Ryne Douglas Pearson's Blog, page 11

Just awesome. Love the pilot's comment.

Yes, I'm one of those people. When the movie is over I stay to see if they've done anything cute during the credits, like the bloopers in Grumpy Old Men or the Build Me Up Buttercup montage following Something About Mary. If I'm watching a movie at home, I'll look to see if the special features contain any 'making of' featurettes, such as the in depth offerings on the DVD of the lovely western masterpiece Open Range.

I'm no different with books. I love forewards and afterwords. The introductions before a story starts and the final words from an author once all has been said and done. In their best incarnation they are stories themselves, shedding light on the how, why, and when of what we have just read, or are about to.

My favorite 'forewarder' is, hands down, Stephen King.  In the introduction (okay, it's not called a foreward here, but it quacks like a duck...) to his short story collection Skeleton Crew, he dives into the 'why' of short stories. Why bother, especially for him? What spins from this is a funny and true statetment that should ring true for all writers, namely the balance between putting words to paper for money, or for love of what one does.

When it comes to an 'afterworder', my appreciation for this particular writer is more recent, having just reread Quicker Then The Eye by the master, Ray Bradbury. Following this collection of wonderful short stories, Bradbury, whose use of language has always drifted effortlessly between forceful and poetic, gives us a rundown of the origins of his tales, and ends with some of the most beautiful advice to writers (and others) I've ever read. I quote a few lines here: 'Make haste to live. Oh, God, yes. Live. And write. With great haste.' What words those are, which boil down to his own version of Carpe Diem, but with a lyricism I find simply stunning.

So, yes, there is always the story. The meat imprinted on the numbered pages. But there is more. And it is often worthwhile to come a little early and stay a little late to savor what the author has left for us.

I've frequently been asked for the recipe to my signature dessert, Clam Brulee. Be it after a dinner party where invitees have swooned over, as one critic put it, 'the stunning, sweet taste of confection and shellfish', or from internet friends completly blown away by the unlikely combination, I am invariably asked how to make what another critic labeled 'like a mouthful of the Thames sprinkled with sugary sunshine'.

Well, I now give to the world my recipe for Clam Brulee.

Ingedients: 6 egg yolks, 6 tablespoons of sugar, 1/2 teaspoon of vanilla extract, 2 1/2 cups of heavy cream, 2 drops lemon juice, 6 ounces of precooked clams.

In a bowl, beat the egg yolks, 4 tablespoons of sugar and vanilla until thick and luscious. Set aside.

In a saucepan, heat the cream over low heat until just about to boil. Quickly remove from the heat. Add the cream to the egg mixture and mix until combined. Add 5 ounces of clams and stir thoroughly.

Add the cream/egg/clam mixture to the top of a double boiler and stir gently over simmering water for 4 minutes. Remove from the heat and fill six small ramekins.

Place the filled ramekins into a preheated 300 degree F oven for 30 minutes. Remove and let cool in the refrigerator overnight.

The next day, combine the remaining 1 ounce of clams with the lemon juice. Set aside.

Sprinkle remaining 2 tablespoons of sugar over each ramekin, then top each with a few clams.

Place in broiler until the sugar melts. Do not allow to burn.

Remove from heat and refrigerate until the custard mixture cools.

Serve as a refreshing after dinner dessert and let the compliments wash over you.

Enjoy!

You're a publisher. The world of digital distribution has swept over you like a tsunami, both opportunity and menace mixed in that frothing cascade. You have older titles, classics, that you know people will want, so, what do you do?

Get them out there.

Now, we've seen quicky eBook attempts where the formatting was screwy, with the overall package looking rather amateurish. Less so from major publishers, however, which is usually the argument against small or independent publishers--they just don't have the ability/expertise to put together a polished, professional product. In many ways, regardless of content (whether the book is good or not), this has some truth to it.

Last night I found that conclusion shattered when I purchased a digital copy of one of my favorite novels, the Judith Guest classic Ordinary People. I've had the dead tree version for thirty years, and wanted something now that would 'last'. So, I pay, download, and start reading last night in bed.

Dear God. Is this possible? I asked myself this while a few pages in. Chapter one. The mistakes were obvious and, worse, explainable. Let me digress for clarity...

It is likely the the publisher did not have a truly digital file of Ordinary People. The book was originally published in 1976. What probably was done to prepare for an eBook release was to scan pages of the book using OCR--Optical Character Recognition. This is common. I've done it. The scanner 'reads' a page and the computer interprets the images to decide what letters it is seeing, and from that data creates a digital text file.

But it is never perfect. The computer guesses wrong sometimes. Decides that a lower case 'l' is actually an upper case 'I', etc... That can cause issues. But, no fear, you now have that digital text file in the computer so, at the very least, without even using a copy editor yet, you can run a spell check and fix the obvious errors.

This, also, is the beauty of eBooks and digital distribution--mistakes are not in stone forever. A corrected eBook file, sans mistakes pointed out by readers, can be uploaded. I'm a spelling Nazi and I've even had readers point out corrections. I'm happy to make things right. It's a wonderful new world!

But...

What if you are a major publisher, and you are putting out the eBook version of a beloved novel, that was made into an Academy Awrd Winning film? You're careful, right? You at least run a basic spell check to catch the obvious mistakes. Right?

Apparently, no.

In the first chapter of Ordinary People, 'skin of calm holding him together' becomes 'skin of calm holdirig together'. Yes, 'holdirig'. Now, I'm no dictionary, but 'holdirig' seems to have been made from the OCR process deciding that 'n' was actually an 'r' and an 'i' next to each other, and is not an obscure word meant for use in this novel.

But, that's just a fluke, right?

'Nice for the May Hies.' A couple pages after 'holdirig'. The fussy OCR attempt here decided that the 'fl' in 'flies' was a capital 'H', turning 'May flies' into...something.

My point in laboriously illustrating this is simple--a basic spell check, doable on virtually any digital tex file, would have caught these errors in the FIRST CHAPTER, not to mention what a copy editor would have (should have) caught. But these errors survived and are now out in the digital libraries maintained by thousands and thousands of people. Why?

Because the publisher, one of the big six, let that happen. It appears that no spell check was run, and no copy editor was charged with vetting the digital file. In other words, the presentation of this beloved novel hardly rises above amateur hour.

Any spelling mistakes above, feel free to tell me. :)

 

In an earlier post I talked about how you can help authors you like simply by taking a few minutes to review their work on sites like Amazon and Barnes & Noble. But is that all you can do?

No.

Obviously, you can buy their books. We authors like that. We like it a lot. Still, there are other things you can do that cost no money, and just a bit of your time. I'll list some of them here.

Do you use Twitter? Yes? Then find out if your favorite authors also Tweet and follow them. I'm right here on Twitter.

Do you Facebook? Many authors have pages dedicated to their work. If they do, LIKE their page.

Do they blog? Follow them. Subscribe to them. Visit them. Leave comments on their posts. This not only shows interest, it generates links to their sites because every comment is 'crawled' by search engines.

Do they have an Amazon Author Page like mine? If so, you can LIKE the page. The button to do so is just above the author's photo.

Do they have books on Barnes & Noble? If so, you Facebookers can LIKE the books there as well. The button is right next to the cover picture.

Did you read a review of their books somewhere? Share it on Twitter, or Facebook, or via e-mail to friends you think would like the book.

Do you like to talk? Great. Blab about your favorite author. Tell family and friends.

All of these suggestions are variations on the oldest and most successful form of advertising--word of mouth. Every reader is an author's greatest asset, and every author I know appreciates even the smallest bit of help they get from the people kind enough to give their books a shot.

Did no one see the John Carpenter movie?

Russian scientists are set to pierce through Antarctica's frozen surface to reveal the secrets of an icebound lake that has been sealed deep there for the past 15 million years.

***

Priscu said beneath the frozen crust, far from any sunlight, in the vast sub-glacial lake creatures may lurk around thermal vents in the lake's depths. "I think Lake Vostok is an oasis under the ice sheet for life. It would be really wild to thoroughly sample... But until we learn how to get into the system cleanly that's an issue," he told Reuters.

 

FULL ARTICLE

"NASA's Kepler mission has made a discovery of several hundred potential planets orbiting the Milky Way, five of which are similar to Earth and located in the habitable zone."

I want to know when Amazon will begin shipping to this new audience.

FULL ARTICLE

I've long noticed something about many aspiring writers, and I guess it is no different about any other vocation where one tries to succeed. I'll bet you've noticed it as well. A Tweet here. A Facebook post there. Message Board shout over yonder.

'Just finished 5,000 words today.' 'I'm writing like a madman.' 'My character just did something amazing.'

Now, writing is generally a solitary experience, so a cathartic release is expected every now and then. But turning that lonely process into an endless stream of updates about progress or lack thereof may be many things, but there's one thing it's not.

Writing.

I did a POST some time ago on some rough averages of page counts per day, and what they equate to over a year's time in terms of actual finished material. Writing is writing. It's not talking about writing. And I sense that some people who want to be writers spend more time telling the world about writing than actually turning out pages.

When I'm on Twitter or Facebook, I usually am spewing mindless chatter about bacon (forgive me, oh king of swine-based products) or just socializing. Or I'll post a link to my site, or some other thing I found interesting. When I'm quiet in the virtual world, probably 50% of that time I'm banging the keys.

Talking about doing is a trap. Talkers talk. Doers do. To be the desired noun, you have to execute the correct verb.

Writers write.

A touching, funny life story with no dialogue. All in less than ten minutes.

He's only written some of the most compelling horror, suspense, and thriller fiction ever, for both print and screen, so, yeah, he's worth watching in this brief interview.