Gemstones

Random stock photo of tourmaline gemstones.

Gems: They're pretty, they're shiny, dragons and people like them.

What makes a gem?

It's a stone that can be used in jewelry. People often consider some non-stones to be gems, too, such as pearls. Precious things used for adornment is a catch-all to describe gems in general.

Since many raw gemstones look more like ordinary rocks than rocks you pull them from, you'll want someone to explain to you before you start what you're looking for.

Random stock photo of gemstones.

I like mining for gems. There's something highly satisfying about pulling a rock out of a pile of dirt and knowing it hides a beautiful shiny gem inside. And shining a flashlight through my rocks until I see a green or blue or red glow always makes me smile.

Your quartz stones, of course, are obvious. They'd stick out anywhere, in vivid purples and yellows and browns and clears. One of these days I'll put a whole bunch of them together around a light and make a lamp, or something.

There's a place up near Boone, NC, where you can pan for gems and get an education experience where the staff will tell you about what you find. Okay, there's lots of gem-panning places around Boone. But this one gives you more information than most, and besides, the owners are nice. (The others are, admittedly, also fun. Sorry, Doc, I have indeed cheated with other gem mining places on occasion. Foggy Mountain is pretty nice, for example, although they don't get their ore locally and mail the gems for gem-cutting off to Germany.)

The place I usually go, Doc's Rocks, uses only local ore, from North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, and such. We've got actually a lot of native gemstones in our state, so there's always something to find. In fact, the "Rock Hound" tours take you on a field trip to pick up gemstones from local areas. In the garnet expedition, you can pick up ball garnets (in their raw state, garnets look like 12-sided brown dice) from a stream. Yep. Just pluck them out of the water.

Now, chances are it'll have flaws and inclusions, if you get it cut. It probably won't be high quality by typical gemstone standards. The NC rubies are pink, and the sapphires a dark blue-black; natural emeralds tend to be very flawed. And when you take in an inch-diameter garnet to be cut and come back with a dime-sized cut stone, it's a bit of a surprise that so much of the rock is unusable.

But given a choice between a laser-cut diamond from a bloody mine in a far-away country and a less valuable stone I found myself in my own state, from my own state, hand-cut by someone I've met in person... It's an easy choice. I'll take the bright, beautiful, local stone that exudes personality and reminds me of home.

Have you ever been gem-mining? Did you get anything cut, and if so, was it what you expected?

Book Covers & Fonts to Avoid

Putting together my cover (with the help of the talented Photoshop genius Samantha Collins), I'm thinking about what fonts to use.

The first think I should do is to figure out what fonts to avoid at all costs.

Some of the (apparently) big no-nos?

• Papyrus
• Comic Sans
• Brush Script
• Lucida Handwriting
• Bradley Hand

What goes on the outside helps sell what's on the inside.
(Books by Leon Brooks)

I did a web search for the most-hated fonts, and found these:

Top Design Mag's Top 10 Most Notoriously Hated Fonts

PrePressure.com's The Most Hated Fonts

GlantzDesign's Designers Reveal Their Least Favorite Fonts

Definitive last word on fonts? Probably not. Industry standard is to write your novel in Times New Roman or Courier, of course, so don't deviate in your manuscript pages from that. But for your title, steer clear of average and hated.

Meanwhile, I'll be choosing something just a little more awesome for my own title. Remember that it should easily readable, even from a distance, and to keep it large enough on your cover to be seen from far away. 

I want to avoid making the basic mistakes. I don't know how many self-pubbed books I've seen using lovely fonts for the title, and I have no idea what the book is named, because the elaborate script has so many extra lines and curls that the letters are completely obscured. 

Just as bad are scripts so spindly they fade right into the background, effectively becoming invisible. Why, what a fantastic horror font--wait! Danger, Will Robinson, danger! Use something thick enough you can see it! And I'm averse to eye-popper colors: no red on a black background for me, thanks. 

I also want something indicating the correct genre. Sure, those dots and swirls are cute, but for a contemporary fantasy, high-adventure and high-action, where the hero has lost her entire family except her twin and the only way to bring the rest back puts him at risk, light and cheerful is just not appropriate. And while I love a good cyberpunk font, computers aren't a central theme, nor is programming used anywhere in the plot--thus, another font style to be skipped. 

Now to dive in and find a font I like.

What's your most-hated font? Favorite?

Long beginnings for great stories

Worn binding, yellowed pages... I'd say
30 pages until the story actually begins.
(Public domain image, found here)

Books today start a little differently than books written twenty, thirty, fifty years ago. 

It used to be that writers would pour a few chapters into a book that described the scenery, the background of the main characters, the slow and gradual rise of the villain into power.

These days books seem to start right in the action, or have short setups. Backstory? It's provided in tidbits, here and there, as needed.

Some people call this tragic; others call it progress. Me? I call it a change in writing styles.

One of my all-time favorite books is The Blue Sword, by Robin McKinley. Published in 1982, it's one of the fantasy classics. But it takes a good two chapters before the story really begins, and only in my post-college years did I learn to love those first two chapters. The gradual story building wouldn't fly with most readers today.

On the other hand, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell well exceeds that. If you ever pick up this book, be prepared to spend 100 pages being bored... and the next 800 pinned to your chair with one of the most enchanting adventures you've ever read.Yet it was published in the recent 2004.

The Blue Sword get a special license for a slow beginning. It was published in a decade where that was the norm, and readers expect a slow beginning. But Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell proves that people are still willing to read through books with a slow start, are still willing to work to get to the meat of a story worth reading. On the whole, reader tastes have changed towards a shorter opening, but yet here's a book that proves the stereotype that today's readers won't read long beginnings wrong.


The most important detail is to write a great story. But if someone hadn't strongly recommended Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell to me, if a teacher hadn't required me to pick up The Hero and the Crown (the prequel to The Blue Sword), I'd have never gotten through them. I'm very glad I did, but the slow beginning does make an impact when readers have literally millions of books to choose from (if not more...)

So maybe it's best practice to have a rapid beginning to your story, and get right to the action. It's certainly easier to become traditionally published via this method. But maybe it's just another shift in writing styles, and maybe it's less a shift of readers' tastes as it is publishing trends. I'll be curious to see in fifteen years if the majority of the best-selling books have slow beginnings or quick ones, if prologues make a comeback, if styles change wildly without gatekeepers to say who is and is not allowed on the shelves.

Do you think slower beginnings and other classic structures of classic books will make a comeback with the rise of self-publishing? Or are the days of the two-chapter world setup gone? I was never a fan of them (I skipped more prologues than I read!), yet I know others like them.

Do you mind a slow beginning to a book? Do you think they'll be become more popular in the next ten to fifteen years, or are the days of best-selling books with slow beginnings gone for good?

Publishing Industry News

Today's publishing news and industry blogs post covers from 8/7-8/23/2013.


Publishing News

The Simon & Schuster vs Barnes and Noble terms disagreement has been settled. (And the S&S authors rejoice.)

A new Writer Beware warns writers against American Book Publishing's new arm All Classic Books. Of note is the heavy pressure to buy hundreds of copies of your own book to distribute for reviews. Another recent warning is about Iconic Publishing, whose owner has registered copyright on books despite contracts clearly saying the copyrights remain in the name of the authors, and the authors having not agreed to the transfer.

Did Overstock.com end its "stealth war" with Amazon over prices? Nope, not exactly.

What do you think of paying $200 on course books for your college classes? CourseSmart offers a rental program that allows students to rent 6 books for a semester for just that much.

So Barnes & Noble isn't planning on selling the Nook business after all.

Nielson has purchased book tracking services from Bowker.

Judge Cote ruled on the DOJ vs Apple court case. The injunction she suggests against Apple displeases publishers, who say it affects them, and would disrupt the deals they carefully began establishing after the settlements to be in line with the settlements (and since they've already settled, ruling against them is not part of the deal). Of course the proposal doesn't actually attempt to rewrite directly the publishers' settlements, or their deals with other companies beside Apple. The DoJ dismissed the complaints, and meanwhile Kobo cheered the injunction.

Apple has proposed an October 2014 liability hearing for the damages ruling on the trial (basically, they want to delay the punishment until after they've had a chance to win an appeal). The request to stay the damages hearing until then was denied.  They'll be back in court August 27.

**Added Friday afternoon: More publisher warnings from Writer Beware.


Industry Blogs

QueryTracker's Publishing Pulse for 8/9 and 8/23.

Dana Sitar offers advice on connecting to readers: don't rely on loyal fans for their money (or why should they be loyal?), have real non-sales conversations with people, and more.

Rachelle Gardner talks about how we help ourselves focus on writing as a business.

On QueryTracker, Rosie Genova offers another form of organizing plot, for those of us who don't work so well with notecards, sticky cards, or Scrivener: Word tables. (I have a personal hatred for working with them myself, but that's more to having to fix them when the formatting runs around at work after the 6th person has edited that file across 3 different versions of Word...) And Stina Lindenblatt explains ways authors can do giveaways. Did you know you cannot do promote contests on Facebook outside very specific methods, but you can install a Rafflecopter on your page?

Also on QueryTracker, writer Elizabeth Craig talks about her life as a hybrid author (that is, an author who is both self-published and traditionally published.) And what is Novelrank.com and how does it help you? How about telling you what your Amazon sales are? Sarah Pinneo describes how it works--mostly by watching Amazon's author rank, the ranks of books right above and below you, and tracking when your books move apart as proof of something being sold. Carolyn Kaufman also describes what exactly plagiarism is, and how to avoid being plagiarized.

Kristine Kathryn Rusch makes the point that innovation is now in the hands of indie authors, in no small part because the Big Six are now the Big Five (and possibly whittling those numbers down further). If you do go traditional publishing, she says, be prepared to be a team player, because publishing houses are in it for the money, and like Hollywood prefer reliable sellers to risky new ideas.

How can indie writers find reviewers? GalleyCat offers links to a couple of resources.

Blogger Justin Swapp puts together some free Scrivner templates.

Don't overuse words, such as suddenly, in your novel.

So how about fighting piracy by surrendering customer data to antipiracy organizations, and putting watermarks on your ebooks when you buy them?

Beware of traveling internationally with your e-reader. In fact, don't update when traveling, because you might find you can't read some of your books afterward if you do.

15 places for free e-book promotion (as assembled by GalleyCat). And 23 query letters that got writers agents.

And Smashwords now has a tool that allows authors to interview themselves. (Um, thanks for agreeing to this interview...)


What relevant publishing news have you encountered in the past two weeks?

When Characters Cook

Does your main character's dinner look like this?

When characters cook in a story, what happens?

Food's a pretty important part of our lives, and so it's not surprising to see characters preparing it in the scenes of a story. Watching how they do so tells us about them. Do they microwave? Is the idea of putting a pan in the oven more terrifying than fighting six demons before breakfast? Or do they sweep through the kitchen with joy, dancing through elaborate feasts and feeding all their friends?

In some stories, especially those with restaurants, food is an obvious plot-motivator. But usually it's an accessory, just another way to help develop characters.

Or like this?
(From Wikimedia Commons,
uploaded by PanShiBo)

Sometimes it's a weakness, a point of vulnerability. Often characters will be bad cooks as a way to show something they haven't mastered. Kick-butt super heroine who destroys bad guys with one hand and speaks 14 languages? Chances are she can't boil water.

On the other hand, sometimes kitchen ability is a way of connecting characters. Have a party of four or five disparate characters who don't get along? Cooking together gives them a way of connecting. Have a hypermasculine character who needs a touch of softness? Give him a frying pan and an apron. What about a character who wants to take care of everyone? An author can emphasize nurturing tendencies by letting a character cook for everyone.

There's a lot of characters in stories I read who have unhealthy relationships with food, and often it's almost even celebrated. This trend seems to coincide with the writer's attitude towards skinniness. It's important to remember the character who survives off vitamins for half his meals is probably constantly lethargic and doing horrible things to his body--something often overlooked by writers. The truth is, starving distracts the mind, gives headaches, causes dizziness, and makes a character confused and weak in critical moments. Doing so too long can lead to nutrient deficiencies, including hair loss and weak nails, extreme illness, strange bruising due to the body's consumption of internal organs, and worse. Neglecting those consequences can romanticize unhealthy eating habits (something that bothers me, personally).

On the other hand, occasional missed meals may not be dangerous, and a character in situation where food is hard to come by might deal with starvation on a regular basis. Those who go adventuring (as many stories have them do) will probably burn off a lot of calories on a daily basis, meaning they can eat as they wish. And honestly, a story is just a story, and sometimes it's nice to pretend that the lifestyle habits are sustainable--wish fulfillment does play a role in many novels, after all.

In any case, how the characters deal with cooking tells the reader about them, and sometimes the foods themselves become popular on their own. Ever heard of the cookbooks assembled by sci-fi writers, including Anne McCaffrey (and her bubbly pies)? Some of those recipes are pretty tasty!

Does your favorite character know how to cook? What does his or her kitchen habits tell you about the character? And does the story offer realistic consequences for his or her general eating habits?

F-boing-lar!

When you read a name in a book that has an apostrophe in it, how do you pronounce it?

Apparently Friday was International Apostrophe day! So celebrate your apostrophes (by using them correctly and/or mocking incorrect uses). Personally I don't mind apostrophes in fantasy/science fiction names if they have a purpose to be there (I rather like Anne McCaffrey's use of them; it's perfectly logical). On the other hand, I'm a bit irritated by random apostrophes that follow no rules whatsoever.

Here's an article on how apostrophes worked their way into many real, modern names, such as O'Brien, and the use of them in character names in stories.

Personally, I rather like the idea of pronouncing apostrophes as "Boing." Because it's so much fun to say "F-boing-lar" or "O-boing-Conner" whenever I read them...

Er, or maybe not.

What's a comical misuse of an apostrophe you've seen recently?

Frog Juice: Game

Frog Juice: The official game of Second Christmas!

My old college friends and I get together every year. And, because we're us, every time we get together we must play Frog Juice. It's tradition.

It's one of those slightly silly card games. In this game, you try to make "spells" by matching the number cards in your hand with the numbers on the table (a twelve and a twelve, or a seven and a five to a twelve). You can also cast spells by putting down a "spell" card and collecting the named ingredients; this version gets you points towards winning the game.

Only certain cards are valuable. The rest are just fun.

It's hard to take a game seriously when you're collecting toads, newts, and unicorn horns (or when you're playing it at 3am, but that's another matter.) On the whole, it's just a fun game, and cute. I'm not entirely sure when it became our group's official game, but between that and Mahjong, we keep ourselves entertained.

And, of course, any game where using frog juice, shrinking potion, and a prince as ingredients (to make a frog, of course), is bound to make me giggle.

Do you have a traditional game you take out when you hang out with your friends? What do you play?