writing

widows and orphans in rags, oh my

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ Leave a comment

The last time I printed anything on paper, about seventeen years ago, I didn't know anything about widows and orphans, so I didn't worry about them. Looking over the little chapbooks where A Sane Woman first appeared, I can see that I wasn't worried in the least, because there are widows and orphans all over the place. Or at least I think there are.

What I mean by that is this: I've learned about widows and orphans since 1990, but only in a very general way, since the concept doesn't apply to anything I do. But I knew that you weren't supposed to have a single line from the end of a paragraph roll over to appear at the top of the next page. The rest of it was a little vague, and I wasn't sure if that was a "widow" or an "orphan." Probably, I thought, the other term referred to starting a new paragraph with a single line at the bottom of the previous page.

I assumed that, once I started to investigate this seriously, I'd be able to figure out which were the widows and which were the orphans. It turned out to be much more complex than that. I checked several sources, including usually reliable ones like The Chicago Manual of Style and Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, and the main thing they agree on is that a single line from the end of a paragraph is a "widow" when it appears at the beginning of the following page. That's about it.

Chicago also says that the first line from a new paragraph should not appear alone at the end of a page, but it's not clear if this is considered a "widow" as well. They define an "orphan" as a single word (or, even worse, a part of a hyphenated word) at the end of a paragraph which appears on its own line (so, it's a question of text wrapping, not of pagination at all).

Other sources consider an orphan to be the reverse of a widow, as mentioned above. Webster's has a typographic definition of "widow" ("a single usu. short last line, as of a paragraph, separated from its related text and appearing at the top of a printed page of column"), but doesn't mention any corresponding definition for "orphan" at all. Given the confusion, I can see why they decided to duck the issue.

Chicago also advises that you can add or remove line or two of text from a page to prevent these sorts of things, but that facing pages should be of the same length (which I agree with), and that you can also fiddle with the line spacing (well, they don't use the word "fiddle") in order to achieve this, which I strongly disagree with. Adjusted line spacing, even slightly squeezed or stretched, looks terrible, and I'm not going to do that. That's like telling a pianist, "Hey, if your pinky won't stretch to the B key, hit the B flat instead, it's almost the same note."

So, tentatively, here's what I think. A single line from the end of a paragraph starting a new page is a worse situation than the reverse, since it will usually be a short line (the last line of a paragraph will seldom reach the right margin, for obvious reasons). The line which begins a paragraph will in any normal circumstance be a full line, for even more obvious reasons. So, that's less of an eyesore. Also, I think a very short and/or partial word should not appear on a line by itself. That's about all I intend to worry about.

By the way, one source said that the mnemonic device you can use to remember which are widows and which are orphans is that orphans have no past (because they are the beginning of the paragraph), and widows have no future (because they are the end of a paragraph).

I'll say no more about that, except to say that it reminds me of the line from The Importance of Being Earnest when Algernon, speaking of a widow, says, "I hear her hair has turned quite gold from grief."

vanity becomes much cheaper

~ Anthony Lee Collins

I saw this article in The New York Times* last month.

It was interesting. I've long thought that it would be fun to have something published between hard covers, printed on paper rather than with bytes and pixels.

A Sane Woman is the obvious choice. It was originally written to be presented on paper (in chapter-long chapbooks), before I even imagined any other way of publishing fiction. And even now it's very linear, not at all hypertexty.

So, I visited the three websites mentioned in the article. After very preliminary investigation, here's what I found out:

Blurb.com wants you to use their proprietary software (Mac & Windows, not Linux, of course). This was not appealing, half the fun would be doing the layout myself.

Lulu.com seems to want you to register before they give out any information. Also not appealing. Would you shop in a store where they wanted your credit card number before they answered any of your questions about their products?

Also, I really don't want to be published by something called lulu.com. This applies somewhat to blurb.com as well, but my aversion to "lulu.com" is stronger, since it reminds me of Little Lulu.

Createspace.com looks good, though. Send them a PDF file (well, two PDF files, one for the cover and one for the insides) and you're published, or you will be as soon as somebody orders a copy. The downside (you get no free copies, even your proof copies have to be paid for) seems outweighed by the upside (no cash layout, at all).

Createspace is owned by amazon.com. I bit of further investigation revealed that amazon also owns booksurge.com (are all the good names taken already? Is that the problem?). I had to poke around a bit to figure out the difference between createspace and booksurge, but it turned out that there's a pretty significant one.

Createspace, as I described it above, is pretty DIY. Booksurge supplies formatting and editorial assistance as needed. I assume you pay for this somehow, but I didn't investigate that far, since I don't want editorial assistance (A Sane Woman was finished in 2005, I'm not going to rewrite it again now), or formatting (I'm enjoying figuring out how books are formatted), or marketing (since I have no expectation of making money anyway).

Besides, even Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Faulkner never laid out their own books. šŸ™‚

It reminds me of how some movie directors do double-duty (even apart from the most obvious: writer-directors, or directors who also act). Like directors who also edit their own movies (John Sayles always does, and Robert Rodriguez, and the Coen Brothers – under an alias). Some directors score their own movies (Rodriguez again, and sometimes Clint Eastwood). And some even shoot their own movies (Steven Soderbergh is the one who comes to mind – at least for his more independent-type movies).

So, I'm checking out the different books I have here, looking at fonts and margins and layout. And wondering if I'm going to switch the whole thing to "smart" quotes, or stubbornly stick to my straight quotes.

Plenty of time to figure that out. So, all in all, a pretty exciting development.

(More of The U-town Murder Case was posted last week, starting here. The rest is coming soon.)

_____________________
* I know that's not The New York Times. I couldn't find the article again on their website, so I found it somewhere else instead (which was easy to do, since it was originally from AP).

quotes

~ Anthony Lee Collins

There were a few quotes which were on my mind when I was writing the story which just ended (The School Murder Case).

The first one is easy to spot, since it's the first line in the story ("The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound."). That's from The Importance of Being Earnest.

I should explain that when Jan Sleet quotes, as she does from time to time, it's her doing the quoting, not me. For example, this is true when she quotes Sherlock Holmes in her first appearance, in A Sane Woman, when her first words are, "Come, Marshall, the game's afoot!" She also quotes Holmes in this story when she refers to "the curious incident of the dog in the nighttime" (from the story "Silver Blaze"), and in the third novel, where she refers to Marshall's "experience of women which extends over many nations and three separate continents," which is what Holmes said about Watson. Oh, and in the Return to U-town chapter, when she comments that Perry is developing "a certain unexpected vein of pawky humor."

It's also obvious here that she reads Nero Wolfe when Marshall says, "This was, as my employer would have called it, flummery..." since "flummery" is one of Wolfe's favorite words.

Her reading is obviously not limited to mystery novels, since she also paraphrases Gandalf, from The Lord of the Rings, in this segment:

"In any case," she continued, "I don't think that's the solution. Does she deserve death, for what she's done? Perhaps. Many who live deserve death. Do her victims, or at least some of them, deserve life? Probably, but we can't give it to them, no matter how much we might think they got a raw deal. So, if you can't restore life to the dead, don't be too eager to deal out death in judgment to the living."

This thought is completed later in the story, when she says, "Even starling may have a part to play, before the end."

There's also one reference which may not be deliberate. This is when Jan Sleet says, "...we go to some dangerous places, and dressing well can give people the impression that there might be a price to pay for torturing or killing you." This is similar to William S. Burroughs' explanation for the way he dressed (always like a conservative banker, even when consorting with drug addicts, criminals, and fellow homosexuals in various remote parts of the world). He said that it was always important to make it clear that you were not a member of "the torturable class." I'm not sure Jan Sleet would have spent a lot of time reading Burroughs, so it may just be that they came to the same conclusion in similar circumstances.

There were also two quotes which were on my mind, though they were not included in the story itself. One is from Philo Vance, though I don't remember which book it's from:


"If society were omniscient, it would have a right to sit in judgment. But society is ignorant and venomous, devoid of any trace of insight or understanding. It exalts knavery, and worships stupidity. It crucifies the intelligent, and puts the diseased in dungeons. And, withal, it arrogates to itself the right and ability to analyze the subtle sources of what it calls 'crime,' and to condemn to death all persons whose inborn and irresistible impulses it does not like. That's your sweet society – a pack of wolves watering at the mouth for victims on whom to vent its organized lust to kill and flay."

And the other is from Sapphire and Steel, when they visit a school:

Steel: "Is this really what they do with their young?"

Sapphire: "You don't approve?"

Steel: "Little wonder they turn out how they do."

a parachute, a whirlwind, and other complications

~ Anthony Lee Collins

It is often surprisingly easy to tell when reality pokes its head into a work of fiction.

I was just listening to an audio drama called "The Surest Poison" (from the Sapphire & Steel series, most of which are quite good), and the story centers around a watchmaker in the 18th century, named Abraham-Louis Breguet, who invented various revolutionary watch mechanisms, such as the "parachute" and the "whirlwind," and who was commissioned by Marie Antoinette to make a special watch for her, including all known "complications" (anything a watch displays beyond basic date and time is known in horological circles as a "complication"). The watch was completed, but only after both the queen and the watchmaker had died, and later it was stolen in Jerusalem in the 1980s, a crime which has never been solved.

None of this detail "felt" like fiction, and some research revealed that all of it is true, including even the name of the courtier who brought the queen's commission to Breguet. Which is interesting, but it's more interesting that I could tell the difference (which also reveals that I listen to CDs without reading the liner notes, since this information is clearly laid out there).

In the Philo Vance novel The Kennel Murder Case, one clue hinges on a wounded Scottie dog, and Vance's assessment that she is no ordinary house pet but a championship-level show dog. He goes around to various dog experts and judges, and finds the clue he needs, but all of these meetings "feel" different from the rest of the novel, and I later read that the dog experts portrayed were all friends of W. H. Wright. He was a dog fancier himself, and he wrote the Philo Vance novels (under the name "S. S. Van Dyne").

I'm not sure what makes it so easy to tell the difference. I suspect (as the first paragraph up there might indicate) that the sheer amount of detail may be a factor, but it's almost certainly not the only one. Many authors fill their stories with details, and it doesn't make them seem any more real.

There is more of the school mystery posted.

show me, don’t tell me

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ Leave a comment

The title of this post refers back to this one, which tackled the same question from a somewhat different direction.

However, first I wanted to mention that I've recently realized that it's possible the character of Daphne the dog was influenced by Susie the Bear in The Hotel New Hampshire. Probably not in her creation, but quite possibly in her development.

However (and it's been a long time since I've read the novel or seen the film, so I could be wrong), I seem to remember that the point there was to get Susie out of her bear suit and back to being human, which is not the point with Daphne. If I'd written that book, Susie would have stayed ursine (and she would have stayed gay, too, since apparently part of her "healing" process was becoming straight), and John and Franny would have ended up together. And poor Frank would have got to have a boyfriend at some point, instead of just being "gay" but apparently celibate throughout the many years covered by the novel.

(I also have a mental image of Daphne regarding Susie in her bear outfit and paraphrasing Laurence Olivier: "My dear girl, why don't you try acting?")

This is not a major criticism of the novel or of the movie, both of which I enjoyed. And it does lead me to another, somewhat related, topic.

In an email with a reader, I talked about how much more there always is to tell about fictional characters:

Even with three novels, there's a lot we don't know about Jan Sleet, for example. We have a general picture of where and how she grew up, and in the story being told now her academic history will be discussed, but there's a lot we don't know. Even more true of starling, for another example, who has mentioned details of her history only a few times.

He responded:

I like that, though, because that means there is always more to learn – and more for you (the author) to write about as the character remains interesting. [...] (But please don't pull a Rowling and make a statement about the character outside of the books themselves. If it were worth remarking on, it should have been incorporated into the work itself.)

I agree about how that was handled, though I have no problem with Dumbledore being gay. I understand that, in all those thousands of pages, there aren't any gay characters, which is peculiar.

If, for some reason, Rowling decided after the fact that she had to specify Dumbledore's sexual preference, she could have done what many other authors have done after they've created a fictional universe. She could have written a short story (especially since the backstory of Dumbledore and Grindelwald sounds like it could be quite exciting). That's what John Galsworthy did in between the novels in The Forsyte Saga. That's what Tolkien did with various stories about Middle-Earth. That's what Roger Zelazny did when he wrote short stories about Amber. And, of course, that's what I'm doing now with the murder mysteries.

On another topic, from this month's Q&A at the Chicago Manual of Style website:

Q. In my essay, I have referred to a couple of articles passed to me by an interviewee. They are photocopied, and the article titles and dates are either blurred or missing. How should I footnote and biblio the photocopied materials?

A. These are not proper sources and you must not quote them. Iā€™m sorry – it would be very sloppy scholarship. You might as well write, "I overheard this on the subway." You might take the photocopies to a library and ask the reference librarian if she can help you find some clues as to their origin. Or try typing a distinctive phrase from the pages into a search engine and see if the article appears online.

I must say, I thought that was fairly obvious.

the heady rush

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ Leave a comment

I've been thinking about this:

It's funny, when people were envisioning the future in the sixties and seventies, they correctly predicted there would be home computers. They incorrectly did not predict how the computers would be linked through the Internet and other ways. Think how boring your computer would be if it could not connect with other computers.

We're like stand-alone computers without the Internet or any other networking.

These guys are like computers – that have suddenly got their first Internet connection.

Some of you don't remember – but I do – that first heady rush. The links to anywhere. To everywhere. To ten thousand programs, databases, infobanks.

Al Schroeder (the creator of Mindmistress) said that. My response was: yes and no.

Yes to the fun of being online (on the BBSs, before the Internet was ubiquitous), meeting people, learning things, exchanging ideas, becoming friends with people I wouldn't have met any other way. That was great. The Internet versions of that are still great, or can be. And yes to the huge amount of information available, some of which is even accurate.

But I never found my computers boring, even before I got my first modem (any more than I think I'm boring as a standalone person, not networked – well, there have been some people who thought I was boring, but that wasn't the reason).

If you've ever written a novel on a typewriter, that's reason enough to value a computer.

It allows me to revise text without retyping. Everything else is gravy. Tasty gravy, in some cases, but gravy.