social media

Sundog Rising!

Reflections on living the life literary by the Urban Sundog

Trying To Embrace A Culture of Mediocrity

I came across some good advice in an article on using social media as a career advancer. I quote: “Social media is a tool that can unlock a world of potential.”

Apparently I should “show [my] new connections that [I’m] the real deal by joining in on conversations related to [my] shared professional interests.”

So, as I’m trying to pursue mystery writing as a potentially marketable venture this year, I did a search on “mystery writer and reader forums”. Immediately found a source where my peers were sharing their professional interests in the following thread:

     how to read a comapss

     dude, your link is not working on my side

     the link works for me

     check yr spelling

The same site invited me to become a “memeber”.

All this also followed up on a long conversation I had with my son a month or so back concerning making social media work for me as a marketing tool. Raising my profile. He is a video maker and has pursued this line with great success. I’ve found in general that the text industry doesn’t share the same sort of experience as video does on the Internet, but I still had to admit it was worth a try. And that’s how I found it. Very trying.

First off, it was surprisingly difficult to find any forums on the subject of writing or reading mysteries at all. I thought that at least would be a slamdunk. I never had any problems finding forums on UFOs. Which didn’t work out for me either, but that was for different reasons. (My brain has stopped glowing now …)

I finally found one — not the site I quoted above — that seemed relatively pertinent, but only one devoted uniquely to mysteries. However, once again, the tenor of the conversation didn’t entice me in as a group of my peers sharing their professional interests. These people obviously enjoy their chat, and I applaud them for that. But the issue did not engage me. Of course, the biggest obstacle to making social media work for me has always been having to be social.

Someone wrote a “cozy” with a ghost in it. What should the writer call it!? Is it a “cozy” or a “paranormal”? What’s wrong with “cozy with a ghost” someone suggested. Someone else: I consider ghosts “paranormal”, but maybe publishers don’t? Another party: “supernatural” is a synonym for “paranormal”. Yet another voice: you might find a better word than “supernatural”. Another: one’s dark and spooky, and the other has more twinkle lights.

I’m sorry … I didn’t really search out this forum to discuss with my peers our professional interest in “twinkle lights”.

So, with my wife’s help — she suggested searching for “intelligent forums” — I came across another general literature site that I thought might just be worth an afternoon’s experimentation. I went through the process of registering, posted an introductory bit on myself, replied to someone else’s introductory bit hoping to strike up a conversation, and posted on two threads already going concerning authors I like. Saying something about what went before, and trying to introduce some thoughts of my own.

A week later, no one’s replied to my introductory bit, the other new person didn’t hold up their end of the conversation, and the flow on the two author threads jumped over my remarks as if they weren’t there, the person commenting after me replying to the person who posted before me in both cases.

So in my efforts to raise my profile with my peers by “showing my new connections that I’m the real deal by joining in on conversations related to my shared professional interests” I’ve managed to render myself and my writing completely invisible!

I feel like a ghost in a cozy. Maybe I really do need twinkle lights.

The upshot was the next day I checked out a list of 65 online mystery publishers instead, and actually found 4 worth following up on. This is an unheard of return on an Internet search for publishers, if you’ve read my previous postings on the subject. So now instead of being ignored by my peers or delving into endless discussions on subcategorizing to death what I’d like to be writing, I’m concentrating on getting that first mystery manuscript into shape and getting it out there.

Hoping to unlock a real world of potential.

***************

REALITY FICTION AND BEYOND!

This week:

Continuing The Twitchy Gal with Chapter Thirteen posted on Monday and Chapter Fourteen coming on Friday, September 26th at:

http://realficone.blogspot.ca/

I said there was a lot of sex in this book. Things get too hot for some characters to handle in Chapter Thirteen. Resulting in some intriguing fallout in Fourteen.

summer reading part two

Sundog Rising!

Reflections on living the life literary by the Urban Sundog

Summer Reading Part Two: In With Ten Days to Spare!

A few weeks back, I wrote my So What’s A Good Book to Read This Summer? entry. In which I lamented that I hadn’t been able to put together a good summer reading list this year. I ended the bit by saying I was putting my faith in The Emperor of Ocean Park, by Stephen L. Carter, which I had picked up in hard cover for 80 cents in a secondhand bookstore. And that I would write further, to say how that worked out for me …

Well, The Emperor was a terrific read, which I strongly recommend. But was it a great summer read? Providing that extra dimension of oneness with the season a truly hot summer book always manages?

Unfortunately, not so much.

To be honest, the summer wasn’t what it could have been this year in Winnipeg. We came off the worst winter in recorded history. And in Winnipeg, that’s really saying something. And it never really did get hot this year. It sort of felt more like an extended spring than summer at all. And now we’re moving into fall …

Add to that some personal frustrations with life in general, and it wasn’t a prime time for reading.

Then, finally, my wife and I went for a holiday last week, spending five days in the Whiteshell Provincial Park on the Manitoba/Ontario border, and it all came together! Not so much weatherwise — in fact we even had frost one night. But the summer state of mind finally arrived, and with it an appropriate summer novel. Defining to me that the missing quality in my reading to date so far this season was “delight”.

Our plan was to recharge. All we had on the agenda was sleeping, eating, reading, hiking, and taking pictures. If we did anything more than that on any of the five days, we’d be overachieving. And those five activities were precisely what we managed to fill our days with.

The hiking and picture taking were wonderful, as we covered some twenty kilometres of the Canadian Shield on foot. The eating was good, as we had a barbecue tossed in as part of the rental, and the beds were perfectly comfortable.

The difference between a serious and an amateur photographer.

We drove 265 kilometres, hiked another kilometre through the bush, went half a kilometre down a relatively inaccessible beach so my wife could find a spider web in a hole in the rocks no human had ever seen before to take a picture of. I pointed and shot her doing it.

And finally I found the right book for my missing summer read.

The surprising thing about the title finally is that it was a re-read, not a new read.

Both my wife and I are huge fans of Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series, which to date includes The Eyre Affair, Lost in a Good Book, The Well of Lost Plots, Something Rotten, First Among Sequels, One of Our Thursdays Is Missing, and The Woman Who Died A Lot. It’s been some years since I started reading the books, and quite frankly, I know of no author who throws more brilliant ideas at you per page than Jasper Fforde. I read One Of Our Thursdays Is Missing eight or so years after I first read The Eyre Affair, and quite frankly, things had grown so complex by then I couldn’t always place what he was talking about well enough to really appreciate the novel.

My wife led the way, rereading the entire series just before I bought The Woman Who Died A Lot so it flowed properly for her. I decided I needed to do the same thing, and on a whim, threw The Eyre Affair in my luggage at the last moment as we packed to go.

What a great bit of lit serendipity!

The weather might have been cool, but once I got into the book, I knew I had to sit out on our lakeside porch and enjoy it in a proper outdoor maybe-not-so-summery-reading-session, but datewise, I was still in the season. And it all came together for me. The utter delight and sheer creativity of the novel mixing with the outdoors in someplace I should have been earlier this summer, obviously, but hey better late than never.

So — no doubt about it. Number One Summer Read for me in 2014: The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde.

But I can’t wait until next summer to read Lost In A Good Book, or I’ll lose the thread of the ongoing story again. I’ll just have to fit in six more good reads in the next six months or so. And I hear there might even be a seventh in the works …

***************

REALITY FICTION AND BEYOND!

This week:

Continuing The Twitchy Gal with Chapter Eleven posted on Monday and Chapter Twelve coming on Friday, September 19th at:

http://realficone.blogspot.ca/

Finally! It all comes together to reveal why this novel is the official sequel to Reality Fiction One …

sex between the covers

Sundog Rising!

Reflections on living the life literary by the Urban Sundog

Sex Between the Covers: How Much and How Often?

Didn’t finish writing a book I set in a library once that only stays in my mind for one scene. The older, male head librarian catches a kid viewing porn on the Internet on a library computer terminal and balls him out for it. Finishes the lecture with “For God’s sake, go check out a book and read about it like we always had to!”

A question I’ve been facing since I took up writing full time is how much sex to put in a book anyway? I decided to do some research, to measure how frequently the subject should come up. How much time do people really spend addressing the subject any given day? How often do people have sex anyway?

Typing in “average number of times Canadians have sex per week”, I found a forum that provided answers that were, well … conflicting:

     I'm not sure what average is but me and my husband do it twice a day...usually. We 

     have the same schedule and no kids so lunch time is awesome.

     Per week? How about per month????

     twice a week with my husband and 4 a week with my boy friend.

I dug deeper, deciding not to limit my research to Canadians. Again, I found conflicting results.

One site says the global average is 109 times per year.

Which works out to 2.1 times per week (the 2 I get, but how do you have sex 0.1 times a week?) Or once every 3.3 days. (Set up your day planners now!)

Another site said 1 in 5 couples live in sexless marriages. That’s gotta skew the average …

Another one said 16% of couples do it 2-3 times per week, while another said 34% of couples do it in the same range, 2-3 times per week. More than twice as many. Maybe the second source includes the extra 0.1 in the 2.1 global weekly average, while the first doesn’t? You have to think it would be difficult to measure accurately.

The greater consensus of sites I checked settled on 1 or 2 times per week on average.

But they only looked at married couples. Which seems to be rather an oversight, to my mind.

Then ultimately I realized that to truly determine the weight I should allow the subject in my writing, maybe I should be asking how much time do people spend thinking about sex as well as actually doing it? Trying to extrapolate on a metareasonal basis from my research, it seems to me certain people obviously think and act upon the subject a lot, while others, enh … not so much. Defined by natural biology, or relational circumstances? Obviously a situational conclusion. Determined mostly no doubt by who you’re with in any given situation.

So what did I decide?

I better not leave it out.

The best question obviously should be “How much do people want to read about sex?” A quick look at any bestseller list containing the words “Fifty Shades” clearly answers that. I’ve never thought it was accidental that the one fiction book I managed to sell to a publisher I hooked with a query segment that had the most sex in the entire book.

So there are obviously good reasons to include sex in any given novel in some capacity. Either people looking for it, responding to stimuli in that direction regardless of whatever other crises they have going on in their lives right then, talking about it, making contact, and occasionally, by gosh even having it.

In relation to this issue, I have to say that The Twitchy Gal, which I am posting as we speak on the http://realficone.blogspot.ca/ site has got more sex in it than any other book I’ve ever written and how many people reading this didn’t bother to finish this sentence before they went to check that claim out?

Sexual possession is one of the main themes of the book, and to illustrate it properly I had to contrast it with normal sexual behaviour, the 2.1 times a week kind. Which meant I had to figure out a way to write those 2 encounters a week, plus define that 0.1 adequately somehow, in a manner that quite frankly I was comfortable being quite frank about.

The most important thing I decided was never losing the emotional connection between the participants as well as the physical. You need both — the emotional and the physical. And depending on the circumstances, intimacy, doubt, uncertainty, passion, anger, fear, excitement, reticence, a complete lack of inhibition, humour, sentiment, objectivity, delight, satisfaction, conflict, resolution, tragedy, drama, sweetness, experimentation, content, innocence, raging hormones, licentiousness, interruption, abandon, resolution, focus, forgetfulness, apprehension … and I could go on.

Ah. Maybe that’s why you need to have sex in novels.

***************

REALITY FICTION AND BEYOND!

This week:

Chapter Seven of The Twitchy Gal posted on Tuesday, with Chapter Eight coming on Friday, August 29th at:

http://realficone.blogspot.ca/

In which Mr. Snuff wanders off naked into the woods, and we meet Clare. An even twitchier gal …

culture/pretension

Sundog Rising!

Reflections on living the life literary by the Urban Sundog

Culture/Pretension

On a recent visit to the Chapters bookstore at Polo Park in Winnipeg on what turned out to be the hottest day of the summer I found myself on arrival in serious need of rehydration before starting to shop.

So I purchased myself a Shaken Iced Tea Lemonade and piece of Very Berry Coffee Cake (without actually enunciating the words “shaken” or “very” myself), took a seat against the wall, and soaked up the ambience while I waited for the over half-a-cup of ice cubes I had paid an exorbitant fee for to melt. Observing the look of the other customers and noting the tenor of the conversations, I found myself pondering this question:

Are all cultures inherently pretentious? Or is it just Starbucks?

Look at them: the short, loud annoying indecisive woman faced with hundreds of decisions to make before ordering flitting madly about occupying the personal space of at least four people; the fat middle-aged man carrying an Entertainment magazine snidely excited because Larry David’s going on Broadway; the fey Asian guy lisping articulately and rapidly about grave personal drama hinging on the apparently inconsequential; the tall model-like woman somehow managing to languidly affect wearing bluejeans; the ponytailed skinny student nervously doing homework on a laptop; the two cool guys passing the time leaning back loudly enunciating the final word on whatever subject may happen to arise; a strange, nattily dressed couple in their thirties engaged in an unutterably inconsequential impassioned conversation concerning Warren Beatty (?); the connected dude alternating between his I-Pad, triple very shaken whatever, and his I-Phone, sometimes on all three at once; and one guy in a black heavy metal tee shirt with his baseball cap on backwards communing with his knapsack sitting facing him in the opposite chair.

The thing is, everyone except the guy in the metal tee and the girl with the ponytop and laptail manage to exude an unutterably insincere smugness and sense of  “this is my place, see me in it.” A conceit that comes across as “well, it’s such a bore, but one must be a presence.” Except I don’t think anyone is paying any attention to anyone else except me.

God knows what the knapsack thinks.

So I start pondering further — is pretentiousness mostly a morbid affliction of Western Society coffee depots, or is it something any society is bound to develop regardless of their cultural background? Or sources of caffeine?

I see it coming out of the coffee shop naturally as an extension of Jean Baudrillard’s thinking in The System of Objects. Give people unnecessary extensive selection of material goods, and they will come to associate their meaningless personal choices as a defining function of their being. This is my particular choice of exotic caffeine blend, so I am never quite so much myself as when I am sitting being witnessed sipping it. This might not apply to everyone, but a Starbucks would certainly draw the types who do subscribe to such facile thinking like moths to a flame.

Trying to research the subject, I find there is surprisingly little written on the subject of pretension, given how prevalent it is in our society anyway. The only information that I can find concerning pretension in other cultures and societies is that people in one culture usually regard every other culture as being pretentious.

The general definition of being pretentious seems to be acting as if you’re someone you’re not.

But I think one source I found hit the matter more accurately on the head: 

“Pretentious people overstate their style, value and opinions. They believe that anything below them should be pitied and ridiculed. Their opinion is gospel and they give out that opinion a lot. The pretentious accomplish nothing but comment on everything around them. Their way is always better. They drain the liquid plasma out of everyone's circulatory system, one unwelcomed fact and opinion after another.”

Sort of like bloggers …

“Self importance is the key here. Pretentious people are not important. Important people don't have time to tell others how amazing they are before having an actual conversation.”

Why do people act this way? Again there is no consensus, but the general opinion seems to be: a.) pretentious people have very little self esteem and need to build themselves up in what they perceive to be the eyes of the world;  b.) people are bored and are trying to add some excitement to their lives (which is ironic, since it’s also generally accepted that pretentious people are just about the most boring people you’ll ever meet); and c.) that people are trying to hide from reality. “Our fingers must be in our ears all the time - lalala, I can't hear you - just to keep out the plain sound of the real world.” (Francis Spufford)

I think some people are just clueless, myself.

But that’s probably a pretentious statement.

***************

REALITY FICTION AND BEYOND!

This week:

Chapter Five of The Twitchy Gal posted on Monday, with Chapter Six coming on Friday, August 29th at:

http://realficone.blogspot.ca/

Cyberseers and walks in the forest. But what else is in that forest? Eyes in the trees …

fundamentals?

Sundog Rising!

Reflections on living the life literary by the Urban Sundog

Fundamentals

I’m going to go out on a limb here.

It seems to me that if you’re going to write a story, the concept of setting characters in a physical place and having them interact is so completely fundamental it goes without saying. In fact, it is so self evident, having someone point out to a reader that in this story characters are set in a physical place and interact is actually insulting to the intelligence of everyone involved.

Nevertheless …

In a recent edition of the Winnipeg Free Press book column, a section was devoted to short blurbs on books coming out this fall. One of the blurbs tries to sell the novel involved by stating unequivocally that the author:

“takes four characters in various stages of their lives and brings them to a spacial and emotional intersection in the city in which they all live.”

And nothing more.

Gussy it up however you like, all that sentence says is that the novelist writes a book where she sets characters together in a physical place and they interact. And just in case you didn’t catch every nuance of the concept, the blurb makes certain you understand that this space is actually where the characters happen to live.

Wow! Do I ever want to read that! How revolutionary! To be so utterly and uncompromisingly self evident! And not worry about minor annoyances like, oh I don’t know, plot, theme, tension, specific circumstance, whatever.

I will be generous to the author here and assume she has no choice over how her novel is being publicized. We’ll assume there is more to her book than what’s being promoted. There must be! But still …

Far from being enticed to purchase this book by that blurb, I want to avoid it like the plague. It seems like the snootiest of approaches to making a sale. Like, we can tell these rubes anything if we make it sound pretentious and they’ll buy it. And why bother reading the book ahead of time to find out what it might really be about when we’ve got such a flushbrained turn of phrase ready to make it sell merely working from a natural assumption concerning the fundamentals of writing any story?

If this is what works in Canadian Literature today, obviously I’ve been approaching marketing my own material all wrong, when I’ve been sending queries out to publishers and agents.

For example, for Reality Fiction One, I sent out this description of the book:

A struggling Author acts on a vivid inspiration to self promote his unpublished works. Using the sure fire format of the popular Reality Television Elimination Show he product places his characters in a literary application of the same style – forty characters vying in thirty writing genres with the last character remaining to star in the author’s next novel.

However, the forty characters unexpectedly carry over conflicts and issues from their previous books, while unanticipated relationships blossom between personalities from different books who would never have met outside of this Contest.

Finally, the entire enterprise – and some of the characters’ lives – are placed in peril when an unnamed Antagonist arises whose unfathomable goal is to prevent the Contest from ever naming a winner.

What I should have written was something like this:

The author takes unique and sometimes repeating black marks and brings them to a combinational and significatory intersection on one page after another until implication and intention emerge.

After all, you don’t want to confuse people by implying you might actually have written something. They’d never know how to market it!

***************

REALITY FICTION AND BEYOND!

This week:

Chapter Three of The Twitchy Gal posted on Monday, with Chapter Four coming on Friday, August 22nd at:

http://realficone.blogspot.ca/

Tish wakes up.

summer reading

Sundog Rising!

Reflections on living the life literary by the Urban Sundog

So What’s A Good Book to Read This Summer?

Ahhhhh! It’s August already, and I’m not reading enough!

Well, that’s not entirely true. I’m reading as much as I ever do really. It’s just that I haven’t selected a particular summer reading list yet. And there’s not enough of the summer left to justify picking a full one now.

I never underestimate the value of the summer read. From when I was very young, the summer read has always been a very important event. Because somehow certain books, when read in the ephemeral conditions of a Manitoba summer, are indeed just that — events, unlike fleeting literary moments spent the same way during other seasons of the year. Not that these books probably wouldn’t be good then too. But the way everything comes together in the summertime for a good read, the environment so conducive to certain stories, the way the greater sense of general ease enhances settling down with a good book in July or August …

But if I’m honest that general ease is missing for me this year as I’ve been having a somewhat stressful summer. All the more important to read then, and put myself in that more transcendent, accepting state of mind.

So, distracted as I have been this summer, I haven’t made my summer reading list yet. And time is running out!

Normally I have 30 to 40 books in the house I haven’t read yet, interspersed with biweekly trips to the Library and rereading a certain amount of volumes already in my collection as well. I have a sort of alternating system of how I work through these. But in summer, I like to break away from programming, no matter how self imposed, and choose a few select titles to peruse and savour from … wherever. Build on the freedom of the endless daylight.

In the past this has lead to some excellent reads. Last year was an exceptional summer read year. In 2013 I picked Summertime, All The Cats Are Bored, by Philippe Georget off the shelf at Chapters and started it immediately. As I’ve gone on before, that particular book may qualify as my all time favourite summer read. But I also decided it was time to read P.D. James, and worked through the first volumes in the Adam Dalgleish novels to my delight. Summer seemed the perfect time to settle down and linger over enjoying her  precision of language and slow development of a story.

This year? I didn’t pick out any of them as being specifically summer reads, but I have enjoyed these books over the last sixty days or so …

Two For Sorrow by Nicola Upson was excellent. But not precisely summery, certainly …

Mortal Causes and Let It Bleed by Ian Rankin were solid. But not quite as suitable to the season as P.D. James.

And on the downside, The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood definitely did not do it for me. Permanent winter there …

But the two I’ve enjoyed the most so far have been Donald Spoto’s biography of Marlene Dietrich, Blue Angel, and Phineus Finn by Anthony Trollope. Trollope certainly qualifies as a summertime sort of author. But I’m reading him every season now, one book every three months to stretch them out. So while I loved the book, it just came up as a matter of course.

No, it’s time I picked out at least one book just as a summer read, or I’ll have wasted the whole season as a backdrop.

In that regard, I’ve considered starting Game of Thrones. Up until now I’ve refused to commit myself to that much reading until I’m certain George Martin’s going to live long enough to finish writing the story. Weirdly enough though, I had a dream about actually starting the series in the here and now, so I guess I’m ready to take a gamble on it anyway. But again, that’s a book that has larger implications reaching beyond the summer.

So, this weekend, my wife and I hit the Salvation Army, and I made a concerted effort to find something to fit the bill. From a motley selection, I came up with two titles. Bestseller, by Olivia Goldsmith, and The Emperor of Ocean Park, by Stephen L. Carter. Got a real deal, both books for 80 cents each. And The Emperor’s a hard cover too. (Apologies for buying secondhand, Stephen. And I was sad to learn that Olivia died way too young. Should I ever actually sell a novel myself, feel free to toss the fact I didn’t exactly contribute to her estate back in my face — I only wish.)

Trashy versus classy, I’m thinking. I was debating which one to make my summer read, since it’s too late for a whole list, when I gave my wife The Bestseller to take with her on her upcoming trip to Peru. So that leaves me with the Carter.

I can hardly wait. I’ll let you know how it turns out in the fall.

***************

REALITY FICTION AND BEYOND!

This week:

The beginning of a new epic! Chapter One of The Twitchy Gal posted on Monday, with Chapter Two coming on Friday, August 15th at:

http://realficone.blogspot.ca/

What really goes on at the Reuben Memorial Tech Retreat and Resort? Explore life beyond the cloud with Tish and Brenda, as the sedation slowly wears off …