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From Page to Screen – Part 3

Favourite film adaptations

I thought it might be a bit of fun to list my top ten favourite film adaptations of books I’ve read. Until I sat down to compile the list and realised it’s not that easy because either the films haven’t measured up to the books, or I’ve enjoyed a film but not (yet) read the book upon which it’s based.

The other problem is that I have read a lot of books and watched a lot of films. I’m at that age where my mind refuses to hold onto names that leave no lasting impression on it. That being so, there might have been better film adaptations I’ve seen than some that make it onto the list, but that I’ve simply forgotten about. In fact, it’s quite likely.

Anyway, to the best of my knowledge, here follows in no particular order (I struggled to compile a list of ten, let alone having to rank them in order) my top ten film adaptations of books I’ve read.

The Lord of the Rings

One of my favourite books; one of my favourite adaptations— see From Page to Screen – Part 2 where I explain why.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

I can’t imagine anyone more suited to the lead role of Randle McMurphy than Jack Nicholson in his pomp. Add a breathtaking performance by Louise Fletcher as his nemesis Nurse Ratched and it makes for a superb film, at times hilarious, at others heartbreakingly sad.


One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

The 39 Steps

There have been many film and television adaptations of John Buchan’s adventure novel involving spy rings, military secrets and a man on the run. My favourite by far is the 1935 Hitchcock version, starring Robert Donat as the novel’s hero Richard Hannay. It is only loosely based upon the novel but, for me, improves upon the book with its ending.


The Thirty-Nine Steps

Blade Runner

Also mentioned in ‘From Page to Screen – Part 2’, linked above, this is one of those rare films that takes all that is good from the source material and improves upon it.


Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?

The Da Vinci Code

I’m not a fan of Dan Brown’s writing style, yet I’ve read most of his books and will continue to do so because he tells a ripping yarn. The underlying concept behind this novel blew me away and I thought they did a pretty good job with the film version. Any film featuring Tom Hanks, Paul Bettany and Audrey Tautou (not to mention Ian McKellen and Alfred Molina) ought to be decent, and this one doesn’t disappoint.


The Da Vinci Code

Starship Troopers

The novel is up there, for me, with Robert Heinlein’s finest. The film version, although not originally even based on the book, does a great job of satirising the aspects, such as militarism and fascism, for which the novel came in for criticism. I thought both the novel and film were a great deal of escapist fun.


Starship Troopers

Stand By Me

This adaptation of Stephen King’s novella, The Body, just shades The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile as my favourite King adaptation. See From Page to Screen – Part 1 for more on this.

The Road

One of my favourite post-apocalyptic books. Unremittingly bleak and brutal, I couldn’t put it down. I sat to watch the film version with a little apprehension, but the film was as bleak and brutal, and as good, as the book. It’s also the first film I’ve seen starring Viggo Mortensen where I didn’t keep thinking about Aragorn.


The Road

Catch-22

The novel is a beguiling mixture of absurdism and grittiness, and I wondered how it could translate to the screen. Well, the 1970 film worked for me. What really made it was the casting of Alan Arkin as the central character John Yossarian. I watched the recent television serial adaptation, which was also a worthy effort, but couldn’t help comparing the actor who played Yossarian unfavourably with Arkin.


Catch-22

Day of the Jackal

The tension in the novel is superbly crafted and I doubted it could be reproduced on screen. How wrong I was. The film version, with Edward Fox in the title role, is as suspenseful as the book. They are both excellent.


The Day of the Jackal

Till next time…

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Weird Words 2

The second in a series of posts looking at words, taking a lighthearted look at some of the most troublesome, overused, misused, comical, or downright peculiar words in the English language.

All suggestions for words to include in future instalments are welcome—simply comment with your suggestion.

On with this week’s words…

Myriad

This is a word I tend to avoid because I’ve always been a little confused about its correct usage. Is it:

—there are a myriad of ways to use it

—there are myriads of ways to use it

—there are myriad ways to use it

or some other way?

Many years ago, I read that using it as a noun (as in the first two examples) is frowned upon and I therefore shied away from using it at all. But, on further investigation, it seems that all three examples are correct. It can be a noun or an adjective. According to Merriam-Webster:

Recent criticism of the use of myriad as a noun, both in the plural form myriads and in the phrase a myriad of, seems to reflect a mistaken belief that the word was originally and is still properly only an adjective.… [H]owever, the noun is in fact the older form, dating to the 16th century. The noun myriad has appeared in the works of such writers as Milton (plural myriads) and Thoreau (a myriad of), and it continues to occur frequently in reputable English. There is no reason to avoid it.

So there. Use it pretty much in any way you want.

Supersede

—to displace, to force out of use as inferior, to cause to be set aside, to take the place or position of.

If ever there’s a word that you’d think would be spelt differently, it must be this one. How on earth isn’t it ‘supercede’? Apparently, some think it is. Here’s Merriam-Webster again:

Supercede has occurred as a spelling variant of supersede since the 17th century, and it is common in current published writing. It continues, however, to be widely regarded as an error.

Safer, then, to stick to the generally accepted spelling. Unless you’re feeling contrary…

Gubbins

I love this word. It seems mainly to be a word used in Britain, usually meaning the workings of some machinery, or bits and pieces that go into making something. I used it with glee in The Elevator, where two characters, one British, the other American, have just ventured out of an elevator, not into the office space they were expecting, but into a sun-drenched land inhabited by strange creatures.

“That’s the elevator shaft, right?’ said Kim from behind me.

“I guess so. Look how high it is. The gubbins must be inside it.’

“Gubbins?’

“Er, you know, the workings. Whatever makes it go up and down.’

“Ah. Sure. Okay.’ She gave a high-pitched, feverish giggle.

Like ‘discombobulate’ in Part 1, it’s one of those words that simply sounds perfect for its meaning.

 

That’s all for Part 2. Don’t forget to suggest any words you find weird for inclusion in future instalments. I’ll credit anyone whose suggestion I use.

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Audiobooks – Part 2

When I posted about audiobooks last year, I didn’t anticipate writing another so didn’t call it ‘Part 1’. Well, here’s Part 2 and there will be more parts to come.

Part 1 can be found here: Audiobooks. In it, I explain the process that went into having The Cleansing produced as an audiobook—in short, I hired a narrator and the book went live in November. I bemoaned the fact that I could not accurately estimate how many sales I needed to achieve in order to recoup the initial outlay but guessed at a ‘few hundred’. And I could not afford to begin the process of having the sequels produced in audio format until I’d at least recovered that up-front cost.

Almost a year on, I can now say that my estimate was a little short of the mark. The true figure is somewhere (due to the way ACX calculates author shares, I still can’t make an accurate estimate) in excess of 400 sales—I’m a little over a quarter of the way there so, at this rate, I’m not going to be in a position to have the sequel made for another three years. Oh, man.

Time for another rethink. I wrote this in Part 1:

I toyed with the idea of narrating the book myself to limit cost, but discounted it almost immediately. I don’t have professional recording equipment and I’m hopeless at doing accents. No, it would sound like an amateur production and I wanted the opposite.

You can probably guess what comes next. Yep, I’ve decided to narrate my own audiobooks.

From a financial point of view, it’s a no-brainer. My outlay on the necessary equipment will be a fraction of what it will cost me to hire a narrator for just one book. To have all my books produced in audio format could cost up to £10,000 and that’s if I limit myself to low-end narrators.

I have also been influenced by other authors who have narrated their own books, such as one of my guests, A. R. Kavli. Here’s his post: A. R. Kavli

I began to look into what I need. As always, there’s a bewildering choice of items like microphones and in a huge range of prices. Long story short, I have purchased a microphone, a pop filter*, a set of headphones and, suspecting I need all the help I can get, a desktop sound shield**, all for comfortably below £200. I have downloaded the free sound editing program Audacity and am ready to go, at least equipment-wise.

But I’m not ready any-other-way-wise. I have three main areas of concern. Here they are in ascending order:

  1.  I have no space in which to work that’s ideal for soundproofing;
  2.  differentiating between characters without using accents;
  3.  learning how to edit and master (and discovering what the heck ‘mastering’ even means) the recorded audio is going to be so steep a learning curve, the top is covered in cloud.

Yes, I’m concerned. At the same time, I’m as excited as a child at Christmas. Despite what I said in Part 1, I’m determined that my productions will not sound amateur. No matter how many YouTube videos I have to absorb about vocal and breathing techniques, no matter how many hours of practising and trial-and-error it takes to sound professional and get to grips with the software.

Here’s a snap of the equipment I have so far.

I shall report in Part 3 how I deal with those three main concerns (and the other issues that I don’t even know about yet but which shall, no doubt, arise). Keep your fingers crossed for me.

* I didn’t know what a pop filter was when I embarked on this process—it’s the black mesh, circular thingy in the photo that will go in front of the microphone and which apparently cuts down on the explosive sounds we naturally make when we say certain words; it also prevents the microphone becoming covered in spit, whilst presumably becoming rather damp itself.

** As I understand it, which may not be very far, a sound shield doesn’t aid soundproofing as such, but helps to dampen the voice and limit echoing. My sound shield doesn’t appear in the photo because, at the time of writing, I’m waiting for it to arrive.

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In the Durrells’ Footsteps

One of the books set for study for my English Literature O Level* was My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell. At that time—around 1979-80—I must confess to not having heard of the book, its author or his brother Larry, also a writer. Back then, I was reading horror novels by James Herbert and Stephen King, or fantasy by David Gemmell and Tolkien.

As a young teenager I had read and fallen in love with Cider With Rosie by Laurie Lee. There was something about Lee’s writing and his reminiscences about life in rural Gloucestershire in the period after the Great War that called to me.


Cider With Rosie

My Family had the same effect. I was instantly captivated by Durrell’s writing—it’s been many years since I last read the book, but I can still recall the wonderfully evocative way he described the cold from which he was suffering (and which partly prompted his mother to uproot the family and transport them almost two thousand miles to Greece). He wrote that the British summer had brought cattarh, ‘pouring it into my skull like cement’.

In case you haven’t read it (or seen one of the TV adaptations), the book and its two sequels are about the family’s sojourn to Corfu in 1935 when Gerry (Gerald) was aged ten. A keen student of natural history at even such a young age, he recounts his many and varied adventures with the Greek wildlife. But the real joy, for me, lies in the anecdotes about his family and the locals they encounter during their four-year stay on the island before war forces them back to Britain. There are also the eccentric guests Gerry’s eldest brother, Larry, invites to stay with them, usually at short to no notice, much to his long-suffering mother’s despair.


My Family and Other Animals

Larry (Lawrence) became an accomplished novelist, best known for The Alexandria Quartet. He provides the impetus for most of the funniest escapades, although Gerry’s bullish older brother Leslie and his flighty sister Margo, as well as their mother, have their share of comic moments.

As soon as we started reading the book in class, I was hooked and there was no way I could wait to read the book at the pace set by our English teacher. I continued reading it at home that evening and had finished it long before the deadline set by the teacher. Re-reading the book two or three times in preparation for the exam was no hardship.

That’s a long-winded way to explain why the island of Corfu has held a fascination for me since my mid-teens. Over the years, I have visited the island four or five times and have just come back from a fortnight in Glyfada on its west coast. The landscape, despite the paucity of summer rain, is surprisingly verdant, the sea is molten aquamarine and wonderfully cooling in the heat of the day, the sunsets are spectacular, and the locals are amongst the friendliest people I have ever encountered.

Although this holiday was intended as a total chill-out, recharge-the-batteries laze around the beach and pool—and was—we did take a couple of trips into the baking heat of the island’s capital, Corfu Town. They have a cricket pitch near the castle and harbour; on a previous trip, I’ve drunk a beer and watched a match taking place. Not far away, is a park dedicated to Lawrence and Gerald Durrell.

In My Family, the Durrells live in three villas during their stay on the island: apparently, two of the three still stand and they’re not far away from Corfu Town. Next time I visit Corfu (there will definitely be a next time), I want to find a trip that takes tourists to view the villas. Sure, they and the surroundings in which they stand probably bear little resemblance to the 1930s versions, but it’s still something I’d love to do. Short of time travel, I can’t imagine a better way of bringing one of my favourite books to life.

( * for those who don’t know, O Levels are the qualifications that teenagers used to sit in the UK at around the age of sixteen. They’ve since been supplanted by GCSEs.)

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Utter Bunkum and the Suspension of Disbelief – Part 2


In Part 1, I said I’d take a look at some of my favourite works of utter bunkum. You’ll need to read Part 1 ( utter-bunkum-part-1 ) to know what I mean by ‘utter bunkum’, but it’s worth repeating: this is not in any way meant to be serious. I am not intending to be disrespectful or disparaging about any of the works mentioned—as I said, these are some of my favourite works of speculative fiction. I love these books; I wish I’d written them.

It might be a little more fun to present the books in the form of a lighthearted quiz. What follows are the plots of twenty novels stripped back to their bare bones—to the utter-bunkum level. See how many you can get without peeking at the answers which follow. (The links—some of which partially obscure the answer numbers, which I can’t do much about—lead to Amazon UK in case anyone wants to check out any of the books mentioned.)

Warning: by their very nature, some of these may be spoilers if you haven’t read the books, so proceed with caution.

  1. Shapeshifting alien terrorizes small American town every twenty-seven years.
  2. Six-foot-plus man who thinks he’s a dwarf joins city police force and helps thwart a dragon.
  3. Children play computer games in preparation for alien invasion.
  4. Man from Mars preaches free love.
  5. Boy speaks pidgen English and worships a Punch puppet in post-apocalyptic Kent.
  6. Made-up creature and faithful companion infiltrate the heart of deadly enemy territory to destroy magical artefact.
  7. Old aristocrat takes voyage to Yorkshire for the hot young women.
  8. Man tries to open path to hidden worlds, convinced he’s finishing the work begun by Jesus.
  9. Man and boy wander along and hide a lot.
  10. A strange cloud turns people into murdering psychopaths.
  11. Intrepid young woman tries to prevent the plot of a much-loved classic being ruined.
  12. Everyone, kill Zack!
  13. Bury them and they come back, but you’ll wish they hadn’t.
  14. Boy meets girl in midnight trysts; boy watches girl die of old age.
  15. Lots of intrigue and spicy worms.
  16. Man in dressing gown sets off on amazing adventures after his home is demolished.
  17. Evacuees from war-torn London free land of icy dictator; native fauna say, “thank you.”
  18. Sculptor shockingly brings life to his work.
  19. Love story that jumps about because he can’t stay still.
  20. 101 reasons to be paranoid.

 

Answers
1.

IT

2.

Guards! Guards!

3.

Ender’s Game

4.

Stranger in a Strange Land

5.

Riddley Walker

6.

The Lord of the Rings

7.

Dracula

8.

Imajica

9.

The Road

10.

The Fog

11.

The Eyre Affair

12.

World War Z

13.

Pet Sematary

14.

Tom’s Midnight Garden

15.

Dune

16.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

17.

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

18.

Frankenstein

19.

The Time Traveler’s Wife

20.

1984

Right, next week I’m off to chill out in the sunshine, drink lots of beer and grow plumper on a Greek island, so the post due on 6th September isn’t going to happen. See you instead on the 20th. Yia mas!

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Living the Dream

I try to avoid talking about purely personal stuff because, unless you happen to know me in real life, I doubt you’d be particularly interested. Well, this is one of those personal posts so feel free to skip it—I won’t take offence.

I can’t place hand on heart and say I’ve wanted to be a writer all of my life. Although I’ve devoured fiction since I first learned to read, and English was comfortably my best subject at school, the notion of becoming a fiction writer didn’t materialise until my mid to late twenties. Then, no sooner had I sat down and started to write the first novel than the urge to become a full-time writer set in and has never left me.

Half of my life, then.

In Taking the Plunge, I wrote about what led to cutting my hours by half in my regular job. That happened in July 2017, after approaching my employers the previous August to request going part-time.

A lot can happen in a year. In my case, for reasons mentioned in that post, my writing output and sales dwindled to virtually nothing. Nevertheless, I was confident I could turn it around once a couple of things had fallen into place.

Now, two years on from going part-time, those things, and more, are in place. The biggies are regaining complete control over my books from the small press publisher, learning how to produce my own covers and paperbacks, designing my own website, and grasping enough about marketing to know how to give my books some sort of visibility. (My struggles with marketing are well documented in the Marketing for Muppets posts.) Apart from using an outside narrator for audio (I did consider narrating myself, but I’m dreadful at accents) and utilising the services of Amazon, iTunes, Kobo, etc to make them available to purchase, I don’t rely on anyone else for any aspect of producing my books.

In short, I have become totally self-sufficient. And I love it.

There is only one fly in my idyllic ointment: for two or three days each week, I have to toddle off to sit in an office and work for someone else. That’s half of each week taken up with doing something I don’t want to do that takes me away from what I love doing.

Despite my writing income having increased steadily over the past year, my wife—the sensible half of our marriage when it comes to financial matters—would not agree to my leaving the regular job because, as she rightly pointed out, book sales could fall away at any time.

I was growing desperate for a way to escape the regular job. Then, in the office a month or two back, a couple of colleagues happened to be discussing pensions, when one of them mentioned we can access our work pension at the age of fifty-five. Guess what age I’m turning in November? It was like a flashbulb going off in my head. My Eureka! moment.

The possibility of taking early retirement hadn’t been on my radar—I feel too young to even think about retiring. I looked into it. Retiring at fifty-five means a fairly drastic reduction in pension entitlement. It’s little more than peanuts, really, but here’s the crucial point: it’s guaranteed peanuts.

Saying my wife was happy about me retiring might be stretching it a little, but she was agreeable, if only, I suspect, to stop me banging on about becoming a full-time writer.

And that’s what I’m going to be. Last week I handed in my notice in my regular job. I’ll be officially leaving in early November. Since I work part-time and have accrued holidays, I only have twenty-two working days remaining. Not that I’m counting…

It’s not going to be retirement in the generally accepted sense. I won’t be taking up golf or gardening. I’ll be working twice as hard at writing, and all that goes with it, as I do now. I intend working my butt off for the next five years and then taking a breath to see where I’m at.

For the first time in my life, I won’t be dancing to anyone else’s tune. There are still almost three months to go so I’m trying to keep a lid on the excitement, but I haven’t looked forward to a birthday as much since my eighteenth.

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Weird Words 1

Here begins a series of posts about words—what could be more apt for a writer’s blog? I’m going to take a light-hearted look at some of the most troublesome, overused, misused, comical, or downright peculiar words in the English language.

Despite the title, not all words featured will seem weird to everyone but, you know, alliteration works well in a title. So ‘Weird Words’ it is.

Only a few each time to keep this manageable. All suggestions for words to include in future instalments are welcome—simply comment with your suggestion.

On with this week’s words…

Irregardless

You’ll sometimes see this word written in place of ‘regardless’ or ‘irrespective’. It makes me cringe because it always strikes me as, at best, a wholly unnecessary word to use when ‘regardless’ does the same job so well or, at worst, plain wrong. It has apparently been used (or, as some would say, misused) for many years; see Merriam-Webster’s tongue-in-cheek response to criticism for listing the word in their dictionary:

is-irregardless-a-real-word-heh-heh

This is probably one of those words that writers would do well to steer clear of. Rightly or wrongly, a writer who uses it is likely to be viewed by some, if not most, readers as someone of doubtful abilities. With all the competition out there to get eyes on our work, why take that chance?

Discombobulate

I’m including this word for no other reason than I love the way it sounds. Say it out loud; and again; once more. What a great word.

It means to disconcert or confuse someone, which is a perfectly satisfying definition to fit the sound of the word. Discombobulate: to confuse. Ahhh.

When starting this section, I was going to say I first became familiar with the word from the episode in Blackadder III* when Edmund Blackadder taunts Samuel Johnson about his dictionary and how it is not, in fact, a complete record of every word in the English language. However, on checking, I discover that Blackadder actually uses the word ‘pericombobulation’. No matter; that is a splendid-sounding word, too.

Moist

On a writing forum I frequent, sometimes a thread will come up about words people dislike. I was surprised when the humble word ‘moist’ became the focus of one of those threads, with the majority of commenters professing a strong dislike for it. Some went so far as to say they hate it.

It turns out that moist is one of the most disliked words in the English language. It’s something to do with people associating it in a negative way with bodily functions or the sexual act. See, for instance:

science-behind-why-people-hate-word-moist

I confess to feeling bemused.

Moist, for me, is a perfectly acceptable word to use in the right circumstances. Indeed, sometimes it can be the most appropriate word to use. Take this sentence from one of my books; it’s from a scene where a woman awakes from a coma in pitch darkness, having survived a deadly virus, to discover her bedfellow wasn’t so fortunate.

Tentatively, she reached out a hand to the other side of the bed, and withdrew it with a whimper when it encountered something cold and moist.

(from The Beacon)

‘Clammy’ might have worked there; ‘damp’, maybe; even, perhaps, ‘slimy’. But, to me, none of those words are as effective as ‘moist’ in describing what it must be like to reach out and touch a rotting corpse in the dark. It encapsulates clammy, damp and slimy all in one hit.

What a clever little word, punching well above its weight.

Sir Terry Pratchett, no less, used it for the first name of a Discworld character. Now there’s an author who could appreciate the merit of moist.

 

That’s all for Part 1. Don’t forget to mention in the comments any words you find weird for inclusion in future instalments. I’ll credit anyone whose suggestion I use.

 

* for anyone who doesn’t know, Blackadder was a four-series sitcom that aired in the 80s, starring Rowan Atkinson, among others, set in various key periods throughout British history. It was quite brilliant and not only hilarious, but could be deeply poignant (anyone who’s seen the final episode of Blackadder Goes Forth will know what I mean).

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Guest Post – A. R. Kavli

Today I’m pleased to host American author, A. R. Kavli, who is going to talk about narrating his own audiobooks. Around a year ago, I was dipping my toes into the audiobook market for the first time and faced the same considerations he’s going to discuss, so it’s a topic I find particularly interesting. Over to A. R.

DIY Audio

Let me start by saying that I’m at the beginning of my audiobook production journey. An audio amateur, if you will. But I can explain what seems to work for me, and sometimes it can be helpful to hear what others have experienced.

I was recently convinced by various articles and podcasts to try my hand (mouth?) at narrating. Audio is a growth market worthy of investigation for indies. Initially, royalty share options sounded like a dream: get an audio book made with no down payment and no work. Royalty share comes with two big drawbacks, as it turns out. One being that your book is locked in a seven-year, ACX exclusivity contract. The other is that narrators will have to believe your book will make money.

Both were issues for me, so I looked into DIY audio. Any endeavor requires money or time. I’m short on both, but I can wrangle more time than money at this point. So I bought an entry-level set up with mic, mic stand and preamp, and proceeded to learn what I could about the craft. I purchased a couple of online courses and have spent many hours on YouTube learning all about mouth clicks, mic position, and using Audacity to record, edit and master my audio.

There are some steep learning curves. And it is hard work. But I kept my goal in mind and when I gained some competence, I found recording enjoyable—despite my profanity-strewn outtakes. At this point I’ve only recorded my own work, but I think in the future, and with a bit more experience, I might put my toe in the market as a narrator.

Recording a full-length novel is a marathon. That makes it harder to maintain a constant sound day-by-day or month-by-month. I have two main, non-American accents in my novel, one Slavic, one French. On those days where I was struggling, my characters sounded like Count Chocula and Pepé Le Pew.

Less is definitely more when it comes to accents.

Editing the audio files is relatively easy. You have to listen and watch the track to each file, though. I’ve found noises I could hear but not see, and noises that showed up in the waveform that I couldn’t hear. It can be laborious to listen to the same track again and again, but think about how the listener will feel. When you have to later record over something to fix a mistake, it can be difficult to match the original voice qualities.

I still struggle with mouth clicks, both while reading and while mastering. You can’t get rid of them all, but I’ve learned how to adjust my speaking in a way to reduce the problem. Thank you, YouTube.

My cozy recording booth consists of a laptop set on my dresser surrounded by a PVC frame draped with a thick comforter.

I work in my bedroom corner, with roads nearby outside. It doesn’t keep out the noise, so I have to pause whenever someone wants to show off how loud their truck gets. Nor does my booth keep out the stomping kids, barking dog, or my own gastrointestinal misadventures. But it treats my recording space enough for a good, clean background noise level.

I enjoy the process, despite the extra work and frustrations of my DIY set-up. I think you have to enjoy it to keep at it for the long run. It is time-consuming and surprisingly exhausting. Oh, and my air conditioner has to be turned off, too. Very noisy.

I made the rookie mistake of deciding I didn’t need a final edit, then recorded my audio. In the course of that read, I came across many mistakes. I hired a final proofread and it turned up more word changes than I expected. My work was riddled with overused and improperly used words. Or, more accurately, it was a handful of words misused throughout. I knew there were comma issues, but dang. I’ve decided it would produce a better product—and probably be the same amount of work—to record the book over. And, I could apply the things I learned along the way to the beginning chapters.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. I love the work, and I think you really must love it to be able to stay in it for the long term. Just like writing.

I’m hoping to finish the audio production in time to match the ebook and paperback release of my novel, With Our Dying Breath. It is already up for pre-order (reduced price for pre-order) in ebook format, with a release date of Aug 31, 2019.

A.R. Kavli is a U.S. Navy veteran, author, gamer, and long-time fan of all things science fiction and fantasy. His first paid writing projects were for role-playing game companies and his first book was published in 2011. He lives in Middle Tennessee with his wife of 24 years and four children.

Please visit arkavli.com/my-books to purchase and for more information on his work.

 

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What Big Teeth You Have, Grammar – Part 4

Here’s the next post about the wonderful world of grammar, he says to accompanying groans. Actually, it can be a fascinating world. No, really. I’ve been recently engaged in editing for indie authors, which I enjoy, and it’s been having a beneficial effect on my own understanding of how grammar works.

My grasp of grammar comes from a lifelong love of reading and writing. I can read something and instinctively know when a grammatical mistake has been made. However, I didn’t study English at a high level (my degree is in law) and so my ability to explain the error is lacking, especially when it comes to using the correct technical terms. Yet, when editing, I often find myself having to explain the reason for a suggested correction. That is when I turn to the style guides—I use Chicago and Oxford style manuals—and then try to couch the reason in layman’s terms.

I thought it might be fun (yeah, yeah, I have a strange idea of fun) or, at least, useful to explain some of the more common errors I come across while reading and/or editing indie work. (Not, I hasten to add, that these errors are entirely confined to books by independent authors, but I think most people would accept that they are much less commonly found in traditionally published works since they tend to go through more rounds of professional editing.)

I’ll deal with two of the more common ones I come across in this piece. There are plenty of others to discuss in future instalments. (Seriously, stop groaning.)

Run-on Sentences

The humble comma has a multitude of uses. It separates items in a list, it can be used for parenthesis (where a stronger break as indicated by an em dash isn’t required), it punctuates speech, it breaks up wordy sentences into more easily readable chunks, it denotes a slight pause. There are more uses, but that’s enough to be going on with.

What is not a function of the comma is to join two complete sentences. That is the job of a semicolon (sometimes a colon) or em dash, or conjunctions such as ‘and’, ‘but’, ‘then’, etc. I see this sort of construction regularly:

John was exhausted, he fell over.

‘John was exhausted’ and ‘he fell over’ are two complete sentences. You could rewrite the example properly as, ‘John was exhausted. He fell over.’

The author has tried to make the comma do the work of the semicolon. It’s sometimes known as a ‘comma splice’. There are plenty of ways to merge these sentences without abusing the poor comma:

John was exhausted, so he fell over.

John was exhausted and he fell over.

John was exhausted; he fell over.

John was exhausted—he fell over.

More creatively:

John was so exhausted, he fell over.

Since John was exhausted, he fell over.

You get the point (and I’m fed up of writing about John and his problems).

Another incorrect use of the comma is to use it to splice two clauses linked by adverbs such as ‘nevertheless’ and ‘therefore’. So, the grammatically correct translation of the famous philosophical statement attributed to Descartes is not ‘I think, therefore I am’, but ‘I think; therefore I am’. On that profound note, let’s move on.

Like v As

Consider this (admittedly lowbrow) sentence:

I felt scared, like I was about to shit myself.

Not the most edifying of sentences, but is there anything wrong with it grammatically? The answer is, technically, yes.

Ah, technically. So here, according to Chicago, is the technical reason:

‘[Like’s] traditional function is adjectival, not adverbial, so that like governs nouns and noun phrases.’ There’s more, a lot more, but you’ll have to look it up yourself.

In essence, traditional grammar dictates that ‘like’ shouldn’t be used before a verb phrase, such as ‘I was about to shit myself’. Instead, the conjunction should be ‘as if’ or ‘as though’:

I felt scared, as though I was about to shit myself.

On the other hand, this would be grammatically correct:

I felt scared, like a man about to shit himself.

‘a man about to shit himself’ is a noun phrase (i.e. ‘man’ is a noun and the remaining words modify it) and so ‘like’ can properly link it to the preceding clause.

I imagine some writers reading this and shaking their heads, thinking, “What the heck is he wittering on about? I use ‘like’ all the time in the way he’s condemning without any problems.”

Such is your prerogative. However, far better to break grammatical rules through educated choice rather than ignorance. In other words, know the rules before deciding to break them. At least, then, if an irritated reviewer tears you a new one, you’ll know why.

And I’d strongly recommend breaking them sparingly. You’re far more likely to run foul of a disgruntled reader through constant disregard of the rules than by the occasional informed decision to break them.

That’s enough about grammar for today. No doubt there’ll be another post along in a while. Groan away—I can take it.

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Utter Bunkum and the Suspension of Disbelief – Part 1

I’ve posted a few serious pieces in recent months—marketing, editing, etc.—so thought it was time for a bit of light relief; something more frivolous, a little tongue in cheek. What follows are my random musings on the believability, or not, of the stories I enjoy reading, watching and writing.

Most of the stories I write are utter bunkum. Complete tosh. They are, at best, highly unfeasible. If readers took me to task and claimed that some of the scenarios in my tales are totally impossible, quoting scientific evidence to support their position, I’m not going to argue with them. Why would I? They’re right.

But then, we don’t expect horror or fantasy tales to be necessarily possible, though there are still unspoken rules to do with internal consistency and logic. On the other hand, many readers of science fiction expect stories labelled as such to at least be possible if feasible technological advances were made, or if certain conditions pertained that don’t exist here but that might exist in a solar system or galaxy outside our own.

The human brain is marvellously complex. It operates on many levels. (That’s got me thinking about Shrek, insisting to a sceptical Donkey that ogres have layers, like onions.) When we settle down to read a horror novel, or to watch The Walking Dead or a Harry Potter film, we do so in full knowledge that what we are about to read or watch is, from a rational viewpoint, a load of nonsense. Utter bunkum. Yet we lap it up and go back for more.

Yes, it’s known as suspending our disbelief. Although on some level we are fully aware that the storyline or plot device is far-fetched, that it ought to make us pull a face like the cat in the photo above, we’re willing and able to believe in it for the purposes of being entertained. Or, at least, we’re willing to not so vehemently disbelieve it that it would prevent us from continuing to watch or read.

I think there’s a line, the placement of which will vary from person to person, beyond which our willingness to suspend disbelief becomes stretched to breaking point. At that moment, what we are being asked as readers or viewers to swallow becomes too much, it becomes too ridiculous, and we’re no longer willing to play along. The best fiction writers and screenwriters, the best TV and film directors, are those with the ability to embroil their audience in the work so completely that the line is pushed farther and farther away. Perhaps so far away some of us may never reach it.

And there’s this: no matter how incredible something may be, it can be exciting to allow yourself to imagine it’s possible. We all realise that dolls can’t be possessed by evil spirits, that immortal humanoids living off blood don’t exist, that aliens don’t live among us waiting for a signal to trigger our extinction. We know that people who have died don’t get up and walk around—the thrill lies in supposing, but what if they did?

Not sure what you’d call that level which allows us to be enthralled by fantastical stories. Fanciful? Imaginative? Whatever you want to call it, it’s the part of me I most cherish. It’s the part that takes over when I pick up a Stephen King novel or turn on the TV for Game of Thrones. It’s also firmly in control when I sit at the computer to write.

When I allow my imagination free rein, I picture my rational side shuffling off to a corner to sit with arms folded, pretending to sulk. But really he’s watching what I’m up to, ready to leap to his feet like a lawyer in an American courtroom drama and yell, “Objection! That’s too ludicrous even for you!” When that happens, I usually take notice. Usually.

That’s one of the good things about being a writer. Particularly a writer of the sort of speculative fiction usually pigeon-holed as horror or fantasy or science fiction. It’s make-believe taken to the extreme. If I want to have my characters able to travel beyond the speed of light, or journey through time and space in an elevator, or encounter ghosts or zombies or a vampire masquerading as Father Christmas, I can. It’s fiction. It’s made up. It’s utter bunkum.

The aim for us writers is to spin the yarn in such a way that the reader is willing to come along for the ride and is able to overlook the bunkumness (is that even a word?) of the story. It’s what makes successful authors successful. Especially in the speculative fields I mentioned earlier: horror, fantasy, etc. I mean, when you strip them back to the bare bones, many celebrated novels of those genres are, at their core, utter bunkum. Yet, they’re massively popular, and rightly so because they’re so well written and entertaining.

In Part 2, I’ll take a look, for a bit of fun, at some of my favourite works of utter bunkum.

Till then…