(Editor’s note: The Fat Man has an interest in foreign literature (classical and modern) and asked that I put up this link to a translation site that also provides interlinear translations for those studying languages.
photog)
Category: Literature
Word Count
What is the perfect length for a story? Well, I’m sure there is no agreement in the world on that. And I must confess I have enjoyed books that go over a thousand pages (counting the “Lord of the Rings” as one story) and short stories that barely cover a handful of pages.
But I have an opinion and since I get to throw it out onto the internet for as long as I can pay for my hosting costs, I feel I should elaborate. After all, I have to write my five hundred words tonight. Although that length is hardly a perfect length for a work.
I believe that between 10,000 and 35,000 words is the sweet spot for telling a story. I think that’s somewhere between a long short-story and a good-sized novella. So, I’ve rejected the majority of modern novels and definitely all of the thousand-page potboilers that have been in fashion for the last few decades. And look, that rejects the “Lord of the Rings!” Well, hear me out.
I think long books are by nature composite creations. They consist of a bunch of chapters strung together to get our hero from Point A to Point B. And in my opinion each chapter (or at most a few chapters together) is a separate story. This is like a play or a movie having multiple acts or scenes. You string those together and you tell a larger story. But usually in a movie or a play there is a climactic scene when all of the emotional power of the story is unleashed. If the writer is exceptionally skilled, he can drag out the emotional interest from the beginning of the story until this climax. But no matter how well-written the longer story is it doesn’t have the same impact as a shorter work that can be digested in one sitting. Even a long movie has the danger that it can overtax the watcher’s attention and patience.
I think that if I kept my work within that 10,000-35,000-word range I could make the maximum impact on the reader. Of course, 10,000 is really close to the minimum that can result in a rich word-picture. But I think if an author works carefully to paint a vivid sketch of a scene even the 10,000 should yield a memorable story.
Of course, I am painfully aware that the commercial market for shorter fiction is essentially nil. I was reading recently that science fiction short story magazines and collections don’t sell at all. So that guarantees that authors will continue to pump out door-stops. And honestly, the longer episodic genre books are perfectly enjoyable just as they are. But in my opinion the true masterpieces of writing are a shorter type of story that weaves a tapestry in front of the reader’s mind in a unified effect that goes from beginning to end in a single story arc that satisfies the reader’s interest in the subject and provides a legitimate conclusion to the story.
Well, anyway that’s how it seems to me.
I, Robot Author
I was just reading about the second serious scandal concerning AI generated fiction being published by experts in the world of publishing. In the last scandal Hatchette bought a self-published book because the author managed to attract a very large number of readers on her own. After they republished the book, it was discovered that there was a lot of very obvious AI generated content in it.
In the present scandal a prestigious contest that accepts fiction from amateurs living in the countries of the British Commonwealth had three of the five winners flagged by readers as being AI generated by a capable software used for this function.
Here’s a sample of the text:
“Wilfred’s rum-shop leaned into the road like a rotten tooth. Inside, boards blackened by smoke and sweat, the air sweet with cane and forgetting. Coins meant for rice or kerosene slid across the counter and came back white rum hot as apology. One drink opened the chest, two turned fear into courage’s cheap cousin, three steadied the hand enough to write the future in invisible ink.”
Okay, what the hell does “white rum hot as apology” mean? It doesn’t mean anything. It’s AI slop that it thinks sounds “poetic.”
Now five “Experts” picked this gibberish and declared it worthy of a prestigious award. Why? Well, the only thing I notice that both scandals include are woke publishing “experts” selecting the work of minority writers without bothering to see if it’s any good or even written by human beings.
The most hilarious aspect of the latest scandal is that the contest judges refuse to admit that they’ve been made to look like fools and the stories are still up on their site as the winners.
I watched a YouTube video by a young woman who considers herself a seasoned editor and although she agrees that the text is extremely unlikely not to be AI slop she does add the obligatory warning that we should remember that minority writers must not be singled out as more highly suspect just because they always seem to be the ones whose work slips through the editors who are afraid of being called racists if they look too closely at their work and find it’s not very good.
I guess it’s not enough that the publishing world gives precedence to any writer who isn’t a straight white man. Now they add robots as long as they’re not straight white male robots or at least not working under one of their names. Well, be that as it may, today I officially began work on the sequel to my book. I began the outline by writing out a bunch of plot lines to choose between.
Plot Threads
- Update on Bogey and his life
- Update on Grace and her boys
- President Chastain’s crises
- Constitutional Convention
- Seceding States
- Potential Military Insurrection
- Personal Problems (health)
- Relations with Connors’ Group
- Connors’ crises
- Disaffected Groups with His Organization
- Relations with federal and state officials
- Connors’ indecision and doubts
- Disagreements with Cutter and others
- Personal Problems (Grace, Bogey)
- America’s Crisis of Instability
- World’s Crisis of Instability
- Technical Instability
So that’s a lot of stuff. I’m not sure all of these will be included but it’s always best to start with the kitchen sink and pare it back. Well, take that Chat GPT.
Learning to Love Hopeless Gloom
So, I wrote that review last night about “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.” And afterwards, I was surprised at just how negative my review was. I went to great lengths to stress that I thought it was a well written story. But I couldn’t disguise how little I liked the reading experience. I characterized the problem as being a matter of story type. It was an extreme example of dystopia where all the characters reflected a dismal outlook and nothing happy or positive intruded on the gloom.
And that got me thinking. Maybe my dislike of this genre was short-sighted. Possibly I was shutting myself off from treasures that lurked around every corner. And in agreement with that idea, I remembered how I had never been able to get myself to finish 1984. I skimmed through it several times but always got bogged down by just how depressing and irritating I found all the characters and plot.
So apparently, I am a literary lightweight. My guess is that I read fiction for enjoyment. And apparently, I don’t enjoy being depressed. That must explain why I gravitate toward action/adventure and scientific razzmatazz. I like reading stories where things happen and even if the bad guys are winning the good guys don’t roll over and play dead. Even better, I like it when the good guys are also the smart guys and win in the end. But either way I want there to be someone I can empathize with. And no one can empathize with someone whose highest aspiration is to own a sheep (living or mechanical) and have it live on the roof of his apartment building. PKD’s world is made up of mental cases of one type or another and while you may pity some crazy people, they’re really no fun to read about. Unless they’re somehow funny. And these people weren’t.
Maybe that makes me shallow but that’s where I stand. If I was writing 1984, I’d have an underground that did more than just exist as a shadow. I’d have them organize and expand and then one day rampage through the politburo and have Big Brother’s head nailed to the highest flag pole in the capitol. Or even if they fail, I’d have them go down fighting, not meekly cower under their beds waiting for the thought police to drag them off to the dungeon.
But I do wonder whether that puts me in the majority or the minority. Possibly I’m in the majority among my age group but in the minority among the current cohort of readers. So, I’m very interested in how the rest of you out there come down on this question. Are dystopias fun or not? And I’m talking about the real dreary, hopeless worlds. No shreds of joy or hope. Just misery and dysfunction as far as the eye can see. Tell me what you think and list a few examples of the various levels of joyless horror and how you would characterize the experience.
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler – Some Observations on the Book
So, I had so much fun comparing the book and movie for “The Thin Man” that I to read Chandler’s “The Big Sleep” so that I could compare it to its movie too. And once again I’m reading it from the Library of America edition that I already have. The book came out in 1939 and the movie in 1946. The pre-war and post war difference probably is significant. But we’ll just leave that alone.
And let me state for the record that this review is full of spoilers.
First off, I’ll state for the record that although I’ve always enjoyed the movie immensely, I found the book much more interesting and satisfying as a story. The biggest difference between the book and movie is the characterization of the Sternwood daughters Vivian and Carmen. In the movie the role of Vivian is a mostly sympathetic character who becomes the love interest for the Marlowe character. But in the book, she is almost as reckless as her unbalanced sister Carmen. And whereas in the movie Carmen is an exhibitionistic spoiled woman-child in the book she is truly psychotic.
And allowing the Sternwood daughters to be pathological individuals they are, simplifies the details of the story that in the movie have to be sanitized in order to fit the Hays Code. So, we can be told that Geiger’s “book store” lent out pornography to its customers and Carmen was being photographed naked by Geiger at the time when the Sternwood chauffer came in and killed Geiger and stole the exposed film of Carmen. And so on with other parts of the story that don’t make sense in the movie because the seediness of the plot elements prevented their being openly stated instead of subtly implied. So, we don’t have an explicit statement that Eddie Mars is not only aware of Geiger’s racket but also uses it to blackmail customers.
But the biggest difference between the two versions of the story is the disappearance of Rusty Regan (called Sean Regan in the film). At the end of the movie Eddie Mars claims he saw Carmen kill Regan. But because Mars didn’t even know what Carmen looked like Marlowe seems to reject this version of the facts. This leads the audience to believe that Mars had Regan killed by Canino out of jealousy over Mars’ wife’s relationship with Regan. But in the movie Marlowe suspects Carmen of the murder and he tests the theory. After he had rejected Carmen’s sexual advances one night, the next day he tests her sanity. He returns her pistol and tells her it’s loaded and she asks for him to teach her how to shoot. After leading Marlowe to a secluded location, she uses the opportunity and angrily fires all six shots at him. Of course, he had the gun loaded with blanks and after disarming her she goes into an epileptic fit. And after bringing Carmen back to the house to receive medical attention Marlowe tells Vivian that he knows that Carmen must have murdered her husband after a similar refusal by Regan to sleep with her. And Vivian admits to the truth of the killing.
I find this a much more satisfactory ending. We’ve been shown the Sternwoods as a very sinister and dysfunctional clan and the idea that Vivian is somehow a sympathetic or admirable individual despite all the evidence to the contrary just rings false. Chandler’s story is a grim tale that lacks the happy ending of the Hollywood movie that pairs Bogart and Bacall as a romantic couple. But it’s a better ending and in my opinion much more satisfying.
A Milestone and a Low Point
So today I reached the two hundred book milestone. One hundred fifty-three e-books and forty-seven paperback copies. Camera Girl and I celebrated with a bowl of ice cream each. And today I also got my first one-star review. The reader was upset because he didn’t know it was a science fiction story. And I can understand his anger. When I selected the categories for the book the first one, I listed was science fiction. But Amazon rejected this as a false description and deleted this category for the book. And so, Amazon is responsible for the single one-star review I’ve received so far. Well, the world is a complicated place and I guess nothing human is ever free from unexpected consequences.
But, all in all, it’s been an interesting experience. It seems Amazon has created an opportunity for anyone to create a book and it even makes it possible to try and find an audience for that book in the enormous marketplace they have created on their platform. And to the extent that I’ve found some readers I can appreciate how this is an improvement over what there was before. And in my particular case it changes the situation from an impossibility to a difficult one. And by that, I mean I could never have found a publisher (other than a vanity press) that would accept my story because of the right-leaning slant of my story. After all I pretty clearly demonize Antifa in this story and that would never get past the editors and sensitivity readers employed by the “Big Five” publishing houses (Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette Book Group and Macmillan). So, I think the present set-up is an improvement for someone like me. But that doesn’t mean finding an audience is easy. It’s not. It’s tricky and slow and expensive and the skill-set has absolutely nothing to do with being a writer.
The next big milestone will be when I put it on Kindle Unlimited. But since this requires the story to be on Amazon exclusively for three months I’m waiting until I finish putting the story up on Royal Road. I’ve been uploading it in sections (mostly a chapter a day) and I’ve got six more chapters to go, so I want to finish that first. I want to see what feedback I get once I’ve allowed the readers there to finish the story and evaluate it. After that I’ll take the story down from BookFunnel and Royal Road and see what happens with Kindle Unlimited. KU lowers the cost to start the book to essentially zero and I’m hoping that will allow a larger cross-section of the general reading population to give the book a try.
And I believe this population of readers will be significantly younger than the one I’ve been reaching up till now. Now maybe this isn’t my target audience but I think it’s important to test that hypothesis. If Kindle Unlimited doesn’t move the needle, then I know what I’ve seen so far is a good indication of what I should expect. So, let’s see what happens.
Ay, There’s the Rub
Lately there has been an enormous storm of controversy about AI being used in fiction writing. Recently it came out that a self-published story that became quite popular was subsequently picked up by a major publishing house and re-issued with the full weight and authority of this powerhouse including professional editing and a new cover. But then someone looked closely at the self-published edition and saw that not only was it significantly different from the professionally published edition but that the original was obviously a product of AI. Now, that caused a firestorm and the publisher withdrew the book permanently.
But a cloud of questions swirl around the affair. Surely the editors who revised the self-published edition must have recognized that they were dealing with a product of AI writing. Why would they have purchased this title. It’s assumed the reason was because the book had already found a ready audience and so the motive was monetary. But there are other factors. The authoress Mia Ballard is African American and Native American. In other words, in the world of intersectional identity bingo she was a three-fer! And so, she was exactly the kind of person that Hachette wanted for their imprint. But there still remained the fact that she got a bot to write her story. And that someone blew the whistle on her. Of course, she claimed that it was an editor who added the AI sections and what she had written was her own. Oh boy, that’s gonna be a bunch of lawsuits (or it’s just talk that won’t go anywhere).
Of course, the editors are defending themselves by saying that AI detection programs are far from infallible and so they aren’t to blame. But supposedly the content was pretty obviously terribly written. Of course, that really makes it interesting that the self-published book was such a hit on Goodreads with over four thousand reviews. And that would once again jibe with the idea that the “bio” of the writer was one of the big reasons the book was so popular.
The whole scandal seems to show just what a mess the publishing industry has gotten itself into with identity politics becoming the most important factor by which authors and storylines are selected by big publishing houses for their imprimatur. I guess the same problem is playing out with books that Hollywood is suffering from with their heavy-handed woke propaganda pictures. People are staying away in droves and the monetary losses have finally gotten so severe that they’ve been forced to drop most of the woke plot elements just to lure paying customers back to the theaters.
Well, now that I’ve had a taste of what it’s like to self-publish a book I can say that a large part of the satisfaction in writing a book has to be because the author enjoys his creation. Other than the one in a million phenom that finds the sweet spot in the self-publishing universe everyone else is talking to a small audience and in my opinion the only real failure is if you know that your book isn’t good enough for you yourself to read it for pleasure.
But how soon before AI slop is better than Shakespeare? Ay, there’s the rub.
How the Mighty Hath Fallen
So, I put a chapter of “The Sniper” up on Royal Road about a week ago. And shortly afterward I received a rejection from them because the story was also on Amazon and this website (OCF) and I had to prove to them that both those copies belonged to me. They wanted me to add in my Amazon Jake Barter author page that I was putting the story up on Royal Road. So, I had to figure out how to do that and whether this would cause a bad reaction by Amazon. After all, Amazon sells my book for money and Royal Road lets people read it for free. Well, the day before yesterday I tried putting up the statement about Royal Road but the author page rejected the edit. It turns out that I couldn’t use Royal Road’s actual internet address on Amazon but I could just use the name of the site. And then I had to prove that OCF was my website by a similar message and then, voila! They put the first chapter of my book up on their site and so far, nine people have read it. Well, that not much. But I figure it’ll be fun to see if I can get much interest on that site.
Apparently, Gen Z frequents the site to read fan fic called “Lit RPG.” Now, my book is neither fan fic nor Lit RPG. So, it’s not certain that I will find an audience there. But I’m interested in testing the waters. I also put it up at BookFunnel and the good folks over at Whatfinger were kind enough to put up a link to that site and I got 14 e-mail addresses of people who downloaded the book there. So, a little at a time I’m getting more visibility for the book. I’m at 187 sales on Amazon and I’ve accumulated 34 ratings and 29 reviews with a cumulative rating of 4.7 and some very nice reviews that were definitely encouraging.
Once the experiments on Royal Road and BookFunnel have run their course I intend to put the book on KDP Select which requires the book to be exclusively on Amazon for at least 90 days. Supposedly the low-cost barrier to reading on this program will attract the maximum number of “eyeballs” to the story and I’m very curious to see how that effects sales. And I’m not particularly hoping to make a lot more money that way but rather I’m hoping for much more exposure.
So, the great book publishing experiment grinds on. My hopes for international fortune and fame have been dashed on the sharp rocks of harsh reality. My dream of movie studio executives battling each other in front of the Compound to see whose blockbuster offer would land the movie rights to this timeless masterpiece has gone up in smoke. At this point I’m negotiating with the Dunwich Middle School to have the sixth grade put on a one act play version of Chapter 1. Is this how Heinlein got started? How, the mighty hath fallen.
Thinking of Humor
If you go through my entire book looking for moments of humor, I think there are fewer than ten. And that is counting sarcasm as humor. I’m guessing that in an adventure story that’s probably not unusual. With a team of men that know each other pretty well, there will be a certain amount of banter which can be defined as humor. But, I don’t feel like I’ve fallen below some critical thresh-hold of comedic content.
But, at the same time, I have to confess that comedy is one of the things I greatly enjoy in stories. To my mind stories that do not have a certain amount of humor seem flat and lacking in interest. And for that reason, I was recently wondering if I could introduce a character in my next book that is a “wise guy.” And by wise guy I’m not thinking of the Good Fellas definition of an Italian American mobster as a wise guy. I’m harking back to my childhood when every block had at least one guy who was the clown. In my neighborhood we had a kid who today would equate most closely to an insult comic. He was a mimic and he could find a way to mock anyone and everyone. This often earned him at least a mild beating if the victims of his mockery pooled their strength to grapple him to the ground and pummel him until he shut up. But it was almost as if he couldn’t help himself. He was a slave to his craft.
Now I don’t intend to try and recreate that type of juvenile humor but I think I could make a character who doesn’t know when to shut up. I’m guessing I’d have to do a lot of work editing the dialog from this character because obviously that’s the kind of thing that pretty easily can be taken too far. As an example, look at the movie Dead Pool. This character shoots an almost endless series of insulting jokes at every other character in range regardless of whether they’re friends or enemies. For the most part it’s entertaining but at some points it can become wearisome. So, I understand that doing comedy “right” is a matter of balance and skill. And the other part of it is providing the “comic” with a foil; a straight man. So Dead Pool needs the haplessly earnest Colossus as the butt of a lot of his jokes. Building up a duo like that must be handled carefully so that these two characters can be more than caricatures. And all of this mustn’t take away from the main action of the story but merely come off as the personalities of the characters involved. It needs to seem organic to the relationship of the people involved.
Now after talking all that through, it seems like this would be a lot of work for not much gain to the story. But for whatever reason, I’m excited by the idea. Making the characters real seems to be as important to the writer as making the action exciting. I’ve found myself actually caring for my make-believe people as if they were real. Well, anyway, tonight I was thinking of humor.
More Marketing Stuff
So, I spent some time yesterday and today sending a few complimentary copies of the book to reviewers and adjusting the Amazon Ads to concentrate on the “targets” that have produced sales. So far it looks like the ads that work best are where Amazon selects viewers that have done a search for another product that is either “similar” to my book or “complementary” to it and place my ad somewhere on that search result page. How Amazon gauges similarity and complementarity is of course the black box.
These targets that they decide on work better than matching my book to searches that contain keywords that my book has been matched with like “techno-thriller” or “vigilante justice” or “suspense thriller.” These also work but at a lower rate. So, what seems to be the case is that Amazon seems to know what they’re doing better than anybody else. And I guess that makes sense. The algorithm is the wizard behind the curtain but apparently, he’s not some medicine show tramp whose balloon was blown off course. He’s the real deal.
So now that I’m running the marketing show I’m excited again and waiting for that magic moment when the algorithm decides that I’m ready for prime time and blankets the Amazon universe with free advertisements for my magnum opus. And every time you open up an email from Amazon, my book will stare back at you in all its black and white splendor. And once the ten millionth copy is sold, President Trump will invite me to the Oval Office and present me with the Trump/Kennedy Center Medal for the Most Beautiful Literature. And I’ll autograph a copy of the book for him. It’ll read, “To DJT, from one native New Yorker, to another. You, kooky nut, you. Don’t ever change. Jake Barter”
But I digress (or hallucinate). Of late I’ve read just how much AI novel writing has become sort of a catastrophe. Apparently, there is a sizable segment of the book reading audience that is perfectly satisfied with AI slop. And I don’t think this is shocking. Think of what now passes for entertainment on broadcast television. It’s already down to the level of mindless machine output. I guess the question will be whether there will be a reaction to this, with a flight to quality occurring. Even leaving my own personal writing out of this, I’d hate to think that literature will completely disappear from the face of the Earth in favor of subhuman cargo-cult knock-offs.
Well, I guess there can be all kinds of entertainment products out there. After all, a big part of marketing is identifying a niche that isn’t being serviced optimally. But it does make me wonder what that niche is for me. Disgruntled right-wing old guys? Well, why not. Talk about a despised minority. We’re positively reviled by everyone out there. But I am hoping for a larger audience. I have a small test audience of women who won the Goodreads giveaway. I’m hoping for some feedback from them pretty soon. I’ll compare them to the few women that have already read the book in my circle of friends. It might be interesting