Sunday, April 24, 2011
Introductions: Steph
I'm, well, a big bookworm, obviously. I'm a kid who went straight from the Berenstein Bears to the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew. I have a great love of mysteries, random true-crime novels, spec-fic, and zombies. I've been attempting to write for awhile, but am well aware that nothing I write is ready to be released into the wild.
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
So ... What's the Plan?
Now that you know who we are, let me explain to you what we are doing here.
You see, we are three people who love books. We delight in good books. We share them with each other. we buy them for each other. We hang out together and talk about how awesome they are.
We love books.
We all have e-book readers, too. In our cases, they're all Kindles - and it does make a difference in this case because Amazon has an excellent program for self-publishers.
This means that hundreds of "indie" authors - without the support of the formal publishing system - are producing books for the Kindle.
And it's a mixed blessing.
There are gems out there. There are signficant undiscovered works of staggering genius. There are authors who have written books for Kindle that deserve recognition and awards.
We will not be writing about these. If you poke around a bit, there are dozens of blogs dedicated to helping you find good books for your Kindle. There are even several excellent blogs devoted to indie authors that are worth reading. We plan to link to some of those blogs as well, so you can see that we aren't just harbingers of doom.
But we're going to be writing about the other end of the spectrum.
The bad books we're going to be writing about here are clunky. They're awkward. They'll spend too many words describing the scene and not enough telling us what's happening in the scene. The dialogue will be stilted and unnatural with little (if any) differentiation between the voices of the various characters. The books we'll be writing about will feature battle scenes with each side firing canon at one another1. The characters will be charming rouges1. The words "there" "their" and "they're" will be used nearly interchangeably.
And sometimes the story will be a transparent self-insert wish-fulfillment fantasies. And no, I won't refer them as being a "Mary Sue." Mary Sues are the domain of Fanfic.
Speaking of fanfic, there will probably be stories which are really just Fanfic with the names changed to avoid possible legal problems.
We really don't know the depths to which we will have to sink to highlight some of these lowlights.
We're reading them so that you don't have to.
We're going to be updating irregularly - as we find (and finish) books. Sometimes, we'll read the same books and will have comments to make together. We may even occasionally get together and record a podcast about some of these shared-pain books.
In short: Our pain, let us show you it.
1 If you don't understand why this is a problem, use a dictionary. Not a spell-checker - a dictionary. And yes, I know I used the same footnote number multiple times.
You see, we are three people who love books. We delight in good books. We share them with each other. we buy them for each other. We hang out together and talk about how awesome they are.
We love books.
We all have e-book readers, too. In our cases, they're all Kindles - and it does make a difference in this case because Amazon has an excellent program for self-publishers.
This means that hundreds of "indie" authors - without the support of the formal publishing system - are producing books for the Kindle.
And it's a mixed blessing.
There are gems out there. There are signficant undiscovered works of staggering genius. There are authors who have written books for Kindle that deserve recognition and awards.
We will not be writing about these. If you poke around a bit, there are dozens of blogs dedicated to helping you find good books for your Kindle. There are even several excellent blogs devoted to indie authors that are worth reading. We plan to link to some of those blogs as well, so you can see that we aren't just harbingers of doom.
But we're going to be writing about the other end of the spectrum.
The bad books we're going to be writing about here are clunky. They're awkward. They'll spend too many words describing the scene and not enough telling us what's happening in the scene. The dialogue will be stilted and unnatural with little (if any) differentiation between the voices of the various characters. The books we'll be writing about will feature battle scenes with each side firing canon at one another1. The characters will be charming rouges1. The words "there" "their" and "they're" will be used nearly interchangeably.
And sometimes the story will be a transparent self-insert wish-fulfillment fantasies. And no, I won't refer them as being a "Mary Sue." Mary Sues are the domain of Fanfic.
Speaking of fanfic, there will probably be stories which are really just Fanfic with the names changed to avoid possible legal problems.
We really don't know the depths to which we will have to sink to highlight some of these lowlights.
We're reading them so that you don't have to.
We're going to be updating irregularly - as we find (and finish) books. Sometimes, we'll read the same books and will have comments to make together. We may even occasionally get together and record a podcast about some of these shared-pain books.
In short: Our pain, let us show you it.
1 If you don't understand why this is a problem, use a dictionary. Not a spell-checker - a dictionary. And yes, I know I used the same footnote number multiple times.
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