Quote of the Week: Carlos Fuentes

“I live through risk. Without risk there is no art. You should always be on the edge of a cliff about to fall down and break your neck.” -- Carlos Fuentes

Even at 83, it was sad to hear the news of Carlos Fuentes passing. The world seems less erudite on this day. Less considered.

Both his writing and his persona were deeply human, pleasingly flawed. But his thoughts -- both those he wrote and those he shared -- were worth remarking. In his lifetime, he said a great many things worth repeating, again and again and...

“One wants to tell a story, like Scheherezade, in order not to die. It's one of the oldest urges in mankind. It's a way of stalling death.” -- Carlos Fuentes

I wrote about Fuentes passing for January Magazine yesterday. That piece is here.

Quote of the Week: Maurice Sendak

“I have nothing now but praise for my life. I’m not unhappy. I cry a lot because I miss people. They die and I can’t stop them. They leave me and I love them more. ... What I dread is the isolation. ... There are so many beautiful things in the world which I will have to leave when I die, but I’m ready, I’m ready, I’m ready.”

Maurice Sendak died at home in Connecticut yesterday. He was 83. The outpouring has been amazing, though not surprising. Sendak was one of the most respected authors of books for children of all time.

Where the Wild Things Are, of course. But also so many more, including last year’s Bumble-Ardy.

You can read more about Sendak here on January Magazine.

“I cry a lot because I miss people. They die and I can't stop them. They leave me and I love them more.”

Finding Your Way Through the Publishing Forest: Why Bash Through the Jungle When There’s A Perfectly Good Trail?

I have this sense of a forest. And I’ve been bashing my way through it for a couple of decades, one way or another. I feel as though, in many ways, I’ve made a trail. These days, at least, when I look down, I can actually see my feet. That wasn’t always the case. That trail? I’d swear there were times it had kudzu all over it when I began. Now I can walk without stumbling, most of the time. I can set off and expect I’ll get where I want to go.

So I feel sometimes as though all of these roads have led me right here, to where I’m standing now. I go to parties, to events and when I meet people for the first time and they hear what I do, it seems that -- almost without exception -- their eyes light up and they begin to ask me questions. Some of them have a book inside them, that’s how it seems to me. I can almost see it as they speak. There is a glimmer -- and sometimes more than that -- not necessarily of story, but of sharing in a meaningful way. And they have the feeling that I have some kind of key.

And “book” in this instance is a broad term. In some cases, it’s a novel. In others it’s the collective wisdom of a lifetime of learning and sharing. A treatise, then, on the expertise accumulated in a specialized field. In others it’s a private, personal memoir and the final audience in mind is a select and chosen few. In all cases, there are questions and, for the most part, the answers are available. Most of the time, they’re not very far away.

To add to the confusion, the excitement and the general noise, at present the publishing industry is changing so quickly, sometimes it seems the answers are different from one week to the next. Even more alarming: in a very few cases, there are no available answers at all. In those times, especially, the comfortable bed of an adult lifetime’s worth of study is useful; reassuring. Everyone has questions, sure. But almost a whole career of observation and participation has equipped me to futurize about as well as anyone. And over the past ten years or so I’ve discovered that my best guesses tend to be pretty good.

So what do you with all of that? In my case, I’ve gotten together with a few likeminded and geared individuals and created the Publishing Success Network. We anticipate a series of seminars, workshops and perhaps even retreats and books geared on all of the big questions that most outfits don’t even try to answer. Twenty-first century publishing questions, I guess is what I’m saying. Whether to approach an agent or a publisher or go it on your own. Should you hire an editor? Should it be an e-book? And, if so or if not, how to build a distribution network. Are books judged by their cover? If so, what do you need to know about what’s appropriate for each type of book? How should you choose and work with a designer? And social media, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and beyond: where to begin and where -- and if -- to draw lines. So much more. An almost bottomless chasm of more, it seems. And when someone asks a question, it delights and surprises me when I discover the answer very near by!

If you want to see more about the Publishing Success Network, it’s here.

The Indigo: 77-7-7

Like he who tagged me, I don’t normally participate in these sorts of memes, but I can’t resist playing this game with debut novelist David Abrams, because I’ve been editing David’s work at January Magazine for more than a decade and I’m just so incredibly pleased and delighted and even proud that this fine writer will soon be promoting his own book, Fobbit, which will be released by Grove Press this coming September. I encourage you to visit his web site and read more about Fobbit and, if you’re so inclined, pre-order his book, which sounds fantastic.

Now, without further ado, here are the rules:

1. Go to the 77th page of your work-in-progress or latest book.

2. Count down 7 lines.

3. Copy the 7 sentences that follow, and post them.

4. Tag 7 other authors.

The book you’re likely to see from me soonest is The Indigo. News on that book to follow shortly. It’s a contemporary thriller with a paranormal edge set in British Columbia and Virginia. It’s the scariest thing I’ve ever done. I barely slept the whole time I was writing it: I saw things every time I closed my eyes.

In the scene below Olivia, a teacher, has been called out on what she feels will be a fool’s errand (but which, of course, it turns out it is not). Things have started getting scary, but Olivia hasn’t seen any of it yet, and being a practical sort, she doesn’t believe it. By the time she realizes she’s wrong, all hell will have broken loose. But then, it’s possible you already guessed that.

Though she thought the cloak and dagger routine excessive, she agreed, with one addition: she took Artemis with her. Realistically, the dog was no kind of protection -- unless they were attacked by a duck or maybe a stick -- but she felt better for his company, nonetheless.

As she walked towards the house Artemis stayed hard on Olivia’s heel as though sensing how tightly strung his mistress was. The early morning seemed bizarrely quiet and every sound reverberated against Olivia’s nerves. The barking of a dog in the next block. A car starting up in the distance. The squeal of the garden gate on its hinges. She could hear echoes of each sound long after it had died away.

Now I'll tag these seven awesome authors to give us a taste from their books and, in the spirit in which I set out, all either are or have been January Magazine contributors who either have a book recently published or who I either know or suspect have a book underway:

1. J. Kingston Pierce

2. Tony Buchsbaum

3. Andrea MacPherson

4. Anthony Rainone

5. Sue Bursztynski

6. Aaron Blanton

7. Richard Klin

They may not have time or inclination to do a similar blog post (we’re all busy these days, so I can hardly blame them if they don’t), but I urge you to check out their blogs and their books. Fine writers, every one of them.

The Case for the Booklover Who Has Everything

Call me old-fashioned, but I love it when people start talking about books and the shelves on which to put them. Here Stylist Home ponders the bookcase: what they’re made of, where to find them and what they can store:

The bookcase is easily the most essential storage unit in any home. Although its name implies that it should be used for books, the versatile piece is also used to organize a variety of everyday items, from electronics and craft supplies to dishes and even clothing. Plus, they tend to be easy to find and affordable.

Meanwhile, from the too-cool-for-school department, don’t show this to David Middleton, or the guys from Top Gear, but AutoGuide shows us what to do with that vintage Jaguar we all have, just sitting around, gathering dust.

Peer Pressure and a Fancy Icepick

Tonight I’ve given into peer pressure and finally upgraded my author page on a Facebook to the new(ish) Timeline. To be honest, I went kicking and screaming: all group pages will be upgraded to Timeline at the end of this month, so it behooved me to get with the program.

The new Facebook format demands a big, horizontal cover image and I chose an icepick, simply because it was the only horizontal I had close to hand. Plus the book I’m working on right now features that most classic of noir weapons so I’ve been spending time thinking about them. I mean, why else would anyone think about them anymore? We have electronic devices to squeeze, chomp and crush our ice, why on Earth would anyone need a pick?

While we’re on the topic of joining things and peer pressure, I also recently signed up for LinkedIn. I’d been hoping it would go away for about the last five years (who needs yet another thing to do?) but since it shows no signs of doing a MySpace and becoming irrelevant before I sign up I figured I’d been get with the program and get Linked.

Now despite peer pressure, I’m not yet on Pinterest. And why? Because I’m just not that pinterested. (Sorry. Couldn’t resist.)

Meanwhile, if you want to, come Like me on Facebook, Connect with me on LinkedIn, Follow me on Twitter. No fun doing all this stuff alone!

When Books and the Internet Merge

We live in a time when only the largest assertions get any attention. Go hard or go home. It may be silly, but it’s true. And you can make those big assertions and they can be empty because, a year from now? Pretty much no one besides Jon Stewart will remember what you said. So when Hugh McGuire of Pressbooks released the part of an upcoming book that says that books and the Internet will merge, he got a fair amount of attention. Even The Guardian sat up and quoted which is always a big, hairy deal.

McGuire’s rationale is not imperfect, but it is fatally flawed (sez me). It all began with a tweet McGuire made a year ago: “The distinction between ‘the internet’ & ‘books’ is totally totally arbitrary, and will disappear in 5 years. Start adjusting now.”

In Book: A Futurist’s Manifesto, to be published by O’Reilly (print) and Pressbooks (electronic) on March 22, McGuire explains further:

If you think about “books”—which are, more or less, collections of words, sentences, and images arranged in a particular way—and compare them to, say, websites—which are, more or less, collections of words, sentences, images, audio, and video, arranged in a particular way—there is a jarring distinction that presents itself. We have decided, for mostly historical reasons, that collections of words and sentences of one kind go into a “book” and collections of words and sentences of another kind go onto the “Internet.”

And while I get what he’s saying here, it isn’t quite as true as he makes it sound. Think, for instance, of people tooling around Stuttgart in Daimlers in the late 1800s. And someone says, “the ‘car’ and the ‘bicycle’ are the exact same thing: mark my words. The distinction between them will soon disappear.”

On one level, all of that is true. Both cars and bicycles have wheels. And you use both of them to get from one place to another. An argument could even be made for the mechanical skill involved in creating/building/maintaining them. And in both cases, you have to know what you’re doing, at least a little bit: you can’t just hop on.

But see, here we are, more than a century later and though there have been times when the technology has blended, we still have cars. We still have bikes. They are distinct. Unique. Separately important. And you can store them in the same place and think about them in the same way but they’re not ever going to be the same thing. And some of us? We need them both.

Come Say “Hi” at the Galiano Literary Festival

On February 24th through 26th, I’ll be at the third annual Galiano Literary Festival on Galiano Island, B.C. If you’ve ever wanted to combine a gorgeous, restful weekend away with a full on literary festival, this is a really good option. Galiano is less than an hour by ferry from the British Columbia mainland, yet you feel about a million miles away.

Along with talking about books and reading at every possible turn, I’ll be giving a presentation on electronic books. From a recent press release:

"E-Books are on everyone's minds right now," Richards says. "And they're impacting every aspect of the book industry." Electronic books are touching all segments: readers, authors, publishers and booksellers. Richards has been dealing with e-books on a personal and professional level and is an acknowledged expert on the topic.

"I'm still very much a dead tree kind of girl," the author says. "I love books and everything about them: the way they feel, the heft in the hand. Even the way they smell."

Even so, says Richards, no one can deny that electronic books are creating new opportunities right across the industry. "It's a whole new world," says the author, who has been delighted to introduce thousands of new readers since she began publishing her own backlist electronically in 2011. Richards' presentation at the Festival takes place early on Saturday afternoon and will lightly approach many of the central issues.

Most of the Festival's activities will take place at the Galiano Oceanfront Inn & Spa on Galiano Island. Visit the Festival web site to check their full offerings of workshops, readings and panels covering a wide variety of book and writing-related topics.

Note: the Festival’s gorgeous poster was designed by my partner, David Middleton, who also designed the covers of all of my gorgeous e-books.

Building a Volcano in Order to Do What?

This just seems like a really bad idea. From The Guardian:

Dimming the sun by engineering the effects of an artificial volcano is a feasible and potentially cost-effective option to reduce temperatures on Earth, the first major study of the practicality of planetary-scale solar radiation management (SRM) concludes.

Say what?

The idea is to combat global warming in a completely pro active way: by creating an artificial volcano to actually dim the sun.

Dimming the sun by engineering the effects of an artificial volcano is a feasible and potentially cost-effective option to reduce temperatures on Earth, a report says.

I mean, sure, it’s an interesting idea, to put it mildly. But it seems to me that, every time we try to mess with stuff like this in a big way, things get worse. It just sounds like an idea with a huge “oops” potential or the plot for a fairly crappy movie probably starring either Bruce Willis or Mel Gibson. Or both.

Stop SOPA and PIPA

The ramifications of the proposed Internet Blacklist Legislation are numerous and potentially dire. The Electronic Frontier Foundation boils it down most succinctly:

The Internet blacklist legislation -- known as PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate and Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House -- invites Internet security risks, threatens online speech, and hampers Internet innovation. Urge your members of Congress to reject this Internet blacklist campaign in both its forms!

As the EFF points out, though it’s possible to spin both bits of legislation in a positive way, but the deeper implications require serious study:

Big media and its allies in Congress are billing the Internet blacklist legislation as a new way to battle online infringement. But innovation and free speech advocates know that this initiative will do little to stop infringement online. What it will do is compromise Internet security, inhibit online expression, and slow growth in the technology sector.

So much has been written on the topic already, with more being added every minute, rather than add to the noise, here are a series of links:

The Electronic Frontier Foundation covers the matter here.

Wikipedia explains in some detail here.

The National Post does its usual great job of coverage here.

Ditto Strombo here.

CNN covers the basics here.

The Assassin’s Tale

Someone asked me recently why I chose to write a story from the point of view of an assassin. I’m saying that more delicately than it was asked. The tone was scathing. Maybe even a little shocked. The implication: why would anyone -- any nice person -- choose to stand on the uneven edge and look at life from a place where emotional collision is the only possible option? (I paraphrase, of course. You’ll have guessed that. The words the questioner asked were different than these.)

The answer is: I don’t really know. There must have been a moment when it was clear to me. When something fueled the question; pushed me forward to find an answer. But then, as always, the story swept me away. I became involved with the character/her special problems/challenges. And the genesis of that story becomes lost in the mists of memory, though -- truly -- it was not so very long ago.

I keep a notebook of… well, of snippets, really. Some of them are ideas for story. More of them are pieces that just fall out of my head. I write them down to keep them from drifting off. Then -- ideally -- when the time is right, I go back and harvest the snippets because sometimes they’ve taken root.

For the story that became “Hitting Back” there are two of these entries. The first:

With practice joy could be prevented. There often wasn’t far to go.

Meaningless, right? Yet it painted a whole situation for me. A whole chill feeling. It created the essence of the she who would become her. And another:

You can’t predict the moments you’ll remember. They’re seldom the ones you’ll think they’ll be. The grand gestures. The big bangs.

Neither of these lines are in “Hitting Back,” but they spoke to me about this character; about the spiritual desolation she felt.

Who was she? Someone who has hit her own bottom and does what she does in an attempt to find her own path out.

If you’ve read the story, you know the main character -- the nameless character -- in “Hitting Back” is broken and is possibly beyond redemption. Her circumstances create her as a somewhat sympathetic character, but it’s an uneasy sympathy for the reader. After all, she’s a hit woman: she kills people for money. There’s only so much sympathy we can spare. She seems to know this, too, and doesn’t ask for it, as she tells us early on:

It’s more of a temperament thing. That’s what I’ve found. More of life lining up in a certain way, showing you what you’re made of. And this probably isn’t true for everyone, but for me it was also a combination of rage and desperation. And, obviously, there’s no road back. Once you’ve taken a life for money, it’s not like you can return to whatever you were doing before. You can’t just go back to being a stockbroker or a gardener or someone’s secretary. For so many reasons, once you turn that corner, you can’t ever find your way home.

So back to the original question: why write about an assassin? I don’t know. I still don’t know. But she’s made an impression, both on me and on her readers. That much I do know. And I feel her larger story stirring. I’ll let you know about that journey when it begins.

Tis the Season...

My silence over the last few weeks has been partly due to being snowed under doing the
final preparations for January Magazine’s Best Books of 2011 feature. The 2011 edition has been our biggest end of your feature ever, with selections in eight categories: fiction, non-fiction, crime fiction (parts one and two), art & culture, cookbooks, books for kids, science fiction & fantasy and biography.

You can read about January’s Best of 2011 feature here, including details about the selection process.

Still hunting for a last minute gift? Head to your favorite neighborhood bookstore with a selection from the Holiday Gift Guide.

I’ll resurface once visions of books stop dancing in my head. (Will that ever actually happen?) Meanwhile I wish you and yours a joyous 2011 holiday season.

Happy reading!

Judging Books

Do we judge books by their covers? Sure we do. It would be dishonest to even pretend otherwise. When I began publishing my backlist in e-book form, I knew going in that covers were going to be an important component. I’d done my homework, plus I haven’t been knocking around this industry for so many years not to have formed a couple (!) opinions. And one of those opinions was that, if anything, a kick-ass cover is even more important for an e-book than it is for a traditional book. After all, when you’re in a bookstore you can pick up a book, feel it, smell it if you like, read a couple of pages, turn it over and read the back; the spine. There are many things you can do before making your buying decision. But with an e-book? There really isn’t much beyond the cover: it’s everything.

Also, when it comes to covers, I have a secret weapon. I’m lucky in that my partner, David Middleton, is a talented graphic artist whose work has appeared in magazines and newspapers around the world. And he’s designed book covers for other people. So I’ve been able to give him a very small design brief (“Make it look like a real book. One everyone wants to read.”) and he’s just gone off and done his thing and I know I’m in good hands because A/ He’s a terrific designer and B/ He’s my first reader, so knows my work as well as anyone and C/ He loves me and has an emotional investment in my success. Also having a physical investment in my success is not pushing things all that much. Add to all this the fact that, over the years we’ve despaired of some of the covers my books have been given by other people and so it’s been awesome to be able to do what we felt was right.

I think the covers of the Madeline Carter books came pretty easily for David. He’d disliked the original print covers and had in mind what the series should look like. In the time before I reverted the rights to the books, when we traveled, David would photograph images he ultimately knew would end up on covers of the Madeline books.

We were in New York last summer, for instance, and stayed on Wall Street. We could actually see the New York Stock Exchange from the terrace of our hotel. So when it came time for David to design the cover for Mad Money, all of the “stock” images he used were his own: the Stock Exchange from that trip, the palm tree from another, the ominous-looking sky from another still.

When it came to the short stories I’ve been publishing as e-books, it was another matter. Though many people have asked if it’s me, the image on the cover of “Hitting Back” is from stock. I could have posed for it but, to be honest, I wouldn’t have known where to get the gun and if I’d gotten my mitts on one, I doubt I would have been able to shove it down the back of my pants the way it is in that image!

Finding the stock image proved to be challenge enough. The main character in “Hitting Back” is a hired killer and David felt he wanted an image of a woman with a gun. Going through multiple stock libraries, though, David reported that he was sickened after a while. He had a hard time finding photos of strong-looking women getting ready to use their gun in a powerful way. What he did find were a lot of images of exploited-looking women holding guns in sexual ways. That wasn’t the look we were going for. At all.

He narrowed his search down to three or four strong images and we both liked the one that made it to the cover best of all. It seemed to me that the cover came together in a real straight-forward way and we were both happy with it.

The first cover for “Dearborn 9-1-1” was a different matter. It took longer than usual and, when David had narrowed it down to a final half dozen or so iterations for me to choose from, I had the feeling he wasn’t delighted.

This time out, not only had he pulled from his own stock, he’d done custom tabletop photography and even created some props: the coffee cup with the money wrapped around it, for instance. And he illustrated the broken road. I liked the cover he finally came up with and we went ahead with it back in late August of this year.

The thing was, though, that while sales of all of my e-books have increased from month-to-month, “Dearborn 9-1-1” remained a non-starter. Had “Hitting Back” not been part of the mix, I would have written the poor sales of “Dearborn 9-1-1” off to it being a short story. But, with all other things being equal, “Hitting Back” was still outselling “Dearborn 9-1-1” 10-1.

When I mentioned this to David, his response was pretty close to instant. “Let me redesign the cover.” That was on Friday. As I write this, it’s Tuesday and the cover has been in place since Sunday night.

This time, he went straight to it and, with no input from me at all, bashed out cover #2 for Dearborn. As usual, he sent me half a dozen iterations, I chose the one I liked best and he went back and tweaked it a bit, and that’s shown here, lower left.

For me, it had to be the red one, as an explosion is central to this book and it seems to imply that. I liked the euro feel of the design and David had no trouble with me choosing that one: as you can see, he’d liked it well enough to render it in yellow and red.

At time of writing, I’m not sure it will make a difference to sales of the book. With luck and a tailwind, I’ll let you know in a few days or weeks. Here’s what is amazing, though: in this brave new world, we can be so lithe! We can respond to the market instantly, make corrections as necessary, change pricing and, yes, even change covers if we want. What will all of this mean to the publishing industry in the long term? I really don’t know. But in the short term, it sure feels wonderful to be in the driver’s seat.

And Then Books Became More Beautiful…

Happy fallout from the e-book revolution: some publishers are finding that, to be successful, they must make their books more beautiful, inside and out. That story is here.

As Long as it Makes You Feel

Publishing my short story, “Hitting Back,” in e-book form was an enlightening journey in so many ways. For instance, I didn’t anticipate the anger the story would draw. The strong feelings.

I no longer remember where the heart of this story came from and how it came to me. I only know that one of the things I wanted to do was explore looking at things from the viewpoint of a character who was, at very least, morally reprehensible.

The nameless main character in “Hitting Back” is an assassin. A hired killer. You give her money; she’ll make someone dead. For me and my own view of the world, there is no place that she can come to this and have it be all right. But she’s a character and she has her reasons. And even though the story is told in the first person, they are not my reasons. And she? She is not me. If there’s something out there that would make me take a life, I can’t imagine what it would be. That is, I can’t conceive of the situation that would allow me to take another human life, let alone take it and continue to be me.

So coming to this character and writing her in a believable way was, at least, a challenge for me. How could you write something about someone with whom you share nothing at all? More: how could you write it from their viewpoint? Yet somehow she -- whoever she is -- came to be. Not only that, in this single story, she came to be with such veracity that she’s struck a nerve with some readers. With a lot of readers. People have written to me to tell me how much they hate the character: how they could really feel the intensity of her pain, yet still couldn’t justify what she’d done.

Here’s the thing, though: there is no justification for what she’s done/for what she does. In a way, that’s the point. You’re not meant to like her. Or identify with her. Or even, particularly, understand her. If I had any intention at all with that character -- if there’s any reaction I wanted from you, gentle reader -- it’s that I wanted you to feel. If, when you read “Hitting Back” you feel anger or if her story saddens or even confuses you, then I guess I’ve hit my mark. I wanted to explore something for which I don’t think there is a good explanation. I wanted to feel -- and have you feel -- what it is to stand on the dark side. And I wanted you to know how good it feels not to have to stay there. How good it was for both of us not to stay there.

Some people have asked me if this character will get her own book. I’m still not sure. I liked the voice in “Hitting Back.” I liked the tone and the pace. To be honest, though, I’m not sure I could spend a whole book in this woman’s company. I’m not sure I could do that to myself, emotionally. And, were I to do it, I’m not sure I could ask you to join me there.

So here’s what I want you to take away from all of this: if you read “Hitting Back” and the emotions that come up in you are strong, I’ve done what I set out to do. If you feel outrage or disagreement or even anger, that’s all okay. My intention, when I write anything, is not necessarily to make you like what I’ve written or even make you like me. I’m only hoping to make you feel.

Quote of the Week: Anne McCaffrey

“The thing is, emotion -- if it’s visibly felt by the writer -- will go through all the processes it takes to publish a story and still hit the reader right in the gut. But you have to really mean it.” -- Anne McCaffrey

It always seemed appropriate that Anne McCaffrey, best known for her various award-winning and bestselling Pern series, was often photographed holding a cat or standing with one of her animals.

Anyone who ever read the Pern books wouldn’t have needed to be told that McCaffrey was an animal lover of the first order. The emotional connection she builds between Pern’s dragons and their keepers is so clearly an idealized version of our own connections with our pets. They probably don’t understand what we’re thinking. And, if they do, they mostly couldn’t be bothered to act on it. On Pern, though, things are different. And the dragons? They understand human hearts.

“What I used to do between writing fits was feed my kids, ride my horse and go shopping for cat and dog food.” -- Anne McCaffrey

Sadly, there is a little less magic in the world today.

No More High School Literary Abuse

If I were forced to choose one word to described Stephen Mitchell’s new translation of The Illiad, it would be “stunning.” And in so many ways. Mitchell gives the ancient poem a new clarity and verve that makes you realize what previous English translations have been missing. And more.

Yesterday, I reviewed the book on January Magazine. Here’s a taste:

If high school literary abuse makes the very mention of anything by Homer roll your eyes up into your head, you’re in for a treat. This new translation of The Illiad (FreePress) by Stephen Mitchell who starts things off on a wonderful note. “We return to the Illiad because it is one of the monuments of our own magnificence. Its poetry lifts even the most devastating human events into the realm of the beautiful, and it shows us how vast and serene the mind can be even when it contemplates the horrors of war.”

The full review is here.

The Edge of Seventeen

I'm getting close to publishing the third Madeline Carter novel, Calculated Loss, in e-book form. As with earlier books in this series, it's been a delight to go back and revisit work I never thought I'd have reason to spend time with again. But because the Carter books are partly technical in nature -- all that stock and trading stuff -- it seemed especially important to go back and give the books a careful edit before republishing them in a new format.

The Madeline Carter books, along with being high action financial thrillers, also have a thoughtful component. I don't remember any more how that came about, but in doing these new edits its been fun to come across moments like this one and wonder what I was thinking when I wrote the words. Sometimes I remember. In this case, though, I do not. I was so immersed in Madeline's world as I wrote, I know they came out of her memories. But, considering Madeline's source material? They are, of course, at least a little bit my feelings, as well.

When I was younger, everything made much more sense. You looked at the world and what you saw was what you believed: the two things didn’t need to be so very different.

When I look back on it now, I sometimes think I’ll never again possess the wisdom I had when I was seventeen. I knew everything at seventeen. I had opinions on politics and world affairs. More than opinions: I saw the mess everyone else had made of everything in the world and just couldn’t understand how they could all be so stupid. If they’d known what I knew -- I thought -- the planet would be a much more sensible place.

The beauty -- and perhaps the curse -- of being seventeen is that you don’t see the entire spectrum. You see the blacks and you see the whites, but you haven’t developed the taste or the sensibility for all the subtle hues in between. Love was love and hate was hate. They were different and not related. And ambivalence? Empathy? Those aren’t in the seventeen year old’s palette and certainly not her vocabulary.

The edit is nearly complete and so is the cover by David Middleton (which is going to fantastic, BTW). Look for the electronic version of Calculated Loss in the next few weeks. If you want to be reminded when it comes out, you can sign up for my e-mail newsletter here.

Are Electronic Books Better than Traditional Ones?

Which is better: e-books or the printed kind?

The question is both complicated and astonishingly simple. We maintain that it’s also deeply personal. Which might be true for me may not hold true for you. Mashable doesn’t agree:

Ever wonder which method of reading is better for you -- electronic screen or printed text?

The answer: There is no difference.

Well, that’s a bit of an oversimplification. For one thing, it’s not the same. For another, it’s different. The experts would not agree:

“There are no disadvantages to reading from electronic reading devices compared with reading printed texts,” according to a study by Research Unit Media Convergence of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) in cooperation with MVB Marketing- und Verlagsservice des Buchhandels GmbH, operator of the ebook platform Libreka!.

Study or no, I’m holding fast on this one. What’s “better” in this instance is likely situational. Am I at my desk? In bed? On a beach? In the bath? And it’s personal. What do you like? What do you need?

In a classroom, I think the electronic version would always rock: give me random access so I can find what I need in haste! On vacation, e-books are clearly better: you can haul a whole library around the world with you if you want. But when I’m reading outside, under my favorite tree and a sudden rainshower shows up, I want don’t want to have to worry about delicate electronic parts. But, see? These things are personal, as well.

In the end, none of it matters. (And what if it did?) Here’s what does: we’re talking about reading. We’re talking about books. That’s the important thing. And the rest of it? That’s like Purolator or UPS: the method of delivery is clearly up to you, what matters is getting the package home in the way that makes the most sense to you.

Turning Books Into Pumpkins

Well it’s getting to be the season, right? So let’s find this year’s pumpkin story. Here we go.

The last couple of years, it seems like everyone keeps talking about the death of the book. What no one warned us about, though: how a book might turn into a pumpkin.

Seriously, though: there’s a part of me that is appalled at this desecration. And another part can’t help but admire the innovation.

Long story short, someone else might want to use this information to turn some of their unwanted books into pumpkins, but you’d best leave my books the hell alone.