Big Love

I just watched the first season of Big Love on DVD, the HBO drama about a polygamous family in Utah trying to cope with the demands of such a life, while attempting to keep their polygamous ways hidden from the public. Bill Henrickson runs Henrickson Home Plus, an up-and-coming Utah-based competitor to giants such as Lowe’s, Home Depot, and Wal-Mart. He has three wives, but only the first, Barbara Henrickson, is legally wed to him, while the other two are wives through religious practice. The wives take turns . . . uh, servicing Bill, with rotating shifts, so to speak (each wife shares a bed with Bill every third night, and the nights begin at 9:00 a.m.—it gets complicated).

There are various rules associated with this lifestyle, including adherence to almost complete isolation from neighbors, co-workers who exist outside of the “Principle,” and anyone else for that matter. Bill has spread his wives and children out in three separate and abutting houses, and there is one big backyard shared between them. Every evening, Bill enters the same house, the one shared by him and his first wife, Barbara, despite whose shift it is. He will then head over to the house of one of the other two wives via the back entrance, if it is either of their shifts—this is done to avert suspicion. As the show progresses, the layers of the Henrickson household are slowly pealed away, allowing viewers to enter into the inner chambers of their unique belief system and practices. By the middle of the season, one will find oneself completely familiar with the characters, being privy to their secrets, their desires, and their fears.

Bill’s protagonist is wonderfully opposed by the sinister Roman Grant, a said to be “prophet” and the apparent head of the United Effort Brotherhood (UEB), a fundamentalist offshoot of the LDS church. Bill and Grant are bitter enemies, and the surprising ties between them, which are revealed as intriguing and important plot points throughout the season, help to keep things interesting, as these ties only lock them closer in combat. Both men go to various extremes to stick it to each other. Grant, meanwhile, has somehow managed to acquire a stake in Bill’s two stores, earning 15% on each of them (what he believes is his due, in the form of “tithes” and “offerings”). Bill intends to open up a third store, but his expansion is hampered by Grant’s outstretched hand, as he aims to get a piece of that pie as well.

The most appealing feature this show has going for it is its uniqueness. In a time when dramas and situation comedies have grown stale by repeating what has gone before, and in remarkably poor taste, Big Love seems to have captured lightning in a bottle, delivering a fresh, entertaining, and highly engrossing story about a family the likes of which has never been seen in this medium before.

Definitely worth a look.

Jeremy Robinson: Pioneer

Jeremy Robinson hath a new book out—well, the book is forthcoming, with a release date set down for August 1, 2007. He intends to land atop Amazon.com’s bestseller list for August. To that end, he has launched an Amazon.com Bestseller Campaign, which, according to him, is a marketing blitz that seeks to “have everyone [. . .] buy [his] book from Amazon.com on August 1, 2007 (the book's official release date).” At the heart of this campaign is a series of low-budget viral videos that has the author so engrossed in a Breakneck Books title that he is impervious to the ill treatment he receives from those around him. The first four videos can be accessed here.

What interests me most is Mr. Robinson’s pioneering vision, as he has single-handedly opened up a new area of thought when it comes to POD book marketing. His efforts are obviously paying off, because his previous title, Raising the Past, which was reviewed on this site, sold 664 copies online this year alone (as of this writing), and 1,167 copies during a mere four months of its initial release last year, according to Ingram Book Company’s database (neither Jeremy Robinson nor Breakneck Books supplied this information). Now this only accounts for online sales. There’s no telling how much books he offloaded at book signings and other events, or via other avenues.

This astonishes me, to say the least, but only because it is so far above average for a POD title. Many traditionally published books perform in much the same way within the same time frame. And stellar fiction sales for many small publishers result in 7,000 to 12,000 copies sold for a single title, give or take—and I’m talking the life of the book. This was the case at the first small press I worked for. After all is said and done, Raising the Past will probably come close to hitting the conventional small press mark for stellar book sales—at least at the low end.

Robinson’s latest title, Antarktos Rising, may do even better than Raising the Past, as far as book sales go; and, seeing I have a digital ARC sitting here on my computer, I can say that the interior is the best I’ve seen for a POD title thus far, hands down. We’re talking excellence in font choice and size, elegant headers, exquisite section titles, correct spacing on leads, tabs, and ellipses points, beautiful watermarks, the whole kitten caboodle—and the cover isn't too shabby either. I expect to receive the hard copy ARC in two weeks, according to Robinson. Look for a review on this site prior to the release date. My impartial assessment should precede the fireworks.

I will say this: I am very excited for Mr. Robinson, and find that his efforts are important to the furtherance of the POD cause. And I report these facts to highlight some of those efforts and successes, and thus bring awareness to those who are not exactly in the loop.

Moments - A Review

Author: Ali Al Saeed
Publisher: Al Maseerah Publishing House/Lulu.com
ISBN: 978-9-9901-1213-9
Pages: 249

The stories in Moments—like the stories in another book of short stories I reviewed not too long ago—are not really stories, per se, but a collection of, well, moments . . . in the lives of the book’s central characters (and these characters vary, let me tell you). While the book’s characters lack the usual purpose and drive of conventional protagonists, what is delivered in lieu of this is raw emotion. We get to delve into the psyches of all of the narrators, and what we find there is at times gut wrenching, at times sad, and at times absurd.

In his query to me, Saeed wrote: “My stories are never about a place, or even an individual, they are about the states of mind we sometimes find ourselves in, and the moments that lead us to those states, how we react to them, accept them, deny them, refuse them.” I had forgotten these words when I began reading the book, but then something prompted me to return to his email, and when I reread these words, the form his stories took made all the more sense to me. (One story is even ethereal.)

What I like about the book is this: we never lose interest in some (and I should stress the word “some”) of the narrators, even though a plot is not in place, and we are not taken on a quest that starts out at point A and ends at point R. Revelations abound, however, and the thought processes of these characters act as windows into a unique set of human consciousnesses. I found one character of Arab descent, Sammy, to be nicely fleshed, mainly because of the way the author paints him—as a wounded outsider with a past. He takes center stage in Goodbye, Humanity, a story that is framed by a thin, wiry plot. Goodbye, Humanity, which is full of interesting social commentary, ends with what purports to be a shocking scene that follows a routine trip to the grocery store, but, despite a decent initial setup within the first few pages, and the seemingly spontaneous flow of events that play out, this particular ending still feels contrived.

Then there are times, such as in the very next story following . . . Humanity, that there seems to be too much spontaneity in the narrative, as nothing really relevant is said in many of the passages, especially the ones in a certain section that involve fruit. I am almost certain that Saeed wanted to capture a kind a immediacy of consciousness with his unique narrative style, intending to give us the drop on what characters were feeling and thinking then and there (or here and now, given one’s perspective). The experiment’s success, however, slipped out of his grasp like an anxious eel. There are also moments in the book, and particularly in the story of which I now speak, Empty Spaces, where the author employs a repetitious word style that recalls the great Gertrude Stein, but with far less effectiveness. What is very effective, however, is that story’s ending, despite the sluggish text and the almost vacuous details that precede it.

In short, a lot of the story elements contained in this book would be considered “filler” for more full-bodied stories with structured plots, purpose-driven characters, and arcs of some sort. In my view, there are too many peas on this book’s plate, and not enough steak and potatoes, if you get my meaning. Some of the stories are pure time-wasters, like the one that has a central character locked in conversation with a white ceiling—a ceiling, if you must know, that does our protagonist in at the end.

In a book like this, some of the author’s experimentation works, but a lot of it doesn’t, and that is to the reader’s detriment. Many of you might get much more out of this title than I did, and that certainly isn’t impossible.

POD Critic Sees Print

Well, despite those of you who disagree with my views on print-on-demand—and you’re entitled to—it looks like I’m steadily emerging as an authority on this side of the industry. Back in early April, I was approached by the editor of Writing Queensland, a monthly publication of the Queensland Writers Centre, said to be “the leading provider of specialized services to the writing community of Queensland.” (The magazine itself reaches some 2,200 writers.) This editor visited the blog and read some of my editorials on print-on-demand, which she says she found to be informative, and she later congratulated me on them. She then fired off an email to me asking whether I’d be interested in whipping up something on POD for one of their upcoming issues, as I was, in her view, “the perfect person for the job”—flattery will get you everywhere.

I happily agreed to this paying gig, and I pretty much told her that I would be “happy to further the cause of POD publishing, as well as aid both self-published authors and aspiring writers by writing an article for [her] magazine.” Long story short, I managed to whip something up, and, after the signing and exchange of contracts, I delivered the piece to them, and it appears as a feature article in their July issue. You can view the cover and my two-page contribution to the magazine by clicking on the following links:

WQ Cover

Page 10

Page 11

We are on the move, folks.
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The Benefits and Pitfalls of Print-On-Demand*

By POD Critic

With all of the technological advancements made in the entertainment industry, it is not surprising that the publishing world has been graced with print-on-demand (POD), a relatively new, albeit imperfect approach to the production of books. Traditionally, the offset press was the sole and primary method of book production, and publishers would place orders with their printer of choice for short run or long run prints of a given title. (Consequently, this is still the preferred printing method for the vast majority of trade publishers in existence today.) Enter POD, a method of book production that allows a given title to be printed one book at a time from a digital file, rather than in multiples of a hundred or a thousand, which involves the expensive requisite warehousing of books.

It is evident that POD technology has leveled the field in book production, but this comes with unfavorable consequences. The average writer now has his or her pick of various subsidy presses that have been scrambling to fill the ever growing need of hungry authors looking to self-publish. What results is a glut of bad books flooding the market; books that are available mainly through online booksellers, such as Amazon.com and BN.com (Barnes & Noble’s official website). Shoddy production values usually accompany POD produced books, and this is often due to limited design and editorial input from employees at these subsidy presses, or the do-it-yourself efforts of self-published authors.

As a printing method, POD technology is being employed, somewhat as an aside, by various university presses and large publishing houses—the latter for backlist titles. The struggling writer, on the other hand, having exhausted all avenues leading to commercial publication—and who lacks the kind of resources these majors are afforded—has no choice, it seems, but to settle for the POD services offered by the subsidy presses; services that, more often than not, amount to inexperienced self-publishing efforts on the part of the author; hence the aforementioned glut.

Trade magazines and journals tend to shun POD books submitted to them for review, and chain bookstores seldom stock them. The stigma that surrounds most POD produced books is ostensibly warranted, especially when one considers the quality of many of these books, with their garish or unimaginative covers, sloppy interior layouts, and substandard writing. I have long said that some measure of regulation needs to be established, else the glut of bad books would continue unimpeded. To this end, I decided to launch a review blog concerned solely with POD produced books, wherein I dissect, via a thorough critique, the books submitted to me by various authors and micropresses. I also dispense—through the occasional editorial—a good deal of advice on writing, the POD industry, and publishing in general. The blog is called POD Critic, and can be accessed at: www.podbookreview.blogspot.com.

It has been my experience that not all POD books are low in quality; in fact, some deserve to be picked up by major publishers effective immediately. That said, going POD does not always guarantee recognition by large publishers. The ratio concerning POD books that eventually find their way into the hands of large trade publishers is quite low (Xlibris once accounted for 20 in 10,000 books) and this further highlights the associated stigma. Bearing this in mind, authors should not venture into the world of POD with the intention of publishing a book solely to gain recognition from large publishers—in the hope of landing a fat contract. The truth is: it doesn’t quite work that way.

Print-on-demand, as a technology, is great for keeping books in print, and large publishers have been wise to this very idea for some time now. But as a service, such as those offered by Xlibris, Lulu, BookSurge, and others, I believe its purpose is best served when the books produced are those of a particular type, such as personal journals that could use a more professional look, or travel and family photo books, cook books, manuals, and the like. When we get down to genre fare, however—sci-fi, literary, thriller, and so forth—that’s when things get a bit dicey.

Almost everyone knows that self-published fiction, despite the quality of the work, usually ends up on the worst-seller lists of this vast book world. Fiction titles produced via POD will stand even less of a chance of making it, so why would one even think to go there? Certainly not for the money, because there’s hardly any of that in print-on-demand, unless you’re a successful small press or major publisher—and even then we’re sometimes talking pennies on the dollar. So is it for the sake of fame? No way. Recognition is the last thing you’ll get going POD. The truth is, many writers go POD simply because they want to see their work in print—many are eager to, in fact—and realizing that all other avenues are closed to them regarding this dream, print-on-demand is usually the most simple and cost-effective alternative.

If you are truly desirous to see your work in print, and are not concerned with a huge monetary return on your initial investment (made on behalf of your literary endeavor), and if fame is not on your agenda, then you’re the perfect candidate for this revolutionary technology. In addition, one should seek to reach a niche audience, rather than a large mainstream one. Since your books won’t be stocked by the national chains, reaching a large audience will be virtually impossible anyway, and even publishers at POD micropresses understand this.

The Internet should also be your main focus, and if you’re game, target your local community as well. But a niche audience is the ticket. You should target your material to those who are your—and I use the term loosely—“guaranteed market.” You have to fill an area where a demand for your product exists. Is that area Vampire fiction? Not likely, because there’s plenty of that being offered by the large trade presses out there. If you want to self-publish Vampire fiction using POD, you’ll be doing so for your own pleasure, and that of maybe fifty other people, if you’re lucky. But to fill a real demand would be to offer a book that is rare, and will yield little to no competition from similar titles.

Nonfiction is usually a good fit for POD, especially when a title targets a good niche market. But all that aside, if you truly have a love for writing, and literature on a whole, and are convinced that you can deliver a good product to the public, be it fiction or nonfiction—I’m talking quality writing, editing, and book design—and you’re not delusional about making a success of it, by all means, go POD. At the end of the day, everyone deserves a moment in the sun. There’s no better way to achieve this than to have your book lauded by an established POD reviewer and purchased by complete strangers who celebrate your efforts with a few choice remarks on your Amazon Product Overview page. I have witnessed firsthand the joy that writers derive from these two things; and the sense of achievement on their part is, in a word, priceless. There is almost no greater benefit in going POD than this.
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*This article may not be cited or republished electronically or in print without permission from the author.

Professional Book Layout

A big thank you to everyone who responded to the recent post with a positive attitude. Over a third of the submissions in the current queue will now be read from hard copy books, which will certainly help matters. I think this is a good change for the blog, and it will certainly keep things moving at a steady pace. The submission guidelines have been updated to reflect the inclusion—and preference—of hard copy books.
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Professional Book Layout

Now to the meat of this post. I have stressed the importance of the look of a book’s interior in the past, but I have to reiterate here for those who missed it. There is nothing worse than a sloppy, unprofessional interior book layout. NOTHING. Oh, “sloppy editing is worse” you say? Believe me, the layout is the first thing that will give away the quality of your book, and the editing, if it is substandard, will only be the next thing in line (perhaps behind the writing, if that proves to be bad also). A decent cover is usually easy to slap together, if you limit the graphics, license an attractive image, and keep the text neat and elegant, or appropriately stylish, depending on the overall design aspect.

A few self-published authors have submitted books to me that had covers that were designed by them—decent looking covers at that—but the interiors of each of these books had certain deficiencies, owing to the authors’ inexperience in this area. Of note, there were too many spaces between the words of many of the lines, because text wrapping breaks weren’t applied (see image below), or else tabs were off, and ellipses points were spaced incorrectly or placed inappropriately (they should be spaced like . . . that, and not like… that). Sometimes the font was poorly chosen or oversized to artificially enlarge the page count (for shame).

I will, in future, address any new problems that arise in layout and interior design within a given review, if that problem hasn’t been covered already (I do hate to repeat myself, even though I tend to do so at times). The same goes for any editorial or writing errors that will eventually crop up. I’ll try to address the ones that haven’t been belabored already.

My advice on an interior layout is always: hire a professional. They're usually cheap. Book covers can fly if they’re done properly enough, but interior layouts should be handled by professionals, as a reader will spend more time in the book’s interior, going line by line through your story. Their reading experience should be a smooth one, unimpeded by niggling design flaws. There are certain publishing standards that should be met when laying out a book, and if you want people to take you seriously, you will, as I like to say, give them a few good reasons to.

Hard Copy Submissions

I’m considering an alteration in the submission guidelines that would allow for hard copy submissions to be sent to an address I would supply via email to anyone willing to pony up the dough for snail mail deliveries of their books. This would probably speed up my reading of POD books, because getting to the computer is proving more and more difficult with my current schedule. With a hard copy book in my hand I could read pretty much anywhere, and as often as possible. I have received a couple of books from authors this way and I have to say: I actually prefer it.

I know that the savings writers and publishers experience by sending PDF files is a welcome one, but that will have to be curtailed as much as possible in the future. This is standard procedure on the other side of this industry anyway, and I can see why. Though I’m almost always on the computer when it comes to work, I find that I’m not spending as much time at it reading POD books, because my workload has increased over the past few weeks (and much of my free time at home is set aside for family). Therefore, a hard copy book makes all the sense in the world at this point.

I’ll keep going through the current queue of PDFs and MS Word files as is, unless some of you are willing to resubmit a hard copy book that was sent via email already. None of you are obligated to, of course, but it would smooth things out considerably. The sooner I get through much of the books in the current queue (or backlog), the sooner I can reopen submissions to other writers and publishers.

Well, these are my thoughts on this subject. I welcome any and all feedback from as many of you as are willing to grace me with your comments.

The Truth, It Lies - A Review

Author: Eoin Hennigan
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 978-1-8472-8540-9
Pages: 252

The Truth, It Lies is a curious thing: it is a PI novel with no PI, and therein lies the first problem. It has the tone of a PI novel, as well as the basic structure and overall intentions of one, but the ultimate lack of an actual PI (we instead get a desperate lawyer who stumbles around completely out of his element) is immediately disappointing. This is one of those experimental books that acts as a case in point for one or two editorials I’ve written of late. While experimentation is good, bucking an established system isn’t always good.

For one thing, the author inexpertly utilizes more than one grammatical person (third and first) to tell his story, and this makes a reader feel like he or she is reading two separate works. If your narrative voice starts out omniscient and ends up inside the mind of a single character, the author, more often than not, will come across as an inexperienced writer, wielding the reins of a book that wasn’t well thought out to begin with. After all, who is actually telling the story here?

Also, both the third- and first-person narratives are plagued with too much “tell” and not enough “show”—further evidence of the author’s inexperience. I actually found myself growing tired of the narration at certain points, as the lack of action at these points didn’t quite compel me to keep up with the story itself. It rather bogs things down. Your story should feel like it’s happening NOW, so that a reader feels like they’re getting fresh news; better yet, they should feel like they’re a part of that news. Things should be happening to and around your main character, and that character shouldn’t be wasted recounting past conversations and events.

Examples of “telling” rather than “showing” follow below (taken from pages 82 and 83):

Monk was about to leave the studio when Bloom came to him with yet another ‘request’. He wanted Monk to take the film reels home for safe keeping. Bloom told him that he suspected someone might take them, and that he’d feel better if they were off the premises over the weekend. Monk disagreed and expressed unease at the notion. He reminded Bloom that it was against studio protocol. He asked the director why he didn’t take them with him to his own house, but Bloom brushed this off, saying he didn’t have his car that day. It worried Monk that Bloom was adamant that the reels had to be taken off site immediately.

The two men argued about it for some time before Monk relented. His decision to give in to the director’s whim was primarily to get some peace. Monk said he’d take them on condition that he’d be returning them in 48 hours. Monk told Bloom he could take that time to sort out whatever was on his mind. But then Bloom’s next request worried Monk even more: he was asked not to tell anyone that he had the reels of film or where they were.

Now here Monk was, standing on the pier, running these events through his mind, trying to make sense of this irrational man’s actions. He had no idea what Michael Bloom was up to and he didn’t want to know either. With his closest friend at the studio, Morgan, dead he didn’t think there was anyone else he trusted enough to confide in about Bloom’s behavior.

What’s more, I didn’t really get a ’50s vibe when reading this book; the language fails to evoke the time period the author has decided to set his story in.

And aside from the usual spelling errors and inverted words, there is also poor phrasing in this book:

He felt the trip to the cinema had achieved nothing except pile on more unnecessary paperwork.

My advice to authors having trouble with sentence construction is to take the bare bones of your thought and break it down to its smallest component. In this case, considering the above passage, breaking this down to its bare bones would allow even the most inexperienced writer to note awkward phrasing here. Reword the sentence to drive home your point in the simplest form possible: “All that the trip to the cinema achieved was pile on more unnecessary paperwork”? Does this sound right? Of course not, and the simplest fix to the problem would be to eliminate and replace the problem word or words. In this case, the problem is caused by the phrasal verb “pile on.” One could also question the presence of the adjective “achieved.”

Now I don’t like to spoon-feed writers with suggestions when it comes to rewording sentences, because that would result in a change in voice, and my job as an editor is to leave an author’s work without as many kinks as it started out with (no editor can remove every single kink), while retaining the author’s voice and vision.

With more books under his belt, I’m sure Eoin Hennigan will begin to show vast improvements in the areas touched on in this review. (And there will be more books, as this is the first in a planned trilogy.)

The Potential of Literary Novels

Some have said that literary novels don’t sell as they once did, and that is certainly true. But to say that they don’t sell at all, and one shouldn’t waste time attempting to write them (except for a sense of personal achievement or gratification) I would have to counter that. A recent USA Today list of 150 best sellers, despite the reality that surrounds literary works, has Khaled Hosseini’s sophomore effort, A Thousands Splendid Suns, at the top of the list.

While his debut novel, The Kite Runner, offered millions of readers a view into what life is really like in Afghanistan, A Thousand Splendid Suns—a multigenerational novel that may eventually be classed as literature—seeks to plumb even greater depths, recounting three decades of Afghan history, from the communist revolution to the Soviet invasion and the subsequent U.S.-led war against the Taliban—this through the eyes of two Afghan women.

Hosseini’s Kite Runner has even received the Hollywood treatment, as the book has since been adapted for the screen and actually wrapped production in December 2006—principal photography, as I hear it, was shot in China, and the film is now in post-production and may hit theaters by November 2007. Coincidentally, Hosseini’s Kite Runner landed at number 15 on the USA Today list, no doubt a result of the surge in interest in his latest effort.

This just goes to show that there is still great potential for the success of literary novels in the book world; readers still clamor for them, and reviewers and booksellers still salivate over them. Like all other genres, however, not every single book that can be classed as literary will be received in the same way, despite the quality of the work. The success of any book will depend of various factors: subject matter, timing, current tastes, and so many other things. It is up to the writer to write his or her story without worrying about these things, however, because no one can say for sure what will eventually become a best seller or not.

Busy, Busy, Busy

Well, first thing’s first. I was supposed to post a review for a POD title today, but due to certain elements contained in that book, I was unable to complete the reading, as I felt the book, on a whole, wasn’t in keeping with my submission guidelines; therefore, I couldn’t write a review for it. The author was apprized and I have since moved on.

That said, while I’m currently reading the next book in my queue, and working a demanding day job, I’ve just received a couple of emails from an acquaintance of mine, an associate producer of two yet-to-be-made films (one of them a big budget project). I have both screenplays on my computer and have yet to read them. This acquaintance of mine is putting the pressure on me to deliver my assessment of both scripts. We had a wonderful conversation about filmmaking while boating with our wives one weekend, and he got the bright idea that it would be ideal if I could give him some feedback on the scripts he had recently optioned.

I told him that I had helped to beef up and improve certain stories in the past, and he sensed, from the conversation, that I could spot weak areas of the scripts and suggest certain changes for his writers, which would improve the screenplays. Long story short, if this works out, he wants to work with me on a regular basis (for which I would be paid, of course), since we seem to have a good rapport. But I’m not getting any hopes up, as this isn’t something I’m pining after. If it happens, it happens, but I relate it only to let everyone know just how busy I’ve been lately.

Oh, and the book I’m currently reading is Eoin Hennigan’s The Truth, It Lies.

Dedication to the Writing Life

I have a great deal of respect for anyone who sits down to write a novel and actually completes one, whether the time it takes them to do so amounts to a few weeks, months, or (incredibly) years. I know how daunting it can be—hey, editing the darn things is a chore I deign to speak of at times (though I’ve been editing mostly non-fiction for some time now). And when I say I have respect for someone who completes a novel, I don’t mean a good novel. I have respect for people, in general, who see things through to the end; people who aren’t quitters, despite the odds against them—and concerning literature, those odds could come in the form of a lack of literary skills, but don’t let that stop you; in fact, don’t let anything stop you.

One writer I know of stopped emailing me on a daily basis due to his desire to concentrate on finishing a trilogy; a fellow POD book reviewer recently called it quits as far as blogging goes because his writing career started taking off, and the time he needs to dedicate to the writing life suddenly took precedence; ditto another writer, Sonya Bateman, who I mentioned on this blog not too long ago—she landed a literary agent recently—well, she quit blogging for the same reason. This type of dedication has to be applauded; and it goes to show that perseverance does indeed pay off after a while—in some cases anyway.

If you ever want to become good at what you do, giving it up or neglecting to set aside a good amount of time to concentrate on that endeavor in question won’t help. What’s more, you have to write a few bad books before you can write a good one, but just because POD technology is where it is at the moment—convenient and affordable though it is—doesn’t mean you have to publish your first two attempts, which, for most writers, end up being misses rather than hits. Time, study, and practice will eventually pay off, however, and you should begin to show improvements in various areas, but you first have to recognize your weaknesses in order to correct them. Writers who are either blind, or simply close their eyes, when it comes to the areas in which they are particularly weak—or who refuse to accept criticism regarding their weaknesses—will suffer for it in the end. This I don’t respect.

So, while I might slam your book for the sake of bad writing, don’t think I’m slamming you for having written it. I admire your dedication, and I encourage you to persevere until you begin to show improvement. And once you’ve improved to the point of actually seeming to know what you’re doing, then may all the success in the world fall into your lap, because you’ve shown what you are made of, and you deserve something for your hard work. These are the kinds of people whose work will garner praise, and a few of them have had their books reviewed right here on this blog.

Films I took in This Weekend

The Painted Veil (Excellent)

For what it’s worth, I wish the film could live up to my designation of it, that being: “instant classic.” I found the film to be a rich and rewarding experience, in that it demonstrated, and quite efficiently, redemptive love and forgiveness—and this after extreme betrayal was effected within the bonds of marriage. Without giving too much of the plot away (for those who haven’t read the novel by W. Somerset Maugham) the film opens in 1920s China, in a rural province—the movie was filmed on location, thanks to the efforts of the filmmakers, who took it upon themselves to jump through various hoops to obtain all of the permits necessary to film in the country (a feat not achieved for an American-funded film in many years, as far as I know). A seemingly unhappy couple fills the first few frames, and we immediately get their back-story.

Dr. Walter Fane (Edward Norton) is enamored with Kitty (Naomi Watts), the daughter of an affluent family, by all appearances, who he meets at a gala. Not much time passes before he asks the young beauty to marry him and return with him to Shanghai, where he holds a civil position as a scientist. Kitty is taken aback by his sudden boldness and is initially reluctant, until she overhears a telephone conversation her mother has with a friend, wherein she says—regarding Kitty’s marriage prospects—“Oh, I gave up on Kitty long ago.” To escape the clutches of her overbearing mother, Kitty sets off to Shanghai with her new hubby, but as blissful as the marriage seems in the beginning, things immediately go wrong.

For reasons I will not divulge, the naïve Kitty is forced to travel with her husband to a remote region of China, where he has decided to volunteer his services in the fight against a cholera outbreak, as the disease has wreaked havoc and devastation on this part of the country. It is here that the film explores the deepest aspects of the two lead characters, and it is here that the healing process begins. We learn, along with the unhappy couple, that they were expecting things of each other that neither of them possessed in the first place; and each desired something in the other that that person couldn’t supply. But eventually, the two learn to accept each other for who they are; and the connection between them soon becomes solid, and unmistakable. I should say that there is one crucial plot point—which carries us into the Third Act—that will conveniently upset the calm and keep us riveted until the final moments play out.

The performances are brilliant and highly believable, but this is more of an art house film than anything, so the average moviegoer will be sorely disappointed if he or she is expecting otherwise. The cinematography is breathtaking, and exquisite views of actual mainland China, with its distinctive misty mountain ranges, fill the background of many establishing shots. The set designers decided on various muted earth tones for many of the interior settings, and this causes the viewer to focus on the players moving about in the foreground, but whether this is in keeping with the period or not, I do not know. What I can say is that it works. I only mention this because many films that are set in the Orient tend to be extremely colorful, and this film is not, which is refreshing, as the subject matter and themes do not call for it.