Category Archives: writing

The Writers I Love and Why I Love Them

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Last week, I wrote about why we should love writers—and how we should show it. This week, I’m going to take my own advice and write about writers whose work I love.

There are lots of writers I admire. Jon Krakauer, for example. I started with his book Into Thin Air and went on to read more of his work—Missoula, Under the Banner of Heaven, Eiger Dreams, Into the Wild, Where Men Win Glory, and his essays. (Many of his books are about mountain climbing. For some reason, I like true adventure books that describe things I will never do. Dramatic thrills, maybe, or a longing for experiences that I can only live vicariously. But I digress.)

But the writers I love most, the ones whose books I buy as soon as they are published and move instantly to the top of my TBR list, are Mary Roach, Sue Grafton, and Jenny Lawson.

Mary Roach

• Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

• Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife

• Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex

• Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void

• Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal

• Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War

• Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law

• Replaceable You: Adventures in Human Anatomy

Mary Roach writes the least stuffy science books I know on an impressively wide variety of topics. She’s not afraid to insert herself into the narrative as she explores a wide range of topics. Her encounter with the space toilet, for example, is a riot. The thing I love most about her books, though, is the footnotes. They are copious, fascinating, and humorous, and add texture and interest with aspects of the topics that just don’t fit neatly into the narrative.

(I must admit that Roach’s footnotes were the inspiration for my digressions and thus the genesis of this blog. The footnotes for Packing for Mars, for example, include the story of Enos, the chimp that went to space. But I digress again.)

Sue Grafton

• The Alphabet Series

Sue Grafton is justly famous for her series of Kinsey Milhone mystery novels that begin with A Is for Alibi and end with Y Is for Yesterday. She died of cancer before she could write the last book in the series, which she intended to title Z Is for Zero. Mystery fans everywhere mourned her loss.

Grafton’s mysteries are often mentioned in the same breath as Sara Paretsky’s V.I. Warshawski series. They do share many qualities, such as strong female private investigators and a cast of interesting supporting characters. But, to me, Paretsky writes from anger (or rage), while Grafton writes from insight and bemusement. Over the years, I’ve gotten away from reading every one of Paretsky’s books that comes out (she’s still writing), but never tired of Grafton’s. I just wish she had lived to write more.

(When I was writing a mystery novel (which never got off the ground), I attended a writing conference where Sue Grafton was one of the speakers/instructors. She read the first 30 pages of my book and gave me some very good advice. But I digress some more.)

Jenny Lawson

• Let’s Pretend This Never Happened: A Mostly True Memoir

• Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things

• Broken (in the Best Possible Way)

• How to Be Okay When Nothing Is Okay

Jenny Lawson, aka the Bloggess, writes wonderful books on some of my favorite topics. Her writing style is chaotic, wildly funny, and ultimately uplifting. I was reading her “Mostly True Memoir” and couldn’t stop laughing. My husband asked what the book was about. “I don’t really know,” I said, “but she talks a lot about her vagina.” For a long time, he called her “the vagina lady.” I haven’t told him that sometimes she talks about her labia.

There was plenty of other stuff too, a lot of it involving her bemused but steadfast husband Victor and the trouble they get into, separately or together—like the time she bought a six-foot metal chicken that she named Beyoncé and left outside Victor’s home office window.

Her later books contain essays with plenty of humor and anecdotes, but they are loosely on the subject of mental illness and coping with it (or not). How could I resist a book like that?

(I met Jenny Lawson twice, once at a book signing and once at a writer’s conference. At the book signing, there was a Q and A session. I asked, “If you could be any animal, what would you be? And why?” She replied, “A tapeworm. Because I could just lie there and someone would feed me.” But I digress even more.)

Of course, there are other books that I like a lot, including more mysteries, more science, science fiction, some history, some biographies (except ones about Prince Albert), books about shipwrecks, books by Lois McMaster Bujold, Dick Francis, Simon Winchester, Jared Diamond, and Steven Pinker, and true crime. (I don’t read as much true crime as I used to. The ones with atrocity photos no longer interest me. I like the ones involving forensics and legal maneuverings. But I digress yet again.)

Got any books/authors to suggest? My TBR pile (well, electronic shelf) only has 1,000+ books on it. There’s room for lots more!

Love for the Writers

books, etc., film, literature, music, television, writing

My friend Beth messaged me one day last week to inform me that she had been watching Tales From the Darkside and recognized one of the writers’ names as someone we both knew from attending science fiction conventions: Michael Kube-McDowell. She said she found his episodes very imaginative.

I happen to still be in touch with Michael (who has since dropped the Kube part of the name) after all these years, so I messaged him to tell him what Beth had discovered.

“Where did she see it?” he asked. (He meant on what streaming service, I think.)

“She was watching it on her old collection of DVDs.”

“I didn’t even know they were on DVDs,” Michael said. It turns out the only copies that he had of his own work were some VCR recordings he had made at the time the episodes first aired. And he no longer had a VCR player.

I pointed out where he could get all four seasons of the DVDs online for about $20.

And so he did. “A mere 43 years later, I finally have a professional copy!” he said.

This happy incident happened because Beth watched the DVDs and noticed the writer’s name, something not many people bother to do.

Perhaps because I’m a writer myself, I do, too. I find myself saying, “Wow! David Gerrold wrote this episode of Babylon 5!” or “Theodore Sturgeon wrote this episode of Star Trek!” (I then often have to give this announcement some context for my husband by telling him who the writer is and what else they’ve written. But I digress.) (Oh, and not completely off the topic, did you know Ray Bradbury wrote the script for the movie version of Moby Dick? But I digress some more.)

I like to look for the names of directors, too. I don’t recognize them as often as I do writers, but sometimes I notice that an actor on the show has directed one or more episodes. I always think, “Good for them! Way to branch out!”

I feel the same way about songwriters. People give love to the singers, but barely notice the songwriters much of the time. (I have a little game I play with Dan. When I’m listening to iTunes (or Apple Music or whatever they call it these days), we’ll hear a song, and I’ll say, “Okay, who wrote this?” He’s right a lot of the time, but when he doesn’t know, he’ll guess Kinky Friedman if it’s a funny song or Willie Nelson if it isn’t. Once he said, “I don’t know his name, but he wrote that song that goes ‘living and dying in 3/4 time.'” It was Jimmy Buffett, and he was right. I was impressed. But I digress again.)

So I say, “Pay attention to the writers! Show them some love!” It’s hard to throw your arms around ChatGPT and say, “Thanks for the memories!” (Or, if you’re not close enough to the writer to throw your arms around them other than metaphorically, send them money. I once sent Michael a quarter to make up for royalties when I bought one of his books at a used book store. But I digress yet again, for the last time this week.)

Fun With Smut

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I may get in trouble for either the picture (no one I know) or the topic, but it’s an aspect of writing and reading that I have just a wee bit of experience with.

How do I feel about “dirty books”? I’m tempted to quote Tom Lehrer from his song “Smut”: “Dirty books are fun. That’s all there is to it.” He also said, “I do have a cause, though. It’s obscenity. I’m for it.” The song contains not one “dirty word.” ( You can find it online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSwYID-u71M. But I digress.)

Reading Smut

I must admit that I did read Fifty Shades of Grey when it first came out, just to see what the commotion was all about. (My advice: Don’t bother. It’s miserably written. And unrealistic. Any couple having that much sex that often would be too chafed to carry on carrying on. But I digress again.)

When I was an editor for an early childhood magazine, I was frequently given books to review. One was an illustrated sex education book for young children, written by a doctor. I don’t remember the title, but the book was written in a style meant to emulate Dr. Seuss. I also don’t remember much of the content, except for this metaphor for some body parts, which he supplied the location of:

The towns are both called testicle

And they look like two round eggs.

They’re not located on a map

But between your Daddy’s legs.

(The conception scene was a meeting of Stanley Sperm (who wore a top hat) and Essie Egg (who wore a bow) in front of an ornate gate. I did not write a review of the book. It was my theory that it could be read aloud at a party to great amusement. But I digress some more.)

Reviewing Smut

I’ve recently gotten a gig reviewing books. Most of the books I’ve reviewed were in a category called “steamy romances.” This means that the couple must overcome obstacles to get together, but when they do, they have sex. This means about two realistic sex scenes per novel. (They’re short. The books, that is. The sex scenes go on for a number of pages.)

Personally, I’m grateful that these books (there’s a series) use neither clinical names nor cutesy euphemisms for body parts. (I still remember in the movie The Naked Gun when someone used the term “throbbing purple-headed warrior.” Jenny Lawson (The Bloggess) has been known to refer to her “lady garden,” a euphemism she created when not allowed to say “vagina” on TV. But I digress some more.)

Writing Smut

Once during my ghostwriting career, I had to write a piece of smut (erotica, if you prefer). It was the adventures of a woman who was connected (sorry) with various men. The men were all gorgeous and rich, and they bought the main character extravagant gifts. The woman gave me an outline describing her (and their) escapades, which I didn’t believe for a moment. I would call it “wish fulfillment porn.”

This time, I was in the position (sorry) of having to come up (sorry) with words to describe body parts and sex acts without being cutesy or clinical. I guess I succeeded. The customer was satisfied (sorry) with it, and I got paid for it (sorry), so I guess I did okay. (I’ve never been tempted (sorry) to look it up on Amazon and read the reviews. We will not discuss whether or how much I had to conduct research for the book. But I digress even more.)

The only other thing I know about writing sex scenes is that a writer friend of mine once wrote one that went on for multiple pages (and orgasms). My husband read it and was impressed.

What’s So Funny?

blogs, etc., funny things, humor, writing

Recently, I fell in with a comedy site that has weekly online meetings where members are encouraged to submit their humor for feedback. My interactions with them have proved perplexing. I submitted for analysis a piece I was working on. The response was tepid at best, so I revised and submitted it again. Here’s the first draft:

I Use Satellites to Hunt for Tupperware in the Woods

That’s what a contestant on Jeopardy told Alex Trebek when asked about his hobbies and interests between rounds. Alex was taken aback and, for once, clueless.

I have done the same. (The satellite/Tupperware thing, not flummoxing Alex Trebek. I wish. But I digress.)

What both I and the Jeopardy contestant had in common is “geocaching.”

It goes like this. One person hides a piece of Tupperware or other waterproof container (an ammo case is also popular), usually in a natural environment but sometimes within a city or suburb. The container holds a piece of paper, a small pencil, and assorted trinkets, such as a postcard or a small toy. This is called the geocache.

***

Here’s a revision of the first section, rewritten according to what they suggested, or so I supposed.

I Use Satellites to Hunt for Tupperware in the Woods

That’s what a contestant on Jeopardy told Alex Trebek when asked about his hobbies and interests between rounds. Alex should have replied, “So you’re some kind of kitchenware spy,” but missed the opportunity.

I have aspired to kitchenware spying myself.

It’s called “geocaching” to those in on the process. A piece of Tupperware or other waterproof container (an ammo case is popular) is hidden, usually in a natural setting. The secrets within are a piece of paper, a small pencil, and assorted objects of unknown value. This is known in the trade as the geocache or “drop site.”

***

That second version was close to the one that you saw when I posted it. I think it was improved somewhat, but at the next meeting, they suggested even more changes.

I had trouble implementing their suggestions. The first one was “Lose the digressions,” which I was reluctant to do because of the name of my blog and a reasonably consistent shtick when I’m writing what I intend to be humorous pieces. They act like footnotes or record the meanderings of my mind while I write. But I ditched them for the second version, just to see. I also bumped up the spy references, using words like “agent,” “secret identity,” “tradecraft,” “the drop,” and “Ilya Kuryakin.”

On seeing the second version, they suggested that instead of describing how geocaching works, I should use “I” more: “I bait the drop,” “I decipher the clues,” etc. I agree that, in general, unless you’re writing an academic paper, “I” is preferable to “you.” So that was probably good advice.

They also told me I needed more hyperbole and more jokes. I already had some jokes in there: one clue being “Look under the big W” (a reference to It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World) and my secret identity as “DjangOH” (in honor of my cat Django, who was named after Django Reinhardt, the jazz musician). They thought that one was pretty good, but assumed I was referring to the movie Django Unchained, which has nothing to do with cats or jazz musicians. They were apparently too young to get the other references as well. I’m beginning to doubt they got the one about Ilya Kuryakin.

Anyway, based on their comments and critiques of other people’s work, I gathered that what they were looking for was zingers, punchlines, and an over-the-top tone, like a stand-up comedian’s.

But that’s not the kind of writing I prefer. I grew up on observational, story-telling humorists like Erma Bombeck, James Thurber, and Jean Kerr. And if I could write one-tenth as well as David Sedaris or The Bloggess, I would count myself a happy writer. Hyperbole, yes, but no punchlines.

So I ask you these questions:

• Should I keep doing what I’ve been doing, with digressions?

• Should I lose the digressions and rename my blog?

• Do you prefer a stand-up comedy-style writing or an observational one (but not like Steven Wright)?

• Do you want to see listicles? Shorter pieces of writing?

• Would you prefer no serious posts like the one last week about my father? Should I have a separate blog for them? (It would be occasional, as I don’t think I could write three blog posts a week.)

I sincerely want your opinions. Please feel free to sound off in the comments.

Apparently obligatory joke:

Ist old lady: My, it’s windy today.

2nd old lady: No, it’s Thursday.

3rd old lady: So am I. Let’s all go get a cup of tea.

Down the Rabbit Hole

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Almost five years ago, I wrote a post about how memories from my (and likely your) childhood were being repurposed for political statements and propaganda.

This time I’m writing about a classic piece of literature being rewritten for other purposes. (Largely unobjectionable ones, it’s true, but it’s the principle of the thing. But I digress.)

The work in question is Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (more often known as Alice in Wonderland). It’s one of my favorite pieces of literature and I have returned to it many times since I first read it (murfle) decades ago.

(I have a friend who despises Alice. He finds it to be nonsense (which it obviously is) and incomprehensible. This despite the fact that he has returned to it frequently to see if it makes any more sense. (He ought to like at least part of it because he’s a mathematician, like the author, Lewis Carroll. I recommended The Annotated Alice (edited by Martin Gardner), which explains the jokes, Briticisms, and outdated expressions. (It also includes “Jabberwocky” in French, German, and IIRC, Latin.) But I digress, pedantically and at length.)

The “quotations” in question are not political but psychological or philosophical. I’m not saying they’re invalid—merely that they are misquoted, misattributed, or completely made up.

One of the most common misquotes is attributed to the Cheshire Cat:

“You’re mad, bonkers, off your head. But I’ll tell you a secret. All the best people are.”

What the Cheshire Cat actually really said is much more complex. Here’s the context:

“But I don’t want to go among mad people’” Alice remarked.

“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.” 

“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.

“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.” 

One quotation supposedly from the Mad Hatter is:

The secret, Alice, is to surround yourself with people who make your heart smile. It’s then, only then, that you’ll find Wonderland.

Unobjectionable if sappy, but not from the book. The same with this one:

But, said Alice, if the world has absolutely no sense, who’s stopping us from inventing one?

The most annoying fake dialogue is this one, between Alice and the White Rabbit.

“Do you love me?” Alice asked.

“No, I don’t love you!” replied the White Rabbit.

Alice frowned and clasped her hands together as she did whenever she felt hurt.

“See?” replied the White Rabbit. “Now you’re going to start asking yourself what makes you so imperfect and what did you do wrong so that I can’t love you at least a little. You know, that’s why I can’t love you. You will not always be loved Alice, there will be days when others will be tired and bored with life, will have their heads in the clouds, and will hurt you. Because people are like that, they somehow always end up hurting each other’s feelings, whether through carelessness, misunderstanding, or conflicts with themselves. If you don’t love yourself, at least a little, if you don’t create an armor of self-love and happiness around your heart, the feeble annoyances caused by others will become lethal and will destroy you. The first time I saw you I made a pact with myself: ‘I will avoid loving you until you learn to love yourself.’”

The White Rabbit was late to play croquet with the Queen of Hearts. He wouldn’t have had time to discourse on self-love.

Alice has been in the public domain since 1907, so one can misquote or invent all they want. (The Disney movie version only came out in 1951, The book was in the public domain, but the movie isn’t. I think we can expect a live-action film. I hope they lose the repellent pink-and-purple Cheshire Cat, though I doubt they will. But I digress again.)

Surely no one would do this kind of thing to The Wizard of Oz…or would they? [squints suspiciously]

Go. Be Funny.

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Once the boss editor gave me an assignment. “Go,” he said. “Be funny,” he said. “Come back in an hour.” We were preparing a calendar with amusing sayings and odd observances on various dates.

Now, most writers would be daunted by this sort of thing. I know I was. But in an hour, there I came, quips in hand. “Is this job too easy for you?” he asked.

Actually, writing funny stuff is not easy. I was just feeling quirky that day. (“Dying is easy. Comedy is hard” is a quotation that’s been attributed to any number of those shuffling off the mortal coil, from actors Edmund Gwenn to Jack Lemmon to Peter O’Toole to Meryl Streep (who, not having died yet, almost certainly didn’t say it on her deathbed). But I digress.)

The geniuses of Monty Python certainly seem as though they created comedy easily. And I know a man who can write a funny song, a la Weird Al, in 15 minutes or less. But for most of the writing world, humor is the hardest form of writing. (Except possibly the sestina. Or the humorous sestina, come to think of it. But I digress again.)

How do you build up your humorous writing muscles to the point where you can flex? I recommend hanging out with silly people, like the aforementioned songwriter. (If you’re tempted to use AI, forget it. I asked ChatGPT to write a joke about a cat. It replied, “Why did the cat sit on the computer? Because it wanted to keep an eye on the mouse!” Asked for a joke about a dog, it said, “Why did the dog sit in the shade? Because he didn’t want to be a hot dog!” Apparently, ChatGPT writes at the level of a five-year-old. And when I asked for a humorous sestina, it created one about a knight named Sir Guffaw and his tap-dancing horse. But I digress yet again.)

My next piece of advice is to have a cat or a spouse. Cats are not dignified, contrary to their reputations. One of our cats tried to escape from the vet and bonked her head on the glass door to freedom. And my spouse does and says funny things, or prompts them from me. For example, I once took a picture of him in a tweed cap and turned it into a meme (seen here, as you can no doubt tell.)

You can also turn trauma into humor. I once found myself having to get rid of a dead possum, which certainly traumatized me. Another time I almost offed a friend with a bay leaf. Those alarming events worked their way into killer posts, so to speak.

Reading humor can help, too. Think David Sedaris and The Bloggess. For irreverence, there’s Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal, by Christopher Moore. For vintage humor, there are James Thurber and Erma Bombeck. (Given the example of Thurber and Bombeck, being from Ohio helps too. But I digress some more.)

Then there are humorous movies. Personally, Airplane can still make me LOL. (So can Zero Hour, the film from whence Airplane‘s plot and many lines of dialogue came, only deadly serious. It’s impossible to watch without flashing back (or forward, since Zero Hour is the older movie). But I digress yet again.)

But for myself, I like a good catchphrase that didn’t come from a TV show or movie. It came into being because I wanted to write little asides and put them in as footnotes. But I couldn’t figure out how to make WordPress do that, so I turned to my grammatical friend, the paren. (Not really my favorite mark of punctuation, which is the semicolon. But I digress for the last time this post. I swear it.)

Thoughts on Editing

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When it comes to language, I used to be a prescriptivist, telling others how language ought to be used. Now I am a descriptivist, recording how language is used in practice.

Oh, I haven’t entirely given up my mission to get people to use proper grammar, spelling, and punctuation. I still feel that writing “correctly” can be important to the meaning of whatever it is you’re writing about. And I still cringe when someone (usually my husband) says “foilage” instead of “foliage” or “nucular” instead of “nuclear.” But that’s speech, which is very different than writing.

Of course, an editor can’t really edit spoken English aside from pronunciation. Well, there are malapropisms and misplaced modifiers.

Malapropisms occur when a speaker substitutes an incorrect word for a correct one. One headline that makes the rounds on Facebook is about an “amphibious” pitcher, when “ambidextrous” is meant.

Misplaced modifiers are descriptive phrases in the wrong place in a sentence. The classic misplaced modifier is Groucho Marx’s “Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas. What it was doing in my pajamas I’ll never know.” (A misplaced modifier is often confused with a dangling modifier, which happens when an introductory phrase modifies the wrong subject in a sentence: “Painting for three hours, the portrait was finally finished.” Who is painting for three hours? We don’t know, but it certainly wasn’t the portrait. I once worked with a man who described any kind of grammatical mistake, even a subject-verb agreement error, as a dangling modifier. But I digress.)

One of the places I often encounter “faulty” grammar, spelling, and punctuation is on social media. I have to think twice before I share memes with errors in them because I’m afraid someone will think that I don’t know the difference. (I know Lizzie Borden’s name isn’t spelled “Bordon,” but I couldn’t resist the joke: “If you get any messages from my parents, don’t answer them. They’ve been hacked.” But I digress again.)

Speaking of memes, I once saw one that said one shouldn’t look down on someone who mispronounces less-familiar words. It means they learned them from seeing them in print rather than hearing them. One of my dear friends treated the word “sarcophagus” that way and came to me to learn the proper pronunciation. I was happy to oblige. (I’ve also heard of the phenomenon going the other way. Another guy I knew had only ever heard the name Sigmund Freud spoken. He wrote it down as “Froid,” a fair guess based on the sound, but outrageously inaccurate nonetheless. But I digress yet again.)

When it comes to language I do like, however, I love new additions to English. “Portmanteau” words are particularly fun. They’re made up of two words or parts of words smashed together to mean something new. One that everyone knows (but don’t realize is a portmanteau) is “smog,” which comes from “smoke” and “fog.” (I say I like them, but not the ugly portmanteau words that crop up, especially during the holidays. Nothing is simply a sale. It’s always an “aganza,” “palooza,” “bration,” or “thon.” The first million times someone did that, it may have been clever, but the shine has long worn off. But I digress some more.)

Anyway, back to editing. I hereby apologize to everyone whose infinitives I unsplit and whose prepositions I moved away from the end of sentences. I’m really sorry. My bad. Think of me as a recovering prescriptivist. Maybe not fully recovered yet, but I try.

Adventures in Writing: AI

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I must admit I’ve had some experience with generative AI writing. I know I should be ashamed of this, but I’m not. Here’s what I learned about this tool or terror.

When ChatGPT was new, I was intrigued. I just had to try it out. I spent a couple of days feeding it some of my favorite topics and styles to see what it could do with them. What it produced was largely crummy.

For example, I asked it to write a haiku on the subject of sex. What it produced was: “Whispers in moonlight/Bodies weave an intimate/Haiku of passion.” Not exactly T.S. Eliot.

I asked it to write other kinds of poems. In almost every one, ChatGPT included the word “poetry” or the name of the style: “The poetry of passsion’s sweet romance” or “O sonnet of the flesh,” “Each line a brushstroke in the poet’s light,” “In every sonnet, life finds sweet peace.”

It also relied heavily on metaphors, many different ones in the same piece. For example, in a poem on writing, it offered “With verses woven like a tapestry. The writer’s heart, an open book” and “how the words, like melodies, entwine, In stanzas, whispers of a silent song.” Now that’s just bad.

It mixed metaphors atrociously: “The enigmatic tapestry…kaleidoscopic hues… orchestrated by unseen forces, paint the canvas of existence… a symphony of discordant notes, each mood a chapter in a cosmic novel.” All those in one paragraph. Another particularly egregious one was “etched into the fabric of one’s existence.”

It also got facts wrong. Recently, hoping that it had improved, I asked it to write a country song about horses in the style of Willie Nelson. “He’s a big ol’ bay with a coat dark as night” was one of the lyrics. (Bay horses are reddish brown.)

Later on, I had a chance to give a workout to a different AI program tasked with writing ten chapters of a novel. Then I was tasked with cleaning it up into human language. It was a lot of work.

AI couldn’t keep track of the characters, for one. It called a little boy Nicky, Billy, and Jamie and another character Henderson and Nelson in different chapters. It chose weird words (“thrummed”) and repeated phrases (“weight of the world”) in nearly every chapter. It forgot that a pivotal scene was supposed to take place in an abandoned warehouse, setting it instead in the woods. Once I had to have it produce a whole new chapter because the first one was so far off. Plot, characters, dialogue, narrative, backstory, continuity—all would be rejected by any competent editor.

AI nonfiction can be just as bad. There’s a tendency to be simply wrong about names, dates, and locations, for example. Flaws like that will seriously mislead readers. AI nonfiction has also been known to get things like herbal remedies drastically and dangerously wrong.

Once I toyed with an AI image generator, which did reasonably well with a human girl (though it couldn’t produce medium-length auburn hair), but couldn’t make a satisfactory alien to meet my criteria. It looked like one of those sad-eyed children in the old paintings.

I understand why special effects professionals hold AI in horror. Entire departments are being canned and replaced by larger, more sophisticated sorts of AI than the Tinkertoy ones I played with. But movies have been using CGI for years, so AI is the next logical extension. I’m not saying that the SpFX companies are right to abandon the people who have done so well for them over the years. Human imagination controlling the tools of creation will—or should—always have a place in the equation.

But generative AI has a long way to go before it can produce prose or poetry that can substitute for human works. I understand that publishers are being assailed with AI-produced novels, but I can’t imagine they can’t tell the difference. Readers of self-published novels, though, should watch out for AI books and avoid them.

Or, if you prefer, avoid all AI writing. I understand why you would.

(Note: Aside from the brief quotes, no AI was used to write this post.)

The Tyranny of SEO

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There’s a phenomenon called “search engine optimization,” or SEO for short. And I’ve grown to hate it.

The idea of SEO is to increase the chances of your post, article, book, or whatever being at the top of the responses to a Google search. Writers and publishers in particular are invested in making sure that their wares gain the attention of Google and then potential readers.

SEO works by focusing on keywords. There are certain words and phrases that people search for more than others. If your work contains these words, it will appear further up the Google results and, presumably, increase sales. It’s all about “search visibility” and marketing strategies. There are plenty of books and websites that teach you how to improve your SEO game.

What are some of the best, top keywords that people search for? Well, best and top show up high on the lists. Everyone wants to know the best places to eat or the top-rated appliances, so those words show up a lot. “How to” is another search term that gets top results.

There are lists of keywords for any number of fields. If you have a book or article on health and fitness, your SEO keywords include “weight loss,” “lifetime fitness,” and “health tips.” Business keywords include “money” (of course), “opportunity,” “income,” and “profitability.” There are lists of keywords for coffee, dog training, and poker, among many, many others. For one of my areas of interest, mental health, keywords include “symptoms,” “medication,” and “side effects.” There are companies that specialize in giving you a list of keywords for your project—for a price.

What really ticks me off is what this has done to book subtitles. (Yes, I know that there are much more important things to be ticked off about, especially these days. However, I work in the publishing field, so I get to see a lot of subtitles. But I digress.)

Let’s start with one that isn’t all that annoying: How to Sustain Personal and Organizational Excellence Every Day. Eight words only. But look at the SEO keywords. We have Personal and Organizational Excellence. Sustain may be a keyword too, and so might Every Day. What could the author have done instead? Organizational Excellence ought to do it. Combined with a title like Habits for Success, that ought to do it. Still plenty of SEO words. Or just have a title: Success and Organizational Excellence. No subtitle. But that goes against every publishing rule, evidently.

Here’s another subtitle that’s been reined in just a bit: Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for a Faith. Nine words. It says what you’ll find in the book without going on and on. Just enough to pique the potential readers’ interest. (While we’re on the subject of things that tick me off (and I think we were), I cringe whenever I see “peak” someone’s interest, or, God help me, “peek.” But I digress again.)

Now here’s a subtitle that goes a little further overboard: Dynamic Techniques for Turning Fear, Indecision, and Anger into Power, Action, and Love. Thirteen words. Dynamic Techniques, Power, Action, and Love are obvious self-help SEOs. I can imagine the title that would go with it: Transform Your Life.

Let’s keep going. Next on my list of terrible subtitles is Stop People Pleasing, Staying Silent, & Feeling Guilty… And Start Speaking Up, Saying No, Asking Boldly, And Unapologetically Being Yourself. Twenty words, one of them a mouthful by itself: unapologetically. Honestly, I think you could read the first chapter in the time it takes to read the subtitle.

Finally, here’s a subtitle that really grates: Transform Your Body in 28 Days with Illustrated Exercises. Lose Belly Fat, Sculpt Glutes, and Feel More Energized in Just 10 Minutes a Day! Twenty-four words, four verbs, and a plethora of nouns and adjectives. And a promise with an exclamation point. What is there left to say in the book? Whoever wrote that subtitle ought to have their thyroid checked.

On the other hand, maybe I’m just jealous. I wrote two books before SEO took off. (I still get royalties. I’m saving up for a pizza. But I digress some more.) Maybe I should have called them Bipolar Me: The True Story of One Woman’s Journey Through Mental Illness, Depression, and Hypomania, Based on Her Weekly Journal of the Same Name and Bipolar Us: A Deep Dive into Bipolar Disorder and Its Devastating Effects on Sufferers and Society, the Highs and Lows That Come With It, and How to Find Peace and Stability.

Of course, if I did that, the subtitles would have had to be printed in little tiny type, another aspect of publishing that really ticks me off. With my bad eyesight, I wouldn’t even be able to read my own subtitles. I can’t win.

It’s a Bird! It’s a Hat! It’s a …

etc., fashion, funny things, writing, , , ,

What it is, is a fascinator. Better known as that silly thing the women in the British Royal Family wear on the side of their heads.

They’re almost the only ones who wear fascinators anymore, and theirs are so large that they’re often mistaken for hats. And like hats, they often include elements such as netting, veiling, organdy, beads, flowers, and even feathers (hence the bird reference).

They’re different from hats, although. In general, they’re worn on the side of the head, though again the British Royal Family’s fascinators are so large that they perch on the side and spill over to the top of the head, or vice versa. They look like they want to grow up to be the hats that women wear to the Kentucky Derby but still have a ways to go.

You sometimes see fascinators on brides who don’t want to do the whole veil routine. Or you see them on the kinds of ladies who go to high tea and try to impress each other. (You don’t see them on me, largely because there’s this stupid rule that you don’t wear a fascinator with glasses (unless you’re the Queen of England (or Queen Consort, I suppose, if she wears glasses, which I don’t know, not being a Royal follower, though I’ve never seen a picture of her wearing glasses)), and I’m not willing to sacrifice sight for fashion. Or comfort for fashion, for that matter. I’m pretty sure there’s also a rule about not wearing a fascinator with pajamas. There’s also a rule that the escort of a woman wearing a fascinator should stand to her left, as the fascinator is worn on the right side of the head and this would impede conversation. That’s a lot of rules for a piece of headgear or an accessory or whatever. But I digress. At length.)

Fascinators impinged themselves on my consciousness recently because there’s a writer’s conference here in town this week. People have been posting on Facebook about rides to and from the airport and what to pack due to the weather in Dayton (layers was the best suggestion).

The writer’s conference is held in honor of Dayton native Erma Bombeck, and focuses on humorous and human-interest writing. There are sessions and seminars featuring noted writers and comedians, speed-pitch sessions with agents, a stand-up comedy contest, and a writing contest, as well as decadent chocolate cake and killer brownies. (There is a lot of chocolate around here. Some of the presenters even pass out M&Ms. It’s thought to spark creativity, and, as we learned in the Harry Potter books, chocolate really does help. I don’t think there are any studies on the effects of chocolate on creativity. All the evidence is bound to be anecdotal. But I digress again.)

Where was I? Oh, yes, fascinators. Well, people who attend this conference—the women at least (I think)—sometimes wear tiaras. And feather boas. And bunny slippers. Sometimes all at once, I suppose, at least for the overachievers.

Several first-timers noted the suggestion of such accouterments and wondered if they were seriously proposed. One anxious newbie asked if they were required, as she had been viewing “How to Wear a Tiara” videos on YouTube (which I didn’t know is a thing) and decided she couldn’t make the requisite bobby pins (are they still called that?) work with her short hair. I suggested she try a fascinator. She wasn’t sure whether that was a fashion tip or not. But, she said, she is fascinating, so it probably would be appropriate.

(Where she’d find one is a different matter. I don’t know where the Ladies Who Lunch (or Take High Tea) shop. And I suppose a bridal salon would be too pricey as well. I think I’d start in secondhand shops or antiques stores. I think I’ve seen one at such a shop and even tried it on, though it of course looked stupid with my glasses. But I digress for the last time this week. I promise.)

At any rate, I find the subject (cue Mr. Spock)…fascinating.

(And I hope you’re impressed by the number of parens I opened and closed in this discussion.)