While I continue to slog through Freedom, here’s a couple of polls.
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Saving the world, one poll at a time
September 2nd, 2010 Loading ... Loading ... Loading ...Freedom – Rant Alert
August 31st, 2010I am reading Jonathan Franzen’s already acclaimed novel Freedom. I’m not very far along and perhaps my opinion will change, but I confess, so far I am spitting mad.
I’m reading on my iPhone so I don’t know how far I am in terms of paper pages, but I would estimate about 1/20th of the way through. So, really, plenty of time for me to change my mind and admit, perhaps, that I was snookered by the opening pages and Franzen isn’t really clueless.
For anyone who’s been living under a literary rock, Franzen’s novel is 1) hugely anticipated and 2) the subject of controversy unrelated to its merits. Some female writers have pointed out that the New York Times Review of Books seems to privilege white male writers over women and writers of color. They also pointed out that while the NYTRB has reviewed some genre novels they have been exclusively in genres thought to appeal to men — or to put it another way, the NYTRB only reviews popular fiction that is popular with men (regardless of whether women also read the genre which of course, they do). Those two genres are hard core mysteries and thrillers. Why, these authors pointed out, doesn’t the NYTRB like girl-writers and why do to sneer at books that don’t seem to appeal to men? I’m actually not going to comment much on that because its been covered, recovered and misinterpreted by boy-pundits who from what I’ve seen so far have failed, deliberately or otherwise, to understand the point being made.
Anyway, all the hoopla made me decide I would read the dang book to decide for myself if Franzen is indeed a Major Literary Genius. So, I am doing that. I’ve read a lot of books. I went to grad school to learn more about reading books. I studied books with lots of really, really smart people, so it’s not like I’m a dunce about books. I think I’m at the very least an educated judge of literature. I think I can give a moderately informed opinion.
Here we go!
Of course Franzen can write. Doh. The issues I’m having are not related to craft. The issues I’m having are related to a male writer who, so far, seems to think he has something true to say about the female characters in his story.
I didn’t get very far before he’s describing a college-educated woman who is a housewife (there is NOTHING wrong with that), but what he describes is a woman who feels like a man’s idea of what it’s like to be the primary, if not the sole, caretaker of one’s children and family. Which means, I am sorry to say, that many male writers completely fail to understand. The literary canon is chock full of Important Books By Men that purport to say something about women and in fact say much more about what those writers think or wish about women. Worse, the literary canon is full of books that purport to say something about the human condition and in fact represent only the male position.* Real women are obliterated in the pages of these books. Here’s three examples: Madame Bovary, The Grapes of Wrath, Jude The Obscure.
So far, in Freedom, the same obliteration is taking place. The women on these pages are empty. He’s written all around them, describing, giving details of their lives, doling out vignettes and so far I can only say, over and over, as I read, these are not real women. They are a man’s ideas about women. All the big “female” issues are there so far; marriage, children, violence against women and every single one lacks emotional truth. I am sick and tired of reading stories that purport to depict truth about the lives of women and don’t. There are men who can and do. But so far it’s not Franzen.
Like I said, it’s so early in the book and maybe I’ll find out in a bit that somewhere in there Franzen gets around to depicting women in way that doesn’t, once again, misrepresent what it is to be female.
* It’s like all those drug studies that only included men because, gee, women have all that hormonal stuff going on, how abnormal is that? And hey, oops! That drug has lots of unpleasant and deadly effects on women. Who knew? Too bad 51% of the population isn’t normal.
Ooh, this sounds good!
August 26th, 2010I will totally read this book when it come out.
Thriller
USA Today bestselling medical thriller writer Dr. Leonard Goldberg’s PATIENT ONE, the first in a new series, about an emergency room physician and former US Army commando and an adrenaline-junkie trauma nurse locked in a hospital where the US president and the Russian president are rushed after being poisoned at a state dinner, and where terrorists have locked down the hospital, pitched as “Die Hard meets The West Wing”, to Terri Bischoff at Midnight Ink, by Scott Mendel at the Mendel Media Group (World English).
This and That with Poll
August 26th, 2010First off, this:
Period Speech
I know this is not a brand new one, but it’s still funny. xkcd so often is.
I’m pretty much over my cold but now my son has it. I’m going to do another poll because I can. (You can select more than one answer!)
Loading ...Stand Back! Carolyn Does Math!
August 22nd, 2010NB: If you’re reading this in a feed, there’s a poll and I think you have to click through to the post to actually participate in the poll. Which I admit is a silly poll. But whatever. This is my blog.
I’ve been thinking about DNF books.
Specifically, I’m thinking of instituting a rule about how many eye rolls it takes before a book becomes a DNF (Did Not Finish). You know how you’re reading a book and you encounter something so stupid you roll your eyes? Everything’s cool until the hero stops in the middle of saving the free world to take a call from his broker and buy 15,000 shares of Amalgamated Wigets. I know. Total Eye Roll moment.
Here’s how it would work. A book becomes a DNF when some threshold number of eye rolls (X) is equal to 1 eye roll per some ratio of pages (NP) per the total number of pages in the book (TP).
We can’t set a constant value for the number of pages read per eye roll because that would not account for the variation in total pages across books. A shorter book should have fewer pages per eye roll than a longer one. That is to say, should a longer book have more allowable eye rolls because there are more pages? Or is there some set number of eye rolls allowed per book regardless of the number of pages?
How’s a poor reader to figure out when to abandon ship? Let’s do some math.
Suppose the value of X is not constant:
DNF where (TP/NP) >= X
Let’s plug in a few values and see what we get. Suppose TP= 324 and suppose we decide 1 eye roll per 20 pages is our threshold (therefore NP = 20) . We do the following calculation:
324/20 = 16.2
If X= 16.2 then for a book of 324 pages, 1 eye roll every 20 pages would be acceptable for a total of 16.2 eye rolls. That seems like a lot to me, but then I’m strict. You’d have to read with a pen and a note pad or something to keep track, but hey, it’s science and there’s record keeping involved.
What if our tolerance is lower? Suppose it’s 1 eye roll per 50 pages.
TP = 324
NP = 50
324/50 = 6.48
So, this would mean that the rule would allow a total of 6.48 eye rolls for the entire book. You could totally have that rule though. Before you start every book, you note the total number of pages, set a value for NP and derive your eye roll tolerance level.
But wait. This number seems high to me. Eye rolls are eye rolls, and there should be a limit no matter what. Personally, after my third eye roll, I’m thinking of throwing the book against the wall, regardless of its length.
So, let’s do that math. The formula’s a bit different this time since this time we must solve for NP:
TP/X=NP
TP = 324
X = 3
NP=108
Ah. This would mean that for every 108 pages read in a book of 324 pages, we should encounter only 1 eye roll. If you get to page 150 and have already encountered 2 eye roll moments, then it’s time to give up. Probably. Unless the sex is really hot or you’re dying to know what happens to the heroine. Or something.
What if the book is only, say, 200 pages?
TP=200
X=3
NP = ?
200/3=66.6
I know you’re all thinking, Holy Heck! This formula means a 200 page book is Satan! For me, yes. I’m thinking the value of X might be different for every person, so you’d have to figure out what number of pages equals your Satan book and then never ever read a book of that length. This is really handy!
I can perform this calculation and not only know exactly when I have reached my DNF point but avoid my Satan book.
And now (ta da!!!!) for the whole point of this post: testing to see if my polling widget thingee works:
ETA: Looks like the poll does not work at all. Darn. But click anyway. Or answer in the comments or something. I fixed the poll! Yay!
Loading ...Or maybe I should never do math ever.
What do you think?
Facebook vs. Twitter – Get Ready to rumble
August 21st, 2010Somebody somewhere, that I am too lazy to look up, said something the the effect that one’s Twitter followers tend to be friends while Facebook followers were — I forget, something that wasn’t friends. The implication was that Facebook was better for promotion.
At last part of that statement, in my opinion, is wrong. Your Twitter followers may well end up becoming your friends because the medium allows for real time, or near real time conversation.
My lack of engagement with Facebook might be at least partly my fault because I don’t care for Facebook. I find the interface confusing and I hate doing anything that requires me to sit there and figure it out. I hate that Facebook makes me feel like I’m taking a security risk every time I log in and that with every new “feature” I have to worry what tricky new thing they’ve done to get at and share my personal information. Like burying the logout button with, I presume, the hope that people will stay logged in and allow them to track their web surfing outside of Facebook. Anyway, I’m pretty sure I’m not leveraging Facebook, but from what I’ve seen, I don’t have time, either.
Worse, I worry about unintentionally over-communicating on Facebook. I don’t want to continually say, hey, buy my book!! all the time. People will hate me if I do that. Unfortunately, I end up doing practically nothing. I completely under-communiciate. Sigh. I removed my Twitter feed from Facebook after my brother complained about all the tweets.
At any rate, not much happens for me over at Facebook. I get friended by other authors at about 3 times the rate of readers. I think. Usually, it’s pretty easy to tell the author pics from the kind of picture a regular person uses, but every now and then I’m surprised by an author whose photo looks like it was taken on a hot day at picnic by a relative who was drunk. Authors tend to read a lot so I almost always friend them back. But I don’t think they’re fans of mine. I think they’re hoping I’m a fan of theirs. And, you know, sometimes I am. I posted my ARC contest over at Facebook and I’m not sure it brought me any additional traffic. The actual friends I have on Facebook are people who were already my friends In Real Life. I don’t think I’ve made any new friends as a result, although I have made some fun contacts — a cousin I didn’t know about, for example. The daughter of a Turkish pen pal I had in High School — now that was great!
In short, probably through my own fault, Facebook doesn’t seem to do much for me book promotion wise.
Twitter is another matter. There are probably ten or twenty people I have met through Twitter who I now consider friends. I met up with about half of them at RWA and it was lovely to meet them in person. I was thrilled, in fact, to meet them IRL. It was quite clear that the badges should have included Twitter IDs. I was constantly hearing “What’s your twitter ID?” or “Oh, You’re @[whoever]!!” Several conversations that started on Twitter have gone off line for further, deeper conversation.
Here’s an interesting Twitter story: At RWA I met a woman from New York who, I found out, was staying in Oakland CA (not too far from me) for a time. We ended up following each other on Twitter and after I got home, I saw a tweet from her regarding a pic of the Golden Gate Bride. I tweeted back and asked if she was still in the area and if so, if she would ever be coming North. The answer was yes indeed! Two days later, pretty much arranged entirely via Twitter, I met her, a good friend of hers who was visiting CA and her mother at a cafe in my home town. We had a great conversation about all kinds of things. Conversely, only once has someone on Facebook inquired about meeting me. It was a much younger man who thought I was good looking and well, he was bored and in my home town. Of course, I didn’t see his request until several days later (my fault, see above) when it was too late. Just as well as I feel it would not have been wise to meet up in any event.
When I decided to give away the rest of my ARCS, I posted it on Twitter and within five minutes all the ARCs were spoken for.
For me, Twitter works because I don’t have to log into some monolithic site to see what might be going on. Unlike FB, Twitter comes to me. I look at my feed half a second after I decide I want to. It’s right there on my desktop. If I must work without interruption, I can turn it off. The stuff that applies to me gets sorted into a single place for me to look who’s talking to me or about me. I can join any conversation I want to, whether someone follows me or not. Anyone who doesn’t like what I say or how often I say it can just unfollow me. And I can do the same.
Last night I decided to unfriend someone on Facebook because I, personally, found his politics offensive. It took me fifteen minutes to figure out how to do that. Seriously. I had to go to the online help to find out how. That spells “Horrible User Interface.”
Another issue for me is that I have a low quality internet connection, barely half a step up from dial up. This means that I spend a lot of time waiting for web pages to render, including Facebook. And 75% of the time, my connection drops and I have to start over. Often, I give up. The effect of this on my Twitter stream is much less frustrating. Sometimes I have to try a few times before tweet gets through, but I don’t have to sit there waiting for ages to see if anything is going to happen.
So there you have it. I am Facebook impaired and a Twitter fan girl. I like making friends and I have made actual In Real Life friends on Twitter and none on Facebook.
How about you?
Sales News
August 15th, 2010I guess I can now report that I have signed a contract with Berkley Books for two more historicals. Yay! I deliver the MSS in 2011 and they will be out in 2012. It’s a long wait, I know, but considering that this sale almost didn’t happen at all, I am quite pleased.
Also, Scandal and Indiscreet have sold in Turkey. There were two publishers who put in offers and the loser came back and sweetened their offer. I did end up accepting that offer. So! Very exciting for me! My agent says that’s never happened to her before.