With a couple of forthcoming books and other projects in the works, I’m sometimes asked how I manage to do this considering I have a day job, and a long commute to boot. So now — drumroll — I’m finally going to reveal my secret (but you might not like it).

I don’t watch much television. I’ve never seen American Idol, Dancing with the Stars, Jersey Shore, Mad Men, The Sopranos, Real Housewives of Wherever, Two and a Half Men, Lost, or a lot of other popular shows.

In her recent Sunset magazine article “Time Lost and Found,” Anne Lamott writes, “Time is not free—that’s why it’s so precious and worth fighting for…. Fight tooth and nail to find time, to make it. It is our true wealth, this moment, this hour, this day.”

One interesting thing about people is how they use their time. If watching television or playing computer games fulfills your needs, then great, go for it. But if you’re compelled to engage in some kind of creative expression, then you have to make time for it. And that is probably going to mean giving something up.

It’s your choice.

*

Image of a television left out in the rain from striatic’s photostream.

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Productivity secret

How does a hurricane move? It “barrels” and “churns,” to judge from the most popular verbs. “Lumbers” is the oddest verb choice, yet it is used rather often, I guess to convey a large scale (hearing it on the radio this morning led me to this investigation). But can a hurricane really “march”? I guess that’s to show inexorability. Can it “aim”? Here’s just a small sample of today’s journalistic prose at work.

• “Hurricane Irene … makes its way toward the US mainland.” –ABC News
• “Hurricane Irene [is] churning toward the New York/New Jersey area.” — ESPN
• “Hurricane Irene churned on a northwest track.” –Scientific American
• “Irene churns toward North Carolina.” — Bloomberg
• “Hurricane Irene … advances toward the East Coast.” — Ydr.com
  
• “Hurricane Irene may be hurtling menacingly toward the coast.” — Wall Street Journal
• “Hurricane Irene … barrels toward the East Coast.” — Technolog
• “Hurricane Irene barreled toward the region. — Boston Globe
• “Hurricane Irene made its way toward the region.” — Boston Globe
• “Irene continues to steam through the ocean.” — Boston.com
• “Hurricane Irene … roars toward the U.S. East Coast.” Los Angeles Times
• “Irene lumbered into the Bahamas.” — Patch.com
• “Hurricane Irene … bore down on the Bahamas.” — PBS
• “Irene … spins toward the Bahamas.” –WSBTV
• “Hurricane Irene slammed the Bahamas [and] heads toward the East Coast. — Washington Post
• “Irene takes aim at Long Island.” NY Daily News
• “Hurricane Irene aims its fury toward the North.” — brunswickbeacon.com
• “Hurricane storms toward Philly region.” – myfoxphilly.com
• “Hurricane Irene moves toward the Carolinas.” — Charlotte News
• “Irene continued its march across the Caribbean toward the U.S.” — Fox News
  
• “Hurricane Irene marched north.” — Wall Street Journal

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Fun with verbs

When you attempt something ambitious you’re bound to make some mistakes along the way. I’m sure the book I’m working on will have its fair share (recently I realized I had confused the Mughal painters Bichitr and Bishandas). But sometimes a mistake is so stunning that it’s hard to recover from.

I was finding Charles H. Parker’s Global Interactions in the Early Modern Age, 1400-1800 generally interesting and credible. Then I came upon this sentence:

The lack of any indigenous pack animals, except for the llama, and the absence of a wheel meant that humans formed the primary source of portage in Mesoamerican trade.

Probably another reason Mesoamericans depended on humans for portage is that the nearest of their “indigenous” llamas was nearly 2000 miles away in the South American Andes.

This reminds me of a visit to the market in Chichicastenango in Guatemala a few decades ago. The blanket vendors all touted their blankets as pura lana, which means “pure wool.” At the market I met a foolish young Spanish-challenged gringo carrying a blanket he had bought. He’d paid a high price, but it was worth it, he assured me, proudly proclaiming it “pure llama!”

***

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Howlers

I have a month to polish up the book I’m currently working on, and I’m experimenting with a randomized editing process.

Most writers spend a lot of time on the beginnings of their books, and rightly so since they set the tone and either welcome or drive away potential readers. Endings get some attention as well, but authors and readers alike bog down in the problematic middle, especially around three-fifths of the way through.

In revising, you can start from the beginning and just go as far as you can, or all the way to the end, repeatedly, but this will likely result in a mid-book slump. You can also just identify the most important parts, or the parts that need the most work, and concentrate on them, sanding down the rough patches one after another.

If you’re working in short bursts — in breaks in your day job, for example – you might want to test the water by just dipping in here and there. But, if you’re like me, your dipping is not likely to be very random, so you’re not really doing a good test.

There’s a site called random.org, where you can generate a random sequence of numbers within a certain interval. According to the site, “The randomness comes from atmospheric noise, which for many purposes is better than the pseudo-random number algorithms typically used in computer programs.”

A random sequence, as opposed to a random set where numbers can be repeated, is like pulling numbers from a hat, where once a number is used it can’t be used again. So I’ve generated a random sequence of numbers between 1 and 384, and I’m reviewing pages in the that order. I’ll do this a few times with a few different random sequences.

Is this a good idea? I’m not sure, but I think it might be a helpful corrective, or at least complement, to the kind of directed attention that you’re going to give your manuscript anyway.

***

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Randomized Editing

Jill Schoolman of Archipelago Books asked recently if I would be interested in translating the major twentieth-century Spanish poet Jose Angel Valente.  As it happens I would, and I am grateful to her for thinking of me. Valente is a kind of platonist of the word, who seeks to ruthlessly strip bare received language and produce a vitalized text of absolute immediacy. (I’m far from an expert on twentieth-century poetry of Spain, so I’ll need to work at getting up to speed in better understanding his place in the scheme of things.)

I will select roughly eighty poems from his body of work. Unfortunately, I won’t have the sustained time to work on this project until I finish my work on 1616, but I’m looking forward to this challenge. Here’s a very preliminary example:

The wine was the indeterminate color of ash.

I drank it with residue of dark
shadows, shadows, a wet
body on the sands.

You arrived,
You came tonight.

The insidious depths of the glass
conceal an anonymous god.
+++++++++++++++++++++You gave me
blood to drink
tonight.
+++++Depths
of the god drunk to the dregs.

*

By the way, I think I finally figured out how to keep WordPress from stripping out spaces when you have to indent lines in irregular ways like this. You can insert invisible characters, with this kind of code:

<span style=”visibility: hidden;”>++++++++++++++++++</span>

*

UPDATE: Looks like the hidden style attribute doesn’t work with RSS.

*

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Another new book: Selected Poems of Jose Angel Valente

– Timothy Brook, The Confusions of Pleasure: Commerce and Culture in Ming China

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Great opening paragraphs: The Confusions of Pleasure by Timothy Brook

I write like
William Shakespeare

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

… William Shakespeare. Anyway, that’s what it says here. I was scrolling through my feeds and noticed a guy calling himself “Mighty Red Pen” ran a few of his posts through an algorithm that purports to analyze your writing — sometimes he wrote, it said, like Dan Brown, other times like Cory Doctorow, and once like Vladimir Nabokov.

I have no idea how the thing works, but I entered the second chapter of the book I’m working on and got the Will result (which seems appropriate since I’m writing on the early seventeenth century).

I think it’s best to stop now. How disheartening would it be to learn that my second chapter was written like William Shakespeare and my third in the style of Dan Brown?

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I write like …

Today I initiate what I am hoping will become a more or less weekly feature here at blog.rightreading.com — a report on book news from newspapers and journals around the world. (I say “more or less weekly” because I am currently working on a big project that is taking most of my time, and this has reduced my blogging, which had been steadily daily up for years until a few months ago; more on that project in time.)

I think I will eventually move this feature to Thursdays. My plan is to spotlight one interesting story selected from a variety of sources of world book news, include a screen shot linking to the original, and briefly recap or comment on the story. Please let me know if this would be of interest, and I would love to hear suggestions regarding international sources I should include when looking for stories (in my languages: English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian).

Today’s story may be a little different from most because it’s more of an entertaining feature than news about book publishing or authors and books. It’s a fun story from the Guardian (London), which surveys a number of writers — Elmore Leonard, Diana Athill, Margaret Atwood, Roddy Doyle, Helen Dunmore, Geoff Dyer, Anne Enright, Richard Ford, Jonathan Franzen, Esther Freud, Neil Gaiman, David Hare, PD James, AL Kennedy — and asks them to list 10 tips for writers.

Leonard wasn’t actually consulted for the article — he had already done his 10 rules for good writing, and they served as inspiration for the piece. Following is my selection of 13 favorites chosen from those offered by the contributors to the article.

1
Diana Athill: Read it aloud to yourself because that’s the only way to be sure the rhythms of the sentences are OK (prose rhythms are too complex and subtle to be thought out – they can be got right only by ear).

2
Margaret Atwood: You can never read your own book with the innocent anticipation that comes with that first delicious page of a new book, because you wrote the thing. You’ve been backstage. You’ve seen how the rabbits were smuggled into the hat. Therefore ask a reading friend or two to look at it before you give it to anyone in the publishing business. This friend should not be someone with whom you have a ­romantic relationship, unless you want to break up.

3
Roddy Doyle: Do not place a photograph of your ­favourite author on your desk, especially if the author is one of the famous ones who committed suicide.

4
Helen Dunmore: A problem with a piece of writing often clarifies itself if you go for a long walk.

5
Geoff Dyer: Don’t be one of those writers who sentence themselves to a lifetime of sucking up to Nabokov.

6
Anne Enright: Try to be accurate about stuff.

7
Richard Ford: Try to think of others’ good luck as encouragement to yourself.

8
Jonathan Franzen: Never use the word “then” as a ­conjunction – we have “and” for this purpose. Substituting “then” is the lazy or tone-deaf writer’s non-solution to the problem of too many “ands” on the page.

9
Esther Freud: Don’t wait for inspiration. Discipline is the key.

10
Neil Gaiman: The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it’s definitely true for writing.) So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it ­honestly, and tell it as best you can. I’m not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.

11
David Hare: The two most depressing words in the English language are “literary fiction.”

12
PD James: Read widely and with discrimination. Bad writing is contagious.

13
AL Kennedy: Defend yourself. Find out what keeps you happy, motivated and creative.

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World book news: 13 rules for writers

When the ancients wrote books they were trying to get at reality and transmit spirit. But all they could convey was a general idea, in order to help lead people to the truth. Much of their spirit, their energy, their words and laughter and actions, could not be captured.

When modern generations write books they ape the form of the ancients. To show how clever they are they add false analyses and additions. And so they get farther and father from the truth.

–Wang Yangming, 1471-1529

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On the loss of vitality in writing

Within the last few months, I sent you a query regarding my book, [title redacted], which you kindly declined to represent. In the interim, I have built my own website , and I’ve since had grown my audience to hundreds of enthusiastic readers. I’d like to invite you to check it out at [url redacted],

If you are interested in representing this book, then I would be interested in speaking with you.

Thanks for your time,

If anyone is interested in how to write a query letter, well, this is not the way. Among the errors here:

• Not researching the recipient. I am neither an agent nor a publisher.
• Not tailoring the letter. You can’t just dash off one letter and assume it will work for everyone. Imagine you need to convince 10 people in your workplace to go along with a plan. If you are smart you will talk to each one individually and address the special concerns of each person. Book publishing is very competitive, and you have to do the same.
• Beginning with a negative. I can guarantee you that many or most agents and publishers will stop reading after the opening sentence, which announces that they have already rejected this manuscript. The likelihood of a manuscript being reconsidered by a legitimate agent or publisher after a “few months” approaches zero (this is one reason not to go crazy with multiple submissions early on, as you can quickly exhaust the market with that approach). And the author does not even mention rewriting.
• Not looking at the pitch from a publisher’s perspective. Is “hundreds” a strong number for a website? It is not. And how many is that, exactly? For the sake of argument, let’s say 500. Suppose you could get an incredible 10 percent rate of return on sales of the book to this group — that’s 50 books. Not too appealing!
• Not selling the work. There is nothing in this e-mail that says anything about the nature of the work.
• Not proofreading. That is the author’s comma at the end of the first paragraph.

I will give the author points for effort. At least he is trying — he’s not giving up. But he needs to go about finding representation in a more intelligent way to maximize his chance of success. (I’ve sketched out some tips about the process in my guide to getting a book published.) I wish him the best.

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Mailbag: A form query

He did a series of experiments where he bummed one group out and cheered another up. “Trained essay raters” determined that the unhappy subjects wrote superior essays.

According to Forgas “mildly negative mood may actually promote a more concrete, accommodative and ultimately more successful communication style.” (Had he been a little more disappointed in the results he would have crafted a better sentence.)

Along the same lines, it has also been found that people do better work on cloudy days than on sunny ones.

Being in a foul temper may also be good for your love life. According to Forgas, “mild negative affect may actually promote a more concrete and more situationally attentive communication style in intimate relationships.”

So wipe that smile off your face.

*

Via the Web of Language

*

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How to improve your writing (and your love life)

Above, where I mentioned his work as a proofreader, I initially typed “proofreading” instead, and I was sorely tempted to retain that error, for reasons that will become apparent. Sometime in the past year or two Will e-mailed me the following poem, entitled “The Printer’s Error,” by Aaron Fogel. It seems a fitting memorial, and I hope the author will not mind me running it here in Will’s memory.

The Printer’s Error

Fellow compositors
and pressworkers!

I, Chief Printer
Frank Steinman,
having worked fifty-
seven years at my trade,
and served five years
as president
of the Holliston
Printer’s Council,
being of sound mind
though near death,
leave this testimonial
concerning the nature
of printers’ errors.

First: I hold that all books
and all printed
matter have
errors, obvious or no,
and that these are their
most significant moments,
not to be tampered with
by the vanity and folly
of ignorant, academic
textual editors.
Second: I hold that there are
three types of errors, in ascending
order of importance:
One: chance errors
of the printer’s trembling hand
not to be corrected incautiously
by foolish professors
and other such rabble
because trembling is part
of divine creation itself.

Two: silent, cool sabotage
by the printer,
the manual laborer
whose protests
have at times taken this
historical form,
covert interferences
not to be corrected
censoriously by the hand
of the second and far
more ignorant saboteur,
the textual editor.
Three: errors
from the touch of God,
divine and often
obscure corrections
of whole books by
nearly unnoticed changes
of single letters
sometimes meaningful but
about which the less said
by preemptive commentary
the better.
Third: I hold that all three
sorts of error,
errors by chance,
errors by workers’ protest,
and errors by
God’s touch,
are in practice the
same and indistinguishable.

Therefore I,
Frank Steinman,
typographer
for thirty-seven years,
and cooperative Master
of the Holliston Guild
eight years,
being of sound mind and body
though near death
urge the abolition
of all editorial work
whatsoever
and manumission
from all textual editing
to leave what was
as it was, and
as it became,
except insofar as editing
is itself an error, and

therefore also divine.

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Will Powers (1946-2009) and “The Printer’s Error”

Hi, Tom –

I loved your tips on how to get published. Great – and much needed – advice!

I am getting in touch to see if you might consider adding a book to your list of resources: Don’t Sabotage Your Submission by Chris Roerden, winner of the 2009 Benjamin Franklin Award™ for Literary Criticism.

Following is more information and some tips from Chris.

Thanks in advance, and have a nice day!

Maryglenn McCombs

***

MM Book Publicity
2817 West End Avenue
Suite 126-274
Nashville, TN 37203

For Immediate Release
Contact: Maryglenn McCombs

Date: August 19, 2009

Publishing Industry Veteran Shares Tips for Aspiring Authors

Rock Hill, S.C. — “Why was my novel rejected?” Millions of writers haven’t a clue, says veteran book editor Chris Roerden.

Roerden, author of Don’t Sabotage Your Submission, winner of the 2009 Benjamin Franklin Award™ for Literary Criticism, estimates that 4.7 million rejections occurred in 2008, based on the industry average of one in a hundred manuscripts becoming a book, and on 47,541 new adult fiction titles published last year.

“Average writing is the cause,” says Roerden. “At least 90% of all submissions are rejected immediately because editors and agents quickly spot the clues to average writing and stop reading.”

Roerden, who teaches writers to see those clues, eliminate them, and boost their odds of getting published, offers the following ten tips:

1. Go naked: strip adverbs and adjectives from your writing. If a bare verb or noun seems weak, replace with a stronger one.
2. Open in the middle of action and keep it going, with no more than 3 words of description or history per paragraph until chapter 3.
3. Focus your story not on what happens but on the character it happens to. Open with her or him at a moment of change.
4. Stick to the thoughts of one character per scene. No mind-reading or head-hopping. Other characters must speak their thoughts or reveal them through observable behavior.
5. Sad, mad, glad are lazy labels. Labels tell. Instead, show behavior, facial expressions, and dialogue to let readers interpret feelings for themselves.
6. Delete these words from all dialogue: Well, yes, okay, sure, agree. Even when characters agree, change the response to a question or change the subject.
7. There is/was/are/were and It is/was create the most passive prose on the planet. Find all such phrases and rearrange: There was a (noun) waiting becomes A (noun) waited or The (noun) stood/took/held/existed/and so on.
8. Twist clichés. She looked like a million bucks tax free (Harlan Ellison).
9. Find every “as” used to suggest two actions occurring simultaneously. Most actions have different durations. Connect them with “and”; sometimes with “then”; not “and then” or “as.”
10. Read the kinds of books you want to write, then re-read 3 favorites to learn the techniques that make them favorites.

Don’t Sabotage Your Submission (Bella Rosa Books, ISBN 978-1-933523-31-6, Trade Paper, $17.95) shares insider secrets on how submissions to literary agencies and publishing houses are screened—and quickly rejected. Filled with over 230 examples and expert advice, Don’t Sabotage Your Submission describes the dead giveaways to average writing, and shows how writers can improve their odds of getting published. According to New York Times best-selling author Charlaine Harris, “Roerden’s book is chock full of practical advice for the novice writer. Even seasoned writers could use a copy as a refresher course.”

Chris Roerden has worked in publishing 44 years and taught writing for the University of Maine-Portland, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and UNESCO in South Korea. Authors Roerden has edited are published by St. Martin’s Press, Berkley Prime Crime, Rodale, Viking, Oceanview, and many others. A native New Yorker, Roerden now lives in North Carolina and leads workshops for writers throughout North America. For more information about Chris Roerden, please visit www.marketsavvybookediting.com. Based in South Carolina, Bella Rosa Books (www.bellarosabooks.com) is an independent royalty press that specializes in backlist reissues and original titles by commercially-established authors. For more information, please contact Maryglenn McCombs by phone—(615) 297-9875, or email— maryglenn@maryglenn.com.

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Mailbag: Press release promoting a resource for writers

“The submission process is like going to the DMV. It’s one of the great equalizers, and it tends to treat everybody like shit.” — Jess Mowry

Author Jess Mowry (Way Past Cool, Babylon Boyz, Ghost Train, Six Out Seven) has some helpful tips on preparing a manuscript for book publication. Let’s look at some of the things he says.

• PAPER: Use 20-24 lb plain white paper.
   
  Check.
   
  
• COVER OR TITLE PAGE: “There is no cover or title page for a novel or story.”
   
  In my experience this doesn’t really matter, but I guess you might look a little more like an insider by omitting a cover page.
   
  
• FIRST PAGE: “Your name, address, phone, fax, and/or email are single-spaced in the upper left-hand corner. The title of your novel or story is centered about a third of the way down, with your name as the author centered beneath it.”
   
  You don’t have to follow these guidelines, but they won’t hurt.
   
  
• COPYRIGHT NOTICE: “If you want, you can add a copyright symbol (©) or just a “c” and the date your story or novel was completed…. Some editors feel it’s pretentious or amateurish to use the copyright © symbol…. I don’t use the copyright symbol (except to protect the work on this site) just the date I completed the novel or story. If you have a manuscript that is several years old, you might not want an editor to wonder why you are just now submitting it, so it’s okay change the date to the current year.”
   
  Fair enough.
   
  
• LINE SPACING: “The text is always double-spaced … that’s double-spaced, not one-and- a-half spaced, not two-and-a-half spaced, but DOUBLE-SPACED! (Can you hear me now?)”
   
  I have been on panels with genre fiction publishers who sometimes have very rigorous formulas (although they usually don’t like to call them that) according to which published books in a certain line must all be an exact number of total pages. For this reason, genre publishers sometimes prefer ms. submissions to be very standardized (double-spaced Courier with set margins). If so, they will make clear their preferences.
   
  My experience is mainly in trade book literary publishing. In that world these issues are not so important. Because Courier is harder to read than a proportional face, I prefer to read mss in a nice old style font such as Bembo or one of the Garamonds, or even more modern drafted faces like Perpetua or Times. Because such faces vary in x-height and the shape of their descenders, the term “double-space” has little exact meaning.
   
  Basically you don’t want to make it difficult for the editor to estimate the length of the book, and you want to leave sufficient space for edit marks.
   
  
• MARGINS: Mowry advises very specific margins. He also advises not to justify columns.
   
  See my comment above. Just leave some room for the editor’s fingers. When I prepare my own manuscripts (I’ve published many books of my own) I like to follow best design conventions for column measure.
   
  I wholeheartedly second the advice against justifying columns. As an editor I won’t read justified manuscripts unless I really have to. They just make the reading experience too difficult.

A final thought: None of this is anything for authors to obsess over. As long as a manuscript is readable an editor would be a fool to reject a potentially marketable work because it violates some arcane stricture of presentation.

Mowry’s intention is to help new and minority authors break into publishing. You won’t go wrong by following his advice. For more, check out the official Jess Mowry website.

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Preparing a manuscript for book publication

One of the applications of this line of research is for machine translation. How does the translation engine determine, for example, whether the word lead in a text refers to the heavy metal or to the concept of leadership?

One way to try to answer that question is to look for patterns in the denotative and connotative qualities of  the lexicon of the passage. Looking for themes that interlace the selection of words might help to determine the sense in which they are being used and also help to highlight the passage’s main concerns.

Consider, for example, the opening of Flaubert’s Salammbo. (I picked this text up from a website that did not identify the translator but simply gave the credit “etext prepared by John Bickers”)

It was at Megara, a suburb of Carthage, in the gardens of Hamilcar. The soldiers whom he had commanded in Sicily were having a great feast to celebrate the anniversary of the battle of Eryx, and as the master was away, and they were numerous, they ate and drank with perfect freedom.

The captains, who wore bronze cothurni, had placed themselves in the central path, beneath a gold-fringed purple awning, which reached from the wall of the stables to the first terrace of the palace; the common soldiers were scattered beneath the trees, where numerous flat-roofed buildings might be seen, wine-presses, cellars, storehouses, bakeries, and arsenals, with a court for elephants, dens for wild beasts, and a prison for slaves.

Fig-trees surrounded the kitchens; a wood of sycamores stretched away to meet masses of verdure, where the pomegranate shone amid the white tufts of the cotton-plant; vines, grape-laden, grew up into the branches of the pines; a field of roses bloomed beneath the plane- trees; here and there lilies rocked upon the turf; the paths were strewn with black sand mingled with powdered coral, and in the centre the avenue of cypress formed, as it were, a double colonnade of green obelisks from one extremity to the other.

Far in the background stood the palace, built of yellow mottled Numidian marble, broad courses supporting its four terraced stories. With its large, straight, ebony staircase, bearing the prow of a vanquished galley at the corners of every step, its red doors quartered with black crosses, its brass gratings protecting it from scorpions below, and its trellises of gilded rods closing the apertures above, it seemed to the soldiers in its haughty opulence as solemn and impenetrable as the face of Hamilcar.

Looking at this passage we can easily pick out certain themes and observe how the author’s vocabulary reinforces them. (This is just a quick demonstration and not an attempt at a fully worked-out critical analysis.) Clearly Flaubert meant to impress us with the magnitude, exoticism, and lushness of his setting and with the concepts of military authority and its obverse of excess and lack of restraint. He works hard to create an intensified vividness of setting. Notice how his words align to emphasize certain concepts.

I limited myself to six columns for fit in my text window. Of course there are many words relating to feasting and celebration. There is also an element of danger and impending violence associated with the martial aspect and references to scorpions and the like that I could have picked out, as well as a sort of architectural exoticism, but these six topical groupings fairly well underscore the main themes of the passage. In fact, they predict pretty well the overall themes of the entire book.

Now fast forward to the present. I this that search engines use a similar analysis to determine the topicality of web pages. Some such analysis could be done on the page itself. Web search specialists use the term keywords to describe the words they hope to rank for in search engine results pages. But notice that this sort of analysis can help to determine not just the keywords but the context in which they are being used. A similar analysis could be done to the anchor texts and surrounding words in links leading to the web page.

Poets and other literary types have always been sensitive to these sorts of word associations. Even in nonliterary prose, the careful web author would be wise to do likewise.

.

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Topicality in literary writing, and its implications for web search optimization

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3:05

But some writers take the opposite tack. I just encountered this extraordinary opening sentence to chapter one of The Perenial Garden by Jeff and Marilyn Cox:

When the dynosaurs shrieked in the primordial night, and the world’s highest law was to eat or be eaten, there were no flowers.

You won’t find a sentence like that in many gardening books (he shrieked).

.

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Overwrought openings

And it seems likely that queries these days would be shorter than they used to be, since new media, along with the decline in public education, has helped to bring about an age of information snacking, in which we have largely lost the habit of extended continuous reading.

But agent Nathan Bransford says it’s simpler than that. He recently did a survey of 180 queries he received. Looking at the length distribution of the queries, and considering the mss. he called for, he concludes that the “sweet spot” for query letters is 250-350 words.

So now you know.

BTW, I did a check of the last query letter I wrote, and it came in at 325 words.

Spooky.

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Post from Right Reading, Tom Christensen's guide to print and electronic book publishing.
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What is the optimum length of a query letter?

What if some well-known American writers had become wordle poets? I fed six poems into the machine and accepted the default output (except in one case where I rejected a black background).

Watch out language poets, a new movement’s afoot.

1. “The Conqueror Worm,” a wordle poem by Edgar Allen Poe

2. “I Died for Beauty,” a wordle poem by Emily Dickinson

3. “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” a wordle poem by Wallace Stevens

4. “Howl,” a wordle poem by Allen Ginsberg

5. “A Form of Women,” a worlde poem by Robert Creeley

6. “Recalling A Sung Dynasty Landscape,” a wordle poem by Jane Hirshfield

There you have it — it’s clearly a movement!

To see the original forms of these poems you will have to paste the titles in your favorite search engine. Or — recalling the deathless words of Kenneth Rexroth Patchen, “People who say they like poetry but never buy any are cheap sons of bitches” — you could buy a book.

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Post from Right Reading, Tom Christensen's guide to print and electronic book publishing.
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Six classic wordle poets

“The books we need are the kind that act upon us like a misfortune, that make us suffer like the death of someone we love more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we were on the verge of suicide, or lost in a forest remote from all human habitation — a book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us.” — From a letter of Kafka to Oskar Pollak.

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via Book of Joe

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Post from Right Reading, Tom Christensen's guide to print and electronic book publishing.
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The books we need