Tag Archives: books

Book Spine Poetry

In honor of National Poetry Month, and inspired by Brainpicking’s book spine poetry, may I present my latest masterpiece?

*steps up to the mic*

Ahem.

FRIDAY

Dreams of decadence
Strange men, in pinstripe suits
Pretty monsters …
Alien sex!
I am legend.

Thank you.

*walks off stage*

You can make your own. Find poetic genius amongst the titles in your personal library, or go out into the world and disorganize a bookstore, creatively! (Just remember to put everything back where you found it.) These are from my bookshelves at home:

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Current State of the To Be Read Pile, April 2012

I read some of the books from my November 2011 list, I got rid of a few I knew I wasn’t that interested in, and I gave a handful of titles away to people who really wanted them. Of course, since I then had room on my bookshelves …

The following list is broken up into a few categories, and the ones with an * after them are the books I’ve started but never completely finished. As of now, here’s what I have left to read:

Fiction, Short Story Collections:

  1. The Best of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, ed. by Kelly Link & Gaven Grant *
  2. Strange Men in Pinstripe Suits & Other Curious Things, Cate Gardner
  3. My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me, ed. Kate Bernheimer *
  4. The Complete Adventures and Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, by Arthur Conan Doyle (facsimile of the original 24 stories from THE STRAND MAGAZINE)
  5. The Book of Cthulhu, ed. by Ross E. Lockhart (one story, Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s “Flash Frame”, first appeared in Cthulhurotica, which I edited) *
  6. The Living Dead, ed. John Joseph Adams *
  7. The Mammoth Book of Zombie Comics, ed. David Kendall *
  8. Evolve, ed. Nancy Kilpatrick
  9. Other Worlds, Better Lives, Howard Waldrop
  10. Pretty Monsters, Kelly Link *
  11. The New Weird, Ann & Jeff Vandermeer *
  12. Year’s Best SF 15, ed. Hartwell and Cramer *
  13. Brave New Worlds, ed. John Joseph Adams *
  14. Shock Totem #2 (2010)
  15. The Past Through Tomorrow, Heinlein *
  16. Push of the Sky, Camille Alexa *
  17. Tales of Ten Worlds, Arthur C. Clarke
  18. Again, Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison
  19. The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm
  20. The Decameron, Boccaccio
  21. Stories From the Twilight Zone, Rod Serling

As you can see, I tend to read collections a bit at a time and then move on to something else. Continue reading →

Dear Jackass, The Book Review Edition

Dear Jackass,

So you want to get your book sold, do you? And you think that a glowing review of your work will get readers interested? I have to agree with you there. There have been several books that I purchased based on a strong review by someone whose opinion I trusted.

Oh, you don’t want to show anyone the reviews where the reader thought you could have used a better editor, or thought your female characters had no agency, or bemoaned your complete lack of a believable plot? Well, sure, I can understand that. A good review tends to sell more books than a bad one. Your only choice is to keep sending your books out until you’ve found your market, and then post the good reviews you do get.

What? That takes too long? And no one likes your book? And you’re going to do what now? Buy a review?

Hello, jackass. This one’s for you.

First off, if you couldn’t be bothered to have your book edited, or didn’t want to spend the money on a cover by a professional artist, or included in your anthology stories by people you know (as opposed to people who could actually write), chances are you deserve that bad review. You can’t just throw a $50 cover on a first-draft novel that your Grandmother thought would be a “big hit” (but no one else would publish) and expect that mess of a manuscript to make you rich.

But you’ve done it, you’ve gone and gotten it published, and now you realize it’s going nowhere. Your solution is to turn to one of the many pay-for-play review services and throw money at them until they put stars next to your name. Do you honestly think that we, other writers and readers, don’t realize that Kirkus* is letting people buy positive reviews? So what if they said that you were going to be the next Tolkien. What they meant was that your check cleared.

Perhaps you think that the answer is to hold on to your money and just have a friend or relative review your book. Authors, editors, and even small presses do this all of the time – when they have no self respect or respect for their readers. As another example, I know an editor/author whose assistant writes glowing reviews of every book she’s worked on or written for. Now, it’s possible that the assistant genuinely loves her boss’ work; after all, she’s got a choice, doesn’t she? I mean, there are millions of well respected, famous authors dying to take on a young, inexperienced intern and make her a star, right?

Right.

What’s worse than the person writing the reviews (for money or other gain) is the fact that small press publishers link to these reviews on their websites, Twitter feeds, and so on, hoping that no one will notice the questionable provenance of those kind words. They’re assuming that we’re stupid. That we, as readers, won’t know any better, and will fork over our hard earned cash without caring where the review comes from.

Now who’s the jackass?

* For example. Not to single them out, as other magazines do this as well. Pro tip: if a magazine sells its review services, don’t bother reading their reviews.

** As a publisher and as a writer, I only post reviews of my books or stories when I feel they come from unbiased sources. Plenty of my writers talked about Cthulhurotica, for example, but you won’t find those on our Reviews page. Hell, my mom loves pretty much everything I write, but do you trust her opinion to be unbiased?

*** I should point out that my mom is bound to read this. I love you mom! #coveringmyass

A Look At Book Cover Design

I recently made the decision to expand this blog from simply talking about writing to talking about stories. Stories told in film, in images, and – most often – in words. Though many of you know that I my field of study is art history, what you may not know is that I specifically study book history, book creation, and book art. I love Early American books the best, hand printed manuscripts on hand-made paper, pressed into a hand-built machine and gifted with words by hand-carved type bearing hand-made ink. How is that not an art?

While the evolution of book history means that the construction of most books has been industrialized (for large print runs, though there are still amazing artists making hand-crafted books, and I’ll talk more about them later) and even removed as we move into digital reading, the two places that you can still find art in a book are in the font choices, and in the cover. Some books go farther and incorporated art and design into the layout, but even the most minimal of interiors uses a font, and probably has a cover.

Book cover design is its own kind of art. It can be, when done well, its own kind of beautiful. Here are a couple of resources to get you introduced to the possibilities:

Some recent examples at The Book Cover Archive

The Book Cover Archive, “for the appreciation and categorization of excellence in book cover design”. Not only do they post their favorite new book covers, but they also offer up a blog about book design news (it doesn’t update often but I love the very visual aspect of their posts). The whole site is built around the visual so you won’t get too much design discussion but they 1300+ pages of material to scroll through give you an immersion into cover design that can’t be beat. Continue reading →

Current State of the “To Read” Pile, Nov 2011 (Or, Why I Can’t Buy New Books For A Long, Long, Time)

My life has been chaotic for the last year or so. A lot of what’s happening in my life is happening to other people, and therefore not things I can easily control. I get sidetracked and redirected without warning, trying to keep up with the changes around me, and not doing very well at keeping up with my own goals. I’ve done some good things this year, but mostly what I’ve done is keep my head above water, and not as successfully as I’d have liked.

Recently I’ve been doing different things to try to get my life back on track, and made a few decisions, and I’m making some progress. One of those decisions has been to get organized about my goals, and one piece of that has been to make myself a little chart of items I should be doing every day, which I check off as I accomplish them. I don’t get them all done every day but it gives me a better idea of what I’m really slacking on and what is getting done regularly. I’ll talk about that more later, but one of the things I should be doing each day – and had before been doing very little of – is reading.

I always say, and will always say, that the key to improving as a writer is to read everything that you can. I certainly intend to, and my “to be read” pile of books is evidence of plans to read quite a lot. And, I do read! In the last 16 months I’ve reviewed 25+ books and a few magazines (you can find those reviews here) and there’s at least half a dozen more which I read and did not review (mostly because I am not a book reviewer, and I only mention what I’d recommend that you read). I read two more novels this week, Terry Pratchett’s Snuff, which I didn’t review, and Ransom Riggs’ Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, which I did review (read it here). Two books a month, my average, is still more than a lot of people read, especially when you consider that hundreds of short stories I read as submissions to one of my anthologies. Still, it isn’t enough.

I know it isn’t enough because I still have a huge stack of books to read. Some of them are started but not finished, some aren’t even opened, and all of them sit on my bookshelf as a constant reminder that at any given moment, there’s a book waiting for me. I know that if I can get through them all my knowledge of fiction, history, and literature will be vastly improved. Even the books that are awful and won’t get reviewed here – and I’m sure there will be some – at least teach me what not to do in my own writing. So, to encourage myself to make a better effort to get through these books, I’m posting a list of what I need to read, and I’ll update you occasionally with how I’m doing. The list is broken up into a few categories, and the ones with an * after them are the ones I’ve started but never completely finished.

click on the image to see the bigger version

Fiction, Short Story Collections:

  1. The Best of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, ed. by Kelly Link & Gaven Grant *
  2. What I Didn’t See, Karen Joy Fowler
  3. Strange Men in Pinstripe Suits & Other Curious Things, Cate Gardner
  4. My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me, ed. Kate Bernheimer *
  5. The Complete Adventures and Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, by Arthur Conan Doyle (facsimile of the original 24 stories from THE STRAND MAGAZINE)
  6. The Book of Cthulhu, ed. by Ross E. Lockhart (one story, Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s “Flash Frame”, first appeared in Cthulhurotica, which I edited) *
  7. The Living Dead, ed. John Joseph Adams *
  8. The Mammoth Book of Zombie Comics, ed. David Kendall *
  9. The Homeless Moon 4 (a tiny zine I picked up at Readercon)
  10. Evolve, ed. Nancy Kilpatrick
  11. Other Worlds, Better Lives, Howard Waldrop
  12. Annual World’s Best SF 1977, ed. Donald A. Wollhelm
  13. Pretty Monsters, Kelly Link
  14. The New Weird, Ann & Jeff Vandermeer *
  15. Year’s Best SF 15, ed. Hartwell and Cramer *
  16. Brave New Worlds, ed. John Joseph Adams *
  17. Horrors Beyond, ed. William Jones
  18. Shock Totem #2 (2010)
  19. The Past Through Tomorrow, Heinlein *
  20. Schismatrix Plus, Bruce Sterling * (I’ve read Schismatrix and loved it but this edition also includes short stories in the same universe)
  21. Push of the Sky, Camille Alexa *
  22. Tales of Ten Worlds, Arthur C. Clarke
  23. Again, Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison

As you can see, I tend to read collections a bit at a time and then move on to something else. Continue reading →