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I read the bridge advice columns in newspapers.

Don’t misunderstand – I don’t play bridge. I’ve never played. My closest friend for thirty-five years now (except for my wife, of course) does play bridge, and he’s tried to explain the game to me from time to time, but when I read the advice columns in the paper, I have no idea what they’re saying. None at all. “North threw an ace to dummy’s spades, then cashed all his hearts. He ruffed the club and …” He did what to the who? It’s like a foreign language.

Reading Ghost Notes left me with the same feeling.

There’s a lot about music that I don’t understand. I know what I like and what I don’t like, and beyond that I let it all slide. Out of six children, four of them have been heavily involved with music, and they sit around when time and space weave their paths back together for a while, and they talk that foreign language like it makes sense. I guess they get it from their mother.

The jam sessions and sets and gigs in this book, by shining light in a direction I can’t follow, gave it a depth and a life it might not have had otherwise, bringing back those feelings again.

But reading this novel left me with something else, too.

Something I do understand, something I’ve experienced again and again and again within the pages of books. That total weightlessness, that floating, the buoyancy of all great writing. Make no mistake: this is great writing. Every wrong turn a character made left me wanting to shout into the book, to tell him “No, not that way! Don’t do that thing! Do the other!” Every person in this book was someone you know, someone who lives right down the street from you, someone you used to work with. And every one of them was someone you’d never met.

So go meet them. Read this book.

Ghost Notes, by Art Edwards (@artedwardsIII)

Defunct Press, 2008, 212 pages

Related posts:

1. Ghost of Iga, by D. Hamilton Doggett – a review
2. Error o’ The Day: Here, Here!
3. My Non-Review of “The Dog at the Signpost”

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There are so many ways in which this book stinks that it’s difficult to know where to begin, so I’ll just jump in.

1. Dated research.
   
   There were so many references to the 1992 US presidential election, and to fashions and fads of the time, that I honestly thought the author was writing in his own past, and was striving (too hard) to establish the timeframe. But, no, the copyright date is 1993, and the book very likely was written during the election season.

2. “As you know, Bob…”

   If there’s anything that drives me nuts, it’s having the characters explain things to each other solely so that the readers can keep up.

3. Excessive character descriptions.

   Every time a new character comes on stage, we get two or three paragraphs of physical description, life story, political attitudes, and so forth.

4. Shallow characters.
   
   In spite of all that backstory. Perhaps he should simply have shut up and let the characters speak for themselves?

5. Plot twists that exist solely to let Deus ex machina reach down into the diorama and mess with things.

   The biker and the Mexican steal some cargo in a very opportunistic manner, but when it becomes handier for it to have been planned, well, then, that’s what it was. Don’t go back and fix it, just declare it planned.

6. Secrets. As in, hide stuff from the reader, as in:
   

   “Could you go to the home of the dead man and search for two thousand pairs of US Navy shoes?” Bobbie asked, and then she had a long conversation with Rojas concerning her investigation.

   After she hung up she dialed Fin’s number, but got his answering machine. She dialed Nell’s number and got another machine. She hung up and experienced the longest afternoon of her life. She called Fin and Nell no less than fifteen times, leaving several messages for each of them. The messages sounded progressively more impatient and more excited.

   Could we maybe be told what Rojas told her? No. Too much to ask.

7. Poorly written dialogue, part A: Bad dialect.
   
   One of the main characters is a Mexican citizen, but he speaks normal, idiomatic American English, with a normal American vocabulary and cadence. Replacing all of his “i” sounds with “ee,” and writing “joo” instead of “you,” doesn’t make him sound Mexican, it just makes him hard to read. I’ve read dialogue written by masters of understatement, where you can hear the music and rhythm of the voice, without any misspelled words. Here, the words are misspelled, but the voice still sounds like American English.

   Another main character is a biker/thug dude. (I did mention shallow characters, right? Yeah, there’s also a 45-year-old male failing actor/failing cop and a 40-year-old female failing cop worried about her age, and a peppy little high-school-cheerleader type with a blond bob and a big Colt .45 and a dapper white-collar-crime-boss and… It’s about as real as the characters in the Village People.) Anyway, the biker/thug dude reads his lines like he never quite found his motivation, and the director just said “Ok, well, throw in a cuss word now and then, and that will be good enough.”

8. But the absolute worst part, bar none, was “Poorly written dialogue, part B: Bad diction.”

   Every single time, throughout the book, that someone should say “should have,” “would have,” “want to,” “going to,” etc, we get “shoulda,” “woulda,” “wanna,” “gonna,” etc!

   Every single time. Yes, people sometimes speak like that, and yes, we sometimes need to write that, but not every time. Even if you were to argue that no one ever really enunciates properly, nonetheless, we should write as though they do in situations where we want the reader to assume the enunciation was normal (define normal as you will). Reserve shoulda coulda woulda spellings for when you want to say the the character is not enunciating. And lest you think I’m simply misreading, let me point out that the young peppy cheerleader chickie is a Navy (oh, by the way, “Navy,” referring to the United States Navy, is seldom capitalized in this book) petty officer, whose “over-formality” is pointed out to us several times, who habitually uses “sir” and “ma’am,” and she can’t say “would have” or “want to”?

   At one point, the petty officer and the aging cop/actor are getting drunk. We’re told repeatedly that they’re stumbling, that their chins are slipping off their palms and their elbows off the table. We’re told that they lose enough inhibitions that the petty officer is sitting in a man’s lap and being bounced “like a child,” yet their speech never changes!

And, what, you ask, does any of this have to do with self-publishing?

I suppose you’re sitting there thinking to yourself “So what? So that one author should have gotten that one book edited. So what does that have to do with me?”

Well, speaking of hiding things from the reader, I was being a little facetious with my title, because in fact, this book is “traditionally” published!

This book, Finnegan’s Week, was written by Joseph Wambaugh, published by William Morrow and Company, and presumably was edited by someone.

So there you go. That’s the famous gatekeeping value of the corporate bulwarks of publishing, keeping the poorly-written stuff off the market in order to protect the value of all that machinery they sit on, that we need access to so badly in order to publish our little attempts that we’re willing to jumps through the irrelevant hoops of the query/conform/requery pablum-grinding process in order to get our chance at fifteen seconds in the sun.

At least it was free, from Michael’s Books.

Related posts:

1. More Thoughts on the Status of Self-Publishing
2. Misconceptions About Self-Publishing — Part I
3. Photographers, Musicians, and Authors – Further Thoughts on Self-Publishing

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“The nail that rises up will be hammered down.”

–Japanese proverb

In many ways, this is a hard book to talk about.

Partly, it’s hard to talk about because it’s so easy to read. I go back to the book to get a quote and I get swept up in the sheer lyrical poetry of it, and the next thing I know, the time I’ve allotted for working on this review is gone, and I’ve written nothing.

My son,

You are only a child as I write these words, far too young to understand, but the day will come when I hope you will read them. It is in my mind, as I begin this account and look sadly on the days that fade behind me, that these are truly the Latter Days of the Law. This country that men still call the Land of the Gods is split in war; there is no loyalty between servant and lord, no regard between son and father, no bond between husband and wife.

Partly, it’s hard to talk about, because for such an exquisite story, it’s a rather mundane story. It’s the story of a reluctant man who went to war and came back changed forever, and we’ve all read that story before, haven’t we? Well, yes… and, uh, no. Not written like this one is, you haven’t.

In the end I made my decision by doing nothing. I cannot say how many hours I sat in the clearing, my bare knife by my side. I was waiting, I suppose, for that moment of fierce devotion that would drive me to act. The moment never came. I began to grow hungry, and I felt the cold touch of the mountains on my skin, and I knew that my chance to be a dutiful son had passed.

Partly, it’s hard to talk about because Mr Doggett set himself a rather harsh task when he chose Watanabe Kenjiro as his protagonist. When you set out to write a novel, it’s nice if your protagonist can tell the reader some of the things you need to get across, and yet Watanabe is so wrapped up in his own misery that I honestly think he never did see the true picture of what was happening around him. One mark of a gifted author is the ability to tell the reader much more of what is going on in the story than the characters see, especially when writing in first person, and Mr Doggett not only achieves this goal, but he makes it look pretty easy.

I was not happy with our situation, but I trusted him without reservation, as if I were a child. But I was not a child. Amaya understood these things; I mistook her sadness for fear.

Ghost of Iga is the first-person record of Watanabe’s life from his mid-childhood to his adult years. Although this was a period of near-constant war, and although it is, in many ways, the story of that war, nonetheless Watanabe tells us his unique, personal view of the events of that war, or rather, of the events as he saw them. Pursued by the ghosts of his dead brother, his mother and his nurse, his warrior father, persecuted by the very armor and weapons he must now trust his life to, he sets out into the battles believing only in death, and never quite finding it. The moment never came. Or, perhaps, it came and slipped past him in the dark, as so many moments do for each of us.

This is, of course, not a perfect book, but the flaws it displays are formatting errors, not errors of writing. There are widows scattered through the book, and an occasional line was set with a hard return, resulting in a line feed less than halfway across the page, but there is nothing that can be said against the writing itself.

This is an excellent book, and I strongly encourage you to read it.

You can also read D. Hamilton Doggett’s excellent blog, Doggerel, and he is on Twitter as @doggerelblogrel.

Ghost of Iga, by D. Hamilton Doggett, published 2009, 181 pages, 5 1/2” x 8 1/2” perfect-bound $12.95
(also available as a digital download)

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1. “Ghost Notes” by Art Edwards – a review
2. I’m Still Trying to Review YOUR Self-Published Fiction
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Ok, a slightly twisty, bumpy road for you to follow this morning:

• I’ve been following @jdistraction on Twitter for some time now, but haven’t actually made it all the way to her blog. You know how it is; too many things to read every day as it is, and so forth and so on, but I may just be too lazy to get there, too. I don’t know.
• So, today, she tweeted a link to her blog, advising of a picture there in need of a caption (well, apparently in need of everyone’s captions), and solely because her blog is called Zebra Sounds, I had to go check it out.
• So, I liked it. I subscribed to it in Google Reader, and Google Reader, as is its habit, served me up with the last ten posts. So, I looked them over. The earliest one of the bunch has the following:
• And now for something completely different… I subscribe to a news letter that recently arrived in my inbox with this headline: “Want to see the personalized stationery of Hitler, Houdini and Elvis?” I thought, “Absolutely, are you kidding?” because that’s how I roll. (For real.) I love this site. Have fun.
• Well, how I  roll is I click on random stuff, so I clicked through. And I found this:
• http://www.letterheady.com/post/394592390/dada
• As one commenter noted “Dada had stationery. Who knew?” But the really interesting bit was this (blown up a bit, and it’s not a very high resolution image to begin with):
• 
• I wasn’t really able to make much of that, but it did seem likely that someone named [G. or C.] Ridemont-[something French-looking] had something to do with dada (a movement with which, I must admit, I’m not very familiar). I did a search for [dada ridemont], and got a handful of hits, which garnered a name for me:
• Georges Ridemont-Dessaignes
• There, I am at a dead end, as M Ridemont-Dessaignes has a sum total of two hits on his name, and both of them are in French. (You do know that the technical term for a person who speaks more than one language is “polyglot,” right? You do know that the technical term for a person who speaks only one is “American,” right?)
• So, to sum up:
• At one time, there was an organization (?) whose name was D (subscript) O (superscript) H (superscript).
• The superscripts may be 4 and 2, respectively. Then again, they may not.
• This organization had something to do with dada (?).

And just to reiterate, if “Doh!” could be linked (however flimsily) to dada, that would just be too cool!

Any art majors out there who want to enlighten me?

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Good post, couldn’t have stated that much better myself

That’s the entire comment, complete with its missing period. What’s the funny part? Well, it was made on the blog where I’m serializing one of my novels, Light Always Changes. There really wasn’t anything stated in the post at all.

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I’m talking, of course, about Google Buzz. You can create all the social networks you want to, but to automagically add me in and force me to opt out, to add all my email contacts, to (probably, eventually) add the same sort of information about what’s actually in my emails that you obviously already make available to advertisers (or use yourself in the “optimization” of the ads I see (on which I never click anyway)), none of that is going to fly.

I like Gmail. I like Google Reader. But I assure you, there are other ways to get the same things done, and I was inches away from deleting all my Google connections and going down those other routes, when I found the following link. This is a clear, step-by-step list of the three steps to take to kill Google’s latest spyware move, and I highly recommend that you follow it if you use Gmail. (NOTE: This link is to the official blog of the Supreme Court of the State of Texas — seems safe to me, but what do I know?)

Also note: the first step is to delete your Google public profile. This does not delete your Google account. Google Reader, etc, seem to remain unchanged. I was (am) angry enough over this latest grab by Google that I would have lived with it if it had, however, and I will take that step if it becomes necessary.

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REAL PUBLISHING CONTRACT WITH A REAL PUBLISHER!!!!!!!! YAY!!!! HERE’S YOUR CHANCE!!!! WIN THIS, AND YOU, TOO, CAN BE A REAL WRITER!!!!!

This is like throwing a show-n-shine for hand-built hot-rods where the prize is to have your car ripped apart by a “real” car person and put back together the way you should have done it, if only you knew anything at all about cars, you poor, pathetic hobbyist.

Or, for that matter, why people enter them?

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• They are a couple.
• It is a retreat for couples.

In others, you cannot:

• I will list a couple of examples here.
• She has a couple of books in her house.

Here’s the key: replace couple with pair, and see if you need of:

• They are a pair.
• NOT: They are a pair of.
• It is a retreat for pairs.
• NOT: It is a retreat for pairs of.
• I will list a pair of examples here.
• NOT: I will list a pair examples here.
• She has a pair of books in her house.
• NOT: She has a pair books in her house. (We’ll disregard the fact that “couple” in this usage was probably not meant to be literal.)

End o’ the rant. Please carry on.

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1. The Rant o’ the Day: Comprise
2. The Importance of Diction
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• Piracy isn’t really stealing, because the so-called victim of the piracy never loses anything.

• Piracy isn’t a violation of copyright law, because you’re making a copy for your own personal use, and that’s legal.

• Copyright law was never intended to protect the artists, it was intended to protect the printers.

• The only people rooting for the preservation of copyright law are the big corporations, because all it does is perpetuate their profit model.

• Copyright law is immoral because a worker who creates an original work for an employer never holds the copyright to it.

• Copyright law is immoral because so-called “content” is information and information should be free because it is in the best interest of the common good.

• Since the incremental cost of digital distribution is near zero, the price of digital work should be near zero.

• Artists will always produce art, whether they get paid for it or not, because it is in their blood.

• It is immoral for any artist to make more off their art than I declare reasonable.

• Blah blah blah blah blah …

But rule number one, life’s Standing Order Number One, is “Always identify the problem.”

The problem here is very simple, and it has nothing at all to do with the fairness or validity or history or purpose or origins of copyright law.

It’s the piracy, stupid!

In actual point of fact, none of the arguments above, and most of the arguments I haven’t listed, have anything at all to do with the problem, which is that we seem to have raised an entire generation who want something for nothing. Yes, I know. That’s a generalization, and it’s as unfair as any such statement, but it has become increasingly obvious that there is a generational divide in operation here.

Want to know where the ducks are? Look to where the shotguns are pointed. And in the battle over piracy, the guns are pointed squarely at copyright law. Why? Because it’s the one thing standing between the pirates and their victims. And what does that mean? That we, as artists, as creators of intellectual property, must protect the existing copyright law. It may not be perfect. It may not be what it was intended to be. It may not exist for the reasons we think it should, but the fact of the matter is that, as it stands now, copyright law is an impediment to the progress of the pirates.

Of course copyright law protects the printers, when they are the copyright holders.

Of course copyright law prevents information from being free. Your social security number, bank account number, and current bank balance are information. Are you going to make it free?

Of course artists will always produce art, but will you ever get to see it?

The only way to guarantee the continued production of any art, whether it is fiction, painting, drawing, or hand-decorated mud pies, is to see to it that the creator is granted full protection under law from the theft of that art. If the artist chooses to transfer that copyright, as part of some contract, to a printer, publisher, or other third party, that is their right.

Stop talking about whether piracy is theft or not.

Stop talking about whether copyright is moral or not.

Start asking yourself this:

What is a world without any art going to look like?

Related posts:

1. Further Thoughts on Copyright – A Response to Luke Bergeron
2. National Punctuation Day
3. Character Truth Versus Narrative Truth

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