The Good Book Review

Most book reviews are not entertaining. They grind axes that should best be left in the woodshed. They get really snarky. Sometimes they don’t review the book at all, instead reporting only on the reviewer’s place in life and his/her attitude toward the author.

At a minimum, a good book review should include a brief synopsis, follow the plot, address the characters, riff the dialogue, and comment on the pacing. Also, it should cover the story mechanics, flow with the language, and convey the message of the story. In short, a good book review should make its point with focus, clarity, and substance.

A good book review should have both positive and negative points, with a balance. Sometimes you write a review with the intention of giving a new writer a leg up; in that case, you may take it a little easier on him/her than you would on, say, the Larssons of the world. Sometimes, though, your true, toxic feelings toward the story are so powerful that you have to just let rip; in that case, it’s a lot easier if the author has already bought his yacht with the massive profits. Always, you need balance, because, as a reviewer, your integrity is on the line.

A good book review should also include an excerpt or two. Not only do you want to give a potential reader an opportunity to sample the stuff, but you also want to remain true to the material. An excerpt keeps you honest.

A good book review should address the two most important aspects of the reading experience: the reader’s enjoyment and the story’s consistency. Enjoyment is a subjective thing, of course, but in the end, you have to pass judgment. That may be why the rating system is so popular; it’s just so easy. 

Consistency, on the other hand, should be totally objective. We’ll cover that in the next installment: Synthetic, but Consistent.

Focus, Clarity, Substance

When I was in high school, my English teacher told me three words that I have never forgotten: focus, clarity, substance. If you fulfill the promise made by these three, she advised, you will be a long way toward effective writing.

Wow. How obvious, I thought. Of course, those ideas which are most obvious are often the most brilliant. What a different world we would inhabit if only decisions were made based on the obvious, rather than the implied, or worse yet, the rationalized.

Focus requires discipline – discipline to avoid tangents, discipline to stick to the subject matter, discipline to stay the course. There is no substitute. The only alternative would be a stream-of-consciousness, and that’s no alternative at all. Unless you’re a Buddhist monk staring at a cave wall for forty years and training your mind with laser focus, then your consciousness probably streams like an explosion of confetti. You’ve got all kinds of thoughts roiling around up there, moving in a thousand different directions at a million miles an hour.

Especially these days. Our generation was raised on television, and we’ve spawned a new generation raised on Internet. Let’s be honest: neither of those encourage patient, sober, critical thought. With insidious infiltration, television and the Internet have infected our collective minds with a strange, voyeuristic suspension of disbelief. People are just plain credulous. They are.

Which brings us to clarity. Clarity is a harsh mistress, whose raw, bright light generally reveals all the ugly little imperfections you would rather cover up. You can believe what you see, or you can see what you believe, but there doesn’t seem to be much middle ground. With respect to my old English teacher, clarity was the ability to express that rawness. There is a fundamental disconnect between your thoughts and their expression, and bridging that divide determines the level of clarity in your message.

All of which culminates in substance. Here is where the rubber meets the road. After all, who doesn’t want a little detail in their otherwise skeletal plot? Without such supporting material, any message would devolve into empty shouting. In fact, the most effective messages are those which go unspoken, because the reader already knows them to be true. By creating an entirely consistent, synthetic world via the printed word, you can let the idea communicate itself.

I’m not sure if that is what my English teacher was getting at, but hey – it was high school, alright?

Tournament Profession

The famous Freakonomics professor, Steven Levitt, in his famous analysis of drug dealers, used the term “tournament profession” to describe any line of work in which only a very small number of people actually succeed, while an infinitely larger number of people underneath them toil for little or no reward. Recently, I’ve been reading a lot about “self-publishing” being such a profession. That’s hard to dispute. 

Here is a partial list of the things which I’ve done to promote myself and my book, Machines of Kali. I’m having fun, but it’s a little appalling. Without even trying too hard, I’ve already established four separate Internet presences.

I have a website which is hosted by my domain name provider. This website is itself pointed to by several other domain names which I own, and I have at least one email account associated with it. This website consists of a splash page, an illustrative cover page, a plot synopsis, a chapter sample, an artist bio, and a link to my book’s Amazon page. I concocted the entire website myself, but only because I’ve had so much experience doing this in the real world, it would have been silly to outsource it. 

I’m already on my book’s 2^nd book cover, both of which I conceived and executed. I could have paid someone else to do this. Many authors do just that. With all due modesty, though, I couldn’t think of anyone I knew who was better at art direction. Doing a cover, however, required some basic leg/grunt work. I bought a font collection from my local computer store, asked my printer to scan some pictures for me, learned GIMP from scratch, acquired several images from IStockPhoto, and so on.

I opened a Blogspot account, which you are reading. I actually enjoy writing this stuff. It’s not heavy lifting or anything. The only cumbersome aspect is dealing with a 3^rd party, but I know that I don’t want to host my own blogging site.

I opened a Twitter account. This was especially weird for me, because I don’t yet grok Twitter. However, I’m starting to see its charm. It’s like any other strange new application – difficult to grasp at first, but indispensable over time. It was the same way with Lotus 1-2-3 back in the 80s, just as it was with Mosaic in the 90s. (FYI: those were, respectively, the first popular spreadsheet and the first proper Internet browser.) 

Naturally, I had to update my Amazon author page with everything listed here, including my email, website, Twitter handle, etc.. There are so many other little bullet items, but I’m only scratching the surface. It’s just a lot of stuff, and that's the tournament profession.

GIMP Uber Alles, Part 3

Computer graphics apps are bursting at the seams with cool features to tweak and manipulate your images. If you’re at all familiar with visual arts concepts like color spectrums, contrast fades, and like, you know how prevalent these are in even the most simple programs. The sophistication only rises the further you go, starting with MS Paint on your Windows Accessory Menu and moving up the scale to monumentally expensive, custom installations like the Avatar suites. For most of us in the middle, of course, there is PhotoShop, and its open-source counterpart, GIMP.

I made my first book cover with MS Paint, and it showed. For my next attempt, I used GIMP. What a revelation. If I hadn’t had the experience of using Paint, I would never have appreciated the magnitude of the upgrade.

Here’s the deal. The most critical difference between a serious image processing program like GIMP and a simple graphics app like MS Paint is its ability to maintain multiple, separate layers of the same image. For instance, take a simple logo on top of a photograph. Think print ad. In a graphics app like Paint, you would have to write your logo text directly onto a JPEG image. If you needed to move the logo, then you had to undo the text and start over. With GIMP, you would load the JPEG image into one layer, then create a wholly separate layer for your logo. This you could color, distort, and manipulate any way you want. You could see how it would interact with the image underneath it, then move it, resize it, or do anything else that the occasion fancied. 

For my new book cover, I decided I needed multiple elements. The first thing I did was troll IStockPhoto.com for appropriate imagery. My book featured 1) a beautiful woman, 2) a full moon, 3) a satellite, 4) a city at night, 5) guns, 6) cars, and 7) circuitry. For each of these, I copied a dozen different thumbnails. By loading these into separate layers in GIMP, I was able to recombine them endlessly, trying new combinations at will.

 Eventually satisfied that my mock-up was as good as it could be, I procured the images themselves. When I replaced the blurry thumbnails with these high-resolution files, it was like - Bam! The effect was immediate. With these real layers in place, I spent the next week rotating, moving, scaling, distorting, shading, colorizing, cropping, and doing everything else I wanted within GIMP. 

Wow. It was such a better experience. But don’t take my word for it. Here are my two book covers, side by side. See for yourself.

GIMP Uber Alles, Part 2

Last week I wrote about my experience making a book cover with MS Paint. This week I talk about GIMP. For those who don’t know, GIMP, or the GNU Image Manipulation Program, is an open-source program that does approximately the same thing as PhotoShop. There are other such programs, of course, but I’m using GIMP here as an example of a “real” image processor.

First, a little history about graphics tools. A long time ago, I was an art school student. It was so long ago, in fact, that I remember when cut-n-paste meant that you literally cut out a section from the physical paper and pasted it with glue to another location. I’m not joking. I had a weapons cache of X-Acto blades, and I was damned good with them. I was so steady, I coulda been a brain surgeon.

Then, in the mid-80s, computers came along and blew up the graphic design industry. At first, Apple's Macintoshes ruled with their flag ship application, Quark XPress, otherwise known as the Biggest Thing Ever. Eventually, though, a computer science professor from the University of Utah founded a little firm called Adobe Systems, several other products came onto the market, and Apple’s market hegemony crumbled. (We all know how that turned out.) During this digital flood, the old-fashioned practice of physical art production, under the relentless onslaught of these virtual simulations, faded into the sunset. Forever.

And thank God for that. Doing this stuff on computers is soooo much better. Going from X-Acto blades to mouse clicks is like going from horse-drawn carriages to automobiles, and going from MS Paint to GIMP is like going from an old-model P.O.S. to a shiny new Porsche. There is no substitute. Simply put, GIMP is freakin’ AWESOME.

The trade-off (and there’s always a trade-off) is the learning curve, which is apparently modeled after the north face of K-9. Since I didn’t know anything about graphics programs, ramping up on GIMP was a brutally daunting undertaking.

In the first place, the “documentation” is typical of open-source: nominal, minimal, execrable – not a single example to be found, and no pictures at all. To augment my education, I bought a hard-copy manual. It topped out at a thousand pages, but it was only marginally better than the online documentation. Were it not for the example files to be downloaded from its companion website, it, too, would have been a disaster.

In frustration, I turned to the Internet. I searched on focused queries like, “How do I make chrome text in GIMP?” or “Why doesn’t my airbrush work in GIMP?” Of the top ten results returned by Google or Bing, at least one would get me halfway there. Also, interspersed with the dross, there were some pleasant surprises, like the useful GIMPTricks videos posted on YouTube.

In the fullness of time, I noodled together a functional understanding of GIMP. There were many harsh moments in my learning, but with lots of iterations, and lots of back-ups, I eventually got the hang of it.

And you want to know something? It was totally worth it.

Next week: Using GIMP to create a book cover.

GIMP Uber Alles, Part 1

When I put together my first cover, I had a few ground rules. I wasn’t going to violate copyright. I’ve been there. Copyright is sacrosanct. Remember Napster and Metallica? I was in the Metallica camp all the way. Artists get ripped off and exploited enough. Geometrically scaling that destruction via your home computer is beyond the pale. It’s a crime against humanity.

Problem was, I didn't have much of a seed pot. I scanned a few copyright-safe images, bought myself a fresh set of fonts, and went to work on my crappy little MS Paint project. By the time I had finished torturing the image, I thought, “Well, there’s a fine example of cover art.” 

Honestly, it wasn’t so awful. It had a big problem, though. It didn’t sell the book. Ignorant of the context, I had modeled it after some of my favorite covers. Naturally, these covers graced books by my favorite authors. These guys required no selling. In fact, they were the selling points. Their covers generally put their names right at the top, in big bold letters. So guess what mine looked like?

Flash forward a few weeks. After reading a few books and trolling a few websites, I realized that I was going to have to do a better job. So I sucked it up and went back to my old Linux box. I returned to something that I had been noodling for years: GIMP.

I read that GIMP is an open-source knock-off of PhotoShop. I don’t know anything about that. I could never afford the big price tag of PhotoShop. I was aware of one thing, though. You got to have the right tools. So I went to work on GIMP.

 

Next week: the GIMP Experience.

How Simple Can It Get?

I’ve been reading a lot of e-books recently. I don’t mean books that have been ported to the electronic format. I mean books that were never in hardcopy to being with. These are written by a new class of writers. I’m talking about the self-published, the quick-to-embrace-new-technology, the guys who write and upload and repeat. 

What’s remarkable is how simple these stories are. We’re restricted to a handful of characters, only the barest of descriptions, context-setting as an afterthought, and just enough dialogue to get the ball rolling. These writers have a style, and it’s very pure. They’re like those guitar-bass-drum power trios that really crank it out. You listen to them, and you think – it’s not that hard. It rocks. 

One such hallmark of this story telling style is its immediacy. The authors jump right into their tale. There’s no boring exposition. There’s no obligatory family-scene-before-the-massacre. They just go right to the massacre. I found it a little jarring, at first, but then, I found myself appreciating it. 

At this point, aren’t we all a little jaded? Even in today’s age of cross-genres and combo-pack stories, pretty much every reader beyond grade school knows what to expect. A thriller starts with a sensitive, heart-warming portrait of that person most close to the hero’s heart. Your first thought: that person’s doomed. Then you have to keep reading until the inevitable moment. It’s painful for the character, but worse, it’s boring for you. These e-books, like they’re excising a sore, simply cut that out.

And the plot lines are so simple. I’ve read a few e-books recently that had almost no plot at all, other than the hero-villain conflict. I suppose Hollywood has done that to all of us. Their compressed story format has dramatically shortened both our attention span and their linear range. Depending on who you talk to, this plot simplification either distills the story to its purest essential elements, or dumbs it down to its lowest common denominators.

          I’m also surprised at the characters. They’re so familiar. Regular guys working regular jobs, they’re thrown into extraordinary situations. They’re fighting space aliens, taking on the Mob, romancing the beauties, and saving the day. But they're just normal people! It used to be that the Everyman was unusual. Now, everyone’s an Everyman. Are there no more exceptional characters, or have they simply returned to their neverland of make-believe?