally.  Only the biggest in the industry have the financial wherewithal to get books into bookstores (where readers congregate like bees on a warm day in October) where they’ll be laid out on tables and priced to move.  Like many others, I began my writing in academia.  It took some time before I realized that academic prices are a deterrent to readers.  Breaking out of that mold is also difficult.  At the same time, publishers have resources to devote to marketing that an individual seldom has time for, or the reach to accomplish.  So it goes.

Another review of Nightmares with the Bible has appeared (this one in Catholic Biblical Quarterly).  While not glowing, it does recommend reading the book, despite the fact that the publisher has no interest in paperbacking the series and it takes a great deal of motivation for even me to spend that much for a book.  Yes, I can understand self-publishing.  It is a writer’s chance to get their voice heard.  Even some famous authors—Mark Twain comes to mind—had to get their start by paying to have their books published.  Some of us write because we can do no other.  We have thoughts and feelings to share.  And I keep joining local writers groups looking for the rare person who will talk to a stranger about that most intimate act we call writing.  Reading such a book is a very personal thing to do.

The Publishing Self

Leave a comment

One of the things I noticed while researching Sleepy Hollow as American Myth was that many resources on the legend were buried in self-published editions of the “book” itself.  And other material about the legend was from self-published sources.  This lack of serious attention was behind my writing of the book.  Clearly the story is an integral part of American Halloween and Halloween is a big business.  Why aren’t mainstream publishers interested?  (I tried several agents but nobody seemed terribly drawn to the project.)  In any case, my thoughts today are about self-publishing.  Some of these self-published books aren’t even listed on Amazon, which is pretty amazing.  I even found one that apparently lacks an ISBN!  The author’s website (the only place it can be purchased) lists it as out of stock.  Self-publishing must require vigilance in order to be a way to make a living.

The profits from self-publishing are likely better than publishing with an academic press.  (Unless, of course, you’re given the rare trade treatment.)  If you’ve ever tried to find a publisher, the urge to self-publish is understandable.  The publishing world tends to be cliquish.  The same names keep coming up time and again.  If you’re friends with one of them, well, you can get in the door.  And mainstream publishing, surprisingly, doesn’t really like new ideas.  Most publishers prefer to keep on acquiring titles in the vein of one of their successes.  “More like this,” you can imagine them saying in their sleep.  New ideas are untested and may flop.  Bestselling authors seldom flop and those who imitate them often get a seat at the table.  The rest are left to self-publishing, or perhaps academic publishing.

I’ve read many self-published books and most of them have led to disappointment.  You see, a book is better if someone reacts against it.  The problem in mainstream publishing is the reaction against is generally a rejection and that means even if you improve you still have to publish yourself.  I was sorely tempted to self-publish a book before Holy Horror.  Having found a publisher for that book somewhat painlessly (the agents weren’t impressed with it either), led me to keep on going.  Nightmares with the Bible and The Wicker Man were both series books, so again, fairly straightforward.  Sleepy Hollow as American Myth followed the track of Holy Horror.  Written not for a series, I tried to find an agent, failed, and again turned to McFarland.  At least they’ll publish it in paperback.  I’m still discovering self-published books on Sleepy Hollow that I missed in the writing of my book.  For all its faults, academic publishing at least generally offers a good bibliography.

In Praise of Paper

Leave a comment

There’s an old saying that the tech industry might consider.  “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”  I’m thinking books.  I work in an industry that’s running after ebooks, sometimes at the expense of actual books.  You know what I mean—the kind printed on paper.  With a cover.  An object.  What techies don’t seem to understand is that something happens to you when you’re reading a book.  It changes you.  Curled up in a chair with a half-pound of bound paper in front of you, you become absorbed.  Chair, person, paper.  All one.  And you’re taken somewhere else.  I’m not saying that reading online isn’t valuable.  Clearly it is.  The experience, however, isn’t the same.  Industry moguls express surprise at vinyl’s return.  They shouldn’t.  It wasn’t broke either.

After reading a meaningful book I’ll carry it around with me for days like Linus’ security blanket.  Its mere presence reminds me that something profound happened to me while I was spending time with that tome.  Especially meaningful books I hesitate to shelve away with the others.  No, I want them to hand to remind me.  To bring back, at a glance, the fascination they engendered.  Let’s call it enchantment.  Capitalism removed enchantment from the world.  In the heat of materialism’s fervor, it made all alternatives irrelevant.  That’s what’s driving the ebook craze.  Hey, I’m fine if you like to read on a piece of plastic, but please leave the option of paper for those who prefer to truly get lost.

I spend most of my waking hours (and all of my sleeping ones) surrounded by books.  When my eye falls on one that I really enjoyed, I take a nanosecond pause to appreciate it.  We all have to decide how we’ll spend our time on this weary old planet.  A good deal of it will be work, and if we’re lucky it will be doing something we enjoy.  Otherwise we have roughly five hours of waking time five days a week to squeeze in the necessary and the enjoyable.  Some will go out and party with friends, others will stay home and read a book.  Many will use devices to fill the time outside the office, whether alone or with friends.  I tend to be in the book crowd.  I’m not embarrassed by that.  Books have been good to me.  Very good.  They say reading is fundamental.  I would add that reading a real book is life itself.

Not Content

Leave a comment

I write books.  When I want to “create content” I do it on this blog.  (And a few other internet sites.)  These aren’t the same thing.  I find it distressing that publishers are trying to drive us to ebooks where content can easily be changed, as opposed to print books.  The shelves of this room are lined with books and the technology doesn’t exist to come in and change “data” without my knowing it.  Facts are secure in print, right Ilimilku?  I’m not looking forward to a Star Wars future where there’s no paper.  I was born in the last century and, perhaps, I’ll die there too.   You see, when you write a book you have a project in mind that has an endpoint.   It may change and shift as you write, but you know what a book is and that’s what you produce.  It gets shelved and you move on to other things.  (At least I do.)

Content is something different and the creative process behind it also differs.  If I find something wrong after the fact, I go into my past posts and change it.  I’m not afraid of admitting I’m wrong.  The point of this blog is to share ideas with the world, not to write a book.  (Although, I confess that I would not say “no” if someone in publishing wanted a selection of worthwhile posts for a book… just saying.)  It amazes me how publishers have pretty much gone after the money and have forgotten what the creative process is like.  Of course, they’re having to figure out how this whole internet with free content plays into it too.  But still, my book writing uses a different fold in my gray matter than my blog writing does.  All of it feels pretty different from writing fiction too.

These things together adds up to a writing life.  I have a ton of “not for publication” writing.  This is something different again.  I suspect it will never be read by anybody, moldering away on some old hard drive after some AI-induced apocalypse.  I write it for of the same reason, I suspect, that people used to spray-paint “Kilroy was here” on things.  The book of Job, it seems to me, was the preservation of words that someone simply had to write.  We know the framing story is folklore.  But those who have words to carve with iron on lead, or engrave on a stone to last forever.  It’s more, I hope, than just “creating content.”