Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Category Archives: Books ‘n’ Authors
This looks like a good one
When I bought The 2007 Guide to Literary Agents on Barnes and Noble’s website the other day, the site suggested I look at Noah Lukeman’s The First Five Pages, A Writer’s Guide to Staying Out of the Rejection Pile. Sounded worthwhile, so I bought it, figuring if it could teach me even one new thing, it would be worth the purchase price.
The author is a literary agent and former editor. His goal is to let you, the writer, know what criteria an editor or agent uses to toss manuscripts into the round file.
While evaluating more than ten thousand manuscripts in the last few years, I was able to set forth definite criteria, an agenda for rejecting manuscripts. This is the core of The First Five Pages: my criteria revealed to you.
Here’s the first part of the table of contents, with my words of explanation in brackets. Part I is called “Preliminary Problems”:
Presentation [manuscript format]
Adjectives and Adverbs
Sound [rhythm]
Comparison [use and misuse of imagery]
Style
Part II is “Dialogue,” Part III, “The Bigger Picture” (show vs. tell, characterization, pacing, etc.) I suspect I’ll have much more to say about The First Five Pages as I work through it, but here’s my early opinion: this book looks like a keeper. I’ll keep you posted.
And since I got slammed at work today and I’m having trouble keeping my eyes open, this is all I have for you tonight. Sorry!
In fact, this day reached such an acme of suckitude, I was tempted to begin a new Thirteen: Thirteen Unglamorous Things about my Profession.
1. “I hope you don’t catch what I got,” she said after coughing in my face.
2. “Cover your mouth when you cough,” the child’s mother said after her old-enough-to-know-better child fired off his fifth snot rocket.
3. “I didn’t mean to do that,” my nosebleeder said, gazing with wonder at the pointillistic spray of blood across my eyeglasses and facemask.
4. “GhhhRRRAAARGgggllll omigod RAARGH RAAAAAAAARGH,” my nosebleeder said as we both discovered what had happened to all that blood she’d been swallowing over the past four hours.
Ugh. I don’t think I could manage thirteen of these without making myself sick.
D.
SBD: Harvey, meet Eck. Eck, Harvey.
I must confess to irrational reasons for avoiding Erin O’Brien‘s novel, Harvey & Eck. True, Dean liked it, and so did SxKitten and Shaina. But I had these disturbing childhood associations with the word Eck — Los Angeles-based off-the-beaten-path-religion associations. You see, in Eckankar, ECK = spirit, but also represents the audible life stream, and at that point my eyes glaze over.
Let me reassure potential readers that Harvey & Eck has nothing to do with audible life streams, although it does have lots of spirit.
In Harvey & Eck, Harvey (short for Harvest Moon) writes letters to Eck (short for Timothy J. Ecklenburg), who at first is little more than a name she has chosen at random from the phone book. Harvey is young, broken-hearted, soon to be unemployed, and pregnant, and she has no one to talk to. So she decides to spill her guts to Eck.
Before long, Eck responds in kind, but since Harvey’s letters have no return address, Eck has no choice but to save his letters in a cigar box. From the outset, the relationship is uneven: Eck learns everything about Harvey, while for Harvey, Eck remains a black box mystery. The reader, of course, gets to see both their worlds.
Pimpage: Summer Devon
Bam has an interview with Summer Devon, a really GOOD one, too. If you leave a comment, you have a chance to win Summer’s Taming Him AND an Amazon gift certificate.
You heard it here first. Um, maybe.
D.
Three old favorites
From Kate:
The Little-Known Favorites Meme. Rules: List and describe three of your favorite books that other people might not be familiar with. Then tag five people. See, easy!
My first thought: It really is easy! I could do a Thirteen on this. Then I took a look at my library and realized how mainstream I really am. Eclectic, perhaps, but mainstream nonetheless.
Below, I’ve selected three books that meet both criteria: little known and well loved (by me). At the very least, you need to see if I tagged ya.
Jonathan Gold wins Pulitzer!
Los Angeles Weekly food critic Jonathan Gold has won a Pulitzer for food criticism. Gold writes Counter Intelligence, a regular feature (variously at the Weekly and the Times, over the years) in which Gold explored LA’s ethnic holes-in-the-wall to the delight of many — including Karen and me.
When I get the chance, I’ll update this with snippets of Gold. Suffice to say the man richly deserves that Pulitzer.
***
When writing about food, the key to excellence is love. Passion. From Jonathan Gold’s 99 Essential L.A. Restaurants, take this, for example. Feel the love:
Wat Thai
At the northern end of drab, endless Coldwater Canyon Boulevard lies this massive, gold-encrusted Thai Buddhist temple, grounds crowded with parishioners, saffron-robed monks, and small children who run about as if the temple were a private playground. On weekend afternoons and during festivals, the air around the temple almost throbs with the smells of Thai cooking: meat grilling at satay stands, the wheat pancakes called roti sizzling on massive griddles, pungent, briny salt crabs being pounded for the ultraspicy green-papaya salad. This spread may be more or less the equivalent of the smothered chicken and collard greens eaten after services at some African-American churches, and it feels just as homely; the inexpensive Thai feast is open to everyone who cares to come. 8225 Coldwater Canyon Blvd., North Hollywood, (818) 785-9552, www.watthaiusa.org/engmenu.html. Thai.
D.
Give Him hell, Kurt
From Cat’s Cradle, the Bokononist Calypso:
Someday, someday this world will have to end,
And our God will take things back that He to us did lend.
And if, on that sad day, you want to scold our God,
Why go right ahead and scold Him. He’ll just smile and nod.
Kurt Vonnegut died today at 84. When I was a kid growing up in the 70s, Vonnegut introduced me to the Big Questions — fate, free will, the truth and falsehood of religion. So much. I have warm feelings towards him, much as I do for any wise teacher.
Rest in peace.
Sorry for the brief post, but my Internet is down, and it’s a bitch blogging on the Blackberry. See ya tomorrow.
D
SBD: Too stupid to live!
For a change, I have some real, honest to Gaaaaah bitchery for today’s Smart Bitches Day post. To wit: Maddie Faraday, heroine of Jennifer Crusie’s Tell Me Lies, is too stupid to live.
I don’t often bail out on a book when I’m past the 100 page mark. I really don’t usually bail on mysteries, no matter how far I am into the book. But in Tell Me Lies, I made it past page 200 and THEN bailed.
I don’t care who done it. As far as I’m concerned, Maddie deserves to get framed with the murder of her cheating, embezzling husband Brent. She has done nothing to earn the love and protection of stock-hunky-hero C.L.; she hasn’t even earned the love of the Requisite Crusie So-Ugly-Is-It-Even-a-Dog?® dog, Phoebe. She definitely doesn’t deserve to retain custody of her lovely daughter Em. The woman will be the death of that child. There should be a special Darwin Award for people who take not only themselves but their children out of the gene pool.
I mean — seriously. Hiding the murder weapon in a Spam casserole? Why is she even touching the murder weapon any more than she has to? And the crap she does with the embezzled money. Why, why, why? Why, if not to further the plot?
And that’s the real bitch of this novel. If Maddie’s gonna get set up, let the murderer set her up. She shouldn’t set herself up. She especially shouldn’t set herself up since she knows she’s the number one suspect!
Soon after Maddie stashed the gun and the money, I closed the book in disgust. Enough already. I admit I’m tempted to flash to the end, but only if it’s to read about Maddie cleaning the Women’s Prison toilets with a bristleless toothbrush; to see her visited by C.L. with a new girlfriend it tow (“Sorry, Maddie, but she was there, and you weren’t. Have a good life”); and to watch as her daughter is raised by Maddie’s evil in-laws, who will lie to the girl and tell her that her mother died in an attempted prison break.
Yeah, sure, I’m cruel. I’m a bastard, in fact. But I wasted over 200 pages of my reading life on that book and I want ’em back.
Oh — forgot to say it. Better late than never.
Spoilers!
D.
Who’d wanna live in a world without wood?
Today’s Smart Bitches Day post brings us Summer Devon’s Futurelove, an ebook I’ve wanted to read ever since I heard the premise. More on that in a moment. As those of you who have tried to get me to read your pdfs and ebooks know, I’m hopelessly slow at reading things off my computer. Dyslexic, in fact. I keep wanting to turn the page. The fingerprints are a bitch.
With the advent of my Blackberry, Summer’s erotica opened up to me like a nubile vixeny refugee from Barely Legal. Come to me, Summer! Show me your stuff!
Here’s the premise. In the future, I don’t know how people reproduce, but it doesn’t involve penises or vaginas. Clones, perhaps, or test tubes. Maybe they duplicate particularly attractive people using a transporter, just like they did in those old Star Trek episodes, Captain Kirk, Space Queen, and Good Kirk, Bad Kirk. I don’t know. Summer doesn’t tell us, and I don’t care, because this is erotica, not science fiction, and in erotica no one bloody cares how anything works as long as people with hot bodies are getting laid and getting laid frequently.
In the future, all manner of physical defects have been genetically engineered out of the human race. The men all have hot bods, they’re super-strong, they don’t fart or snore or leave their dirty socks lying around or ignore their girlfriends just because Monday Night Football is on and if they’re eating anything in bed, it sure ain’t crackers. They lack all of those 21st Century flaws — which would be cool, of course, except for the nonfunctional penis problem.
Grrrr followup question
And now I’m curious about memoirs and eager to read someone with more insight and honesty than Frank McCourt. Any suggestions?
I haven’t read many autobiographies. Bette Davis, Benvenuto Cellini, that’s about it (how’s that for a pair?) I think I can sling the memoirist BS fairly well, but I’m sure I have a lot to learn from the masters.
So . . . who are the masters?
D.
Grrrrr
I enjoyed Angela’s Ashes so much that I bought the sequel, ‘Tis, as fast as I could. ‘Tis is the second book of Frank McCourt’s memoirs, and it’s as compelling as Angela’s Ashes — or at least it is in the first half. But as the ending approaches, I find myself getting tremendously pissed off at McCourt.
Spoiler alert.
Folks familiar with the story (either the book or the movie) know that McCourt’s father, a good man when sober, was rarely sober. When his children were young, he left his family to live a drunkard’s life in London.
I don’t mind so much that Frank McCourt falls into much the same trap; what I do mind is his lack of honesty. Or, rather, the inconsistency of his honesty. Sometimes, he’s so unflinchingly honest you want to kick his teeth in, he’s been such a heel. But when he talks about the breakdown of his first marriage and how he left his wife and young daughter (a week before her eighth birthday), I see a man who refuses to take full responsibility, choosing instead such meaningless lies as
The old Irish had told me, and my mother had warned me, Stick with your own. Marry your own. The devil you know is better than the devil you don’t know.
. . . the bullshit a man tells himself when he’s trying to come up with excuses. Earlier, referring to his wife, Alberta,
She’d want to go antiquing along Atlantic Avenue and I’d want to chat with Sam Colton in his Montague Street bookshop or have a beer at the Blarney Rose with Yonk Kling.
By this time in ‘Tis, McCourt has given us many examples of his alcoholic binges. He spends his Friday evenings drinking with his teacher friends, standing up Alberta for their dinner dates, at first calling her drunk, later not calling her at all; so we’re left to imagine, at this point, precisely how often McCourt has indulged in beers at the Blarney Rose. We’re left to imagine it because this is one of the few times where McCourt doesn’t confess to the full truth.
I gather McCourt has made peace with his daughter, since he dedicates the book to her, but Alberta is conspicuously absent from the dedication and acknowledgments. Am I imagining hostility? I don’t think so. It saddens me to see this man whom I have come to admire through his writing turn out to be such an utter shit to his family and not even have the courage to fully accept his roll in the debacle. When the moment finally comes, he separates himself from his actions as much as one can with the written word:
Around her eighth year she announced, Look, Dad, I want to go to school with my friends. Of course, she was pulling away, going independent, saving herself. She must have known her family was disintegrating, that her father would soon leave forever as his father had long ago and I left for good a week before her eighth birthday.
If he makes good, I don’t see it in the few pages which follow.
I bought McCourt’s most recent memoir, Teacher Man, but I presume it focuses on his experiences in education. I’m not sure what I’m looking for here. Honesty? Penance?
Grrrr.
D.