Tag Archives: Books

by Ben Trube | June 16, 2016 · 12:05 PM

Surreality Groupees Bundle

Surreality is now available as part of the Groupees Community Bundle 7, running for the next few weeks.

Groupees is a great bundle website, featuring indie gaming, music, videos and comics as well as content from more established publishers. Long-time readers of the blog may know that I’m a fan of the bundle model as a way to offer more unique content, and as an alternative to the Amazon behemoth.

By default, 20% of your purchase of the Community Bundle goes to A Heart For Amanda, a wonderful cause helping to defray the medical expenses of a mother of two who needs a heart transplant. I didn’t know at the time I submitted to this bundle that this would be the charity, but I couldn’t think of anything better. Earlier in my 20’s I had to have a heart-ablation to correct a defect called WPW, which can cause sudden rapid heartbeat.* I can’t even imagine how much scarier it must be to need a new heart. And Groupees donates 20% as opposed to the 0.5% donated by Amazon Smile so you’re really making a difference even with a small purchase.

The Bundle is pay-what-you-want with a $1 minimum (a 75% discount on my book + a whole lot of other cool content). The rest of the bundle is an eclectic mix of games and music including a lawnmower simulator and games like Push the Crate and SweatShop. For the top-contributor (as of this writing only $5) you get a signed copy of Surreality and the entire digital catalog of one of the music contributors (Panda P.I., which raises so many questions. Is he a P.I. who investigates Pandas, or is he a Panda Detective?). The majority of the stuff is DRM free, including my book which comes in all of the eBook formats.

The bundle runs for another 13 days, so if you’ve been thinking about checking out Surreality, or you just really have the urge to cut lawns on your computer, why don’t you go check it out? Please spread the word on Twitter, Facebook and all the other social media areas we 30-somethings have probably never heard of 🙂

*Incidentally being awake while they shock your heart is quite the experience 🙂 (I’m all better now, no worries for like 8 years at least).

It’s Turtles All The Way Down

Have you ever had only 20 minutes to write a blog post, and you realize you have nothing really to say that particular day, but it’s been a couple of days since you’ve said anything so you just write whatever comes to you? It’s important to check in every once in a while and let people know you’re still out there and to give a gentle reminder and plug for the various books you may have written, even some of the older ones people might have forgotten about but that are totally still worth buying. You can’t tackle anything too ambitious, with a lot of pictures or thought. We’ve all got a couple of blog posts floating around in our heads that we’d love to do if we ever sat down and had an 1.5 hours to format them and make a really good argument, but today isn’t going to be that day.

Then, just when you’ve started writing your twenty minute post, you realize that what you really want to write about is the thought process behind writing a twenty minute post. Maybe you want to get people to try to relate to who you are as a writer at that particular moment, or to offer some tip for people dealing with this situation. Sure it feels a bit meta to be blogging about blogging, but that’s only a couple of layers removed and you might really have something valuable to offer. We all have to figure out how to create quality content on a deadline, and being in the middle of an actual crisis may give you a special insight into how to help others get out of it.

Thinking about how to deal with writing a twenty minute post gets you to thinking about the best ways to give writing advice. Should you only be talking about the things you’re dealing with at a particular moment or should you write more reflective posts on the tips you’ve discovered after years of learning? Writing about what you’re dealing with at the moment can be a good way to choose topics, but it might not be the best way to offer any real insight. After all, you might just be guessing how to get yourself out of a situation without any real idea if that solution would even work. Perhaps you should write a blog post about the best ways and times to give writing advice. So we’re writing a blog post about writing an advice blog post on how to write a blog post in twenty minutes while trying to write the post in twenty minutes.

But we can go one layer deeper. We haven’t even begun to deal with the existential question of why writers write, and what’s the difference between a writer and an author. Are bloggers writers in the same sense as people who write books? If the majority of the writing you actually do is just nonsense falling out of your head without being applied to your current work, can you call yourself a writer? Sure words are magically appearing in front of you as you play the keyboard like a piano, or a well … keyboard, and that might be writing. But is it good?

Oh, I almost forgot. We could wonder if writing about how to give advice to writers is actually art, and whether such writing is considered professional or amateur. It could all be a meta-meta exercise designed to kill time and give the illusion of creating something interesting, when in fact we’ve been up our own butt for some time now.

Ooops … time’s up!

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Filed under Writing

Tagged as blogging, Books, Recursion, Turtles, Writing

by Ben Trube | May 18, 2016 · 12:05 PM

Snap Judgment: YA Da Vinci Code

Apparently Dan Brown’s popular novel, The Da Vinci Code, is being adapted into a YA friendly version. According to Publisher’s Weekly the book will be abridged and will have content more appropriate to a teen audience, while maintaining the original plot.

Now I’ll start this brief rant by saying that I have never read The Da Vinci Code and have no particular judgment as to its quality one way or another. It is a very popular book which means that it might also be a good book. My quibble is with abridgments and “audience appropriate” books.

For children I kind of get these sorts of books. Series like the Illustrated Classics series, or abridgments of classic old works like Don Quixote and The Three Musketeers give children a general sense of the story without having to deal with some of the archaic language. I am someone who grew up with Wishbone after all. Children’s versions are a good way to teach children that old stories can be just as entertaining as newer material. But even in elementary school we were reading original versions of Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, Sherlock Holmes mysteries and all sorts of other books.

One of the weird anachronisms of Peanuts that somehow survived to the most recent film was having a character read War & Peace. The age of those kids isn’t firmly specified, but we’re talking an 8-10 year old reading a book with over 1000 pages. These jokes started early on in the strip’s life, and it makes me wonder if kids in the fifties and sixties were held to a higher standard than kids of today. Then again, Schulz had characters often giving Snoopy chocolate, so he’s not a perfect guide. But I think the basic idea holds up, kids are capable of dealing with the original and are more mature than we might give them credit for.

And we’re talking about YA which is aimed at an older audience (and is in fact read by many adults). A lot of YA content deals with violence and post-apocalyptic worlds, so my suspicion is that the only edits for content in The Da Vinci Code have to do with some of the weird sex stuff. I’ll admit that’s a guess, but I bet I’m right. The only abridgment I “enjoyed” in high-school was Les Miserables, and only because it meant that I didn’t have to slog through the full text of a book literally titled “The Miserable.” Most high-school students don’t like to be talked down to, they like to be treated like adults.

The YA version of the Code is being written to inspire young people to an interest in history, but I wonder why Brown (or his publisher) assumes that such an interest can’t be inspired by reading the actual book? I could equally understand taking on a new project, targeted at a YA audience that hits on many of the same themes, but has a unique storyline more “appropriate” to its audience. But instead, he’s rewriting a book he wrote over 13 years ago. One wonders why.

Honestly, I think the YA book is just an attempt to cash in one more time on the brand and I doubt the book brings anything new to the table. I’m sure it will sell, and that people will read it. But if my hypothetical child is interested in The Da Vinci Code, or books like it, I think I’ll stick to the original. Or War & Peace, that’ll keep the kid busy for a while 🙂

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Tagged as Abridgments, Books, Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown, YA

by Ben Trube | May 2, 2016 · 12:05 PM

Kill your darlings (and make sure they stay dead)

We all know variations of the “kill your darlings” quote, but there’s a companion to the quote I see almost as frequently. It can be boiled down to…

“Save your darlings for later. You never know when you might find a place for them.”

This seems like a hoarder’s mentality to me, an approach toward writing that assumes that everything you’ve ever written has a place somewhere. I believe this is objectively false.

There’s a popular notion that it takes 10,000 hours to be an expert at something. A writing variation that’s a favorite of mine converts that to “write as much as you are tall.” For me that would be a stack of paper 6’4″ tall. Considering that a ream of 500 sheets is about 2 inches and the standard manuscript page is 250 words, I need to write about 4.75 million words before I’m any good. Hopefully, that number is a bit absurd, but I think we can agree that getting good at writing takes time, practice, and well … writing.

I think a lot of ideas are like flowers. From the moment we cut them they have a set amount of freshness before they start to wither, die, and grow mold. I’m not saying that ideas can’t be timeless, but I think most of the things we write have a shelf life. If they make it to the end of a novel drafting process, then there’s a good chance they’ll survive for a long time. But if they’ve been cut out of a book, and stuffed in a drawer for later use, they may never find a place to fit in.

And that’s okay.

I wonder if this advice, to “save things for later,” is given to novice writers as a way to make cutting things out easier. It assumes something that I just don’t think is true for the passionate writer:

“You might run out of ideas.”

I’m more worried that I won’t have time to write all the books I want to write than I am about not knowing what to write next. In fact I’m pretty certain that no matter how many books I finish in a lifetime (I’m shooting for 30-40), I will always wish I had written more. At the very least, it makes sense that I would want to write books using some of my best ideas, and these are usually fundamentally different things than the “darling” moments in books that just make me smile.

What I’m writing now is a product of my life experiences and the writing I’ve done before. Because I’m changing as a writer, it can be hard to look back at something I’ve written ten years ago, five years ago, or even three years ago. The piece you’ve cut out is a time capsule of who you were as a writer when you wrote it. If you’re growing as an author, with time this fragment will seem less and less like your writing.

Share a drink or a last meal with these little bits of personal whimsy, then put them before the executioner’s ax. Revision can be ruthless, and it should be. If a moment doesn’t add to characterization, useful description, or moving the plot forward, then it probably needs to go. Being able to tell what is good and what is not is part of being a better writer, and that means throwing some things out completely.

But I do save every draft, every little thought, in notebooks and drawers for years (as do most authors). Tomorrow, I’ll talk a little about why, and how ideas can still be useful.