Too many books? Nothing new under the sun.

Information overload? Too many books swamping the market thanks to new technology? That complaint’s been around for thousands of years.

Complaints about information overload, usually couched in terms of the overabundance of books, have a long history — reaching back to Ecclesiastes 12:12 (“of making books there is no end,” probably from the 4th or 3d century BC). The ancient moralist Seneca complained that “the abundance of books is distraction” in the 1st century AD, and there have been other info-booms from time to time — the building of the Library of Alexandria in the 3d century BC, or the development of newspapers starting in the 18th century.

“But around 1500, humanist scholars began to bemoan new problems: Printers in search of profit, they complained, rushed to print manuscripts without attention to the quality of the text, and the sheer mass of new books was distracting readers from the focus on the ancient authors most worthy of attention.”

(Via Boing Boing.)

“I am serious. And don’t call me Shirley.”

RIP Leslie Nielsen.

How not to get published

On comments and the fun of blogging

Recently John Scalzi wrote Comments Are a Lot of Work. Among the reasons why comments can become work for a blogger, he explained:

3. Lots of commenters are a drag. We’re not even talking about the out and out trolls and spammers. There’s also the single-issue tubthumpers, the condescending rhetoricians, the “devil’s advocates,” the concern trolls, the unintentional derailers, the grievously offended, the eager self-promoters, the cluelessly “helpish,” the ignorant who think they’re not, and so on and so forth. Mind you, you are not any one of them – of course not! — but I’m sure you’ve seen them in the comment threads, and they have to be managed if the comment threads are to have any value at all. Which brings us back to “managing comments is a lot of work.” It’s enough work, in fact, that:

4. Sometimes the amount of work required to manage a comment thread has an impact on what gets written.

John’s entire post is worth a read. I mention it here because it’s one of those days when I’ve been dealing with an unhappy commenter. Which means that “what gets written” is my response to said comment.

Happy Thanksgiving

To all who are celebrating today.

And very, very early Thanksgiving wishes for Canadians celebrating in 2011.

Here’s what I’m thankful for.

I love my iPad

I love books. I love stories. I love my MacBook Pro. I think different. I dig my iPhone. I listen to tunes through an iPod. Of course I was going to get an iPad.

I don’t want to debate whether a physical book is “better” than an e-book. I love books. I love them on my bookshelf, in the library, cramming the shelves of a bookstore, teetering in a stack on my nightstand, or nestling in my hand. And I read on a screen for hours a day. I read, period. I like both media. And, as an author, it is as pointless for me to say, “But books are better” as it would have been for monks to complain that Gutenberg was destroying literature because illuminated manuscripts were the real books. Readers will read in whatever manner they want to. My job as an author is to write the best damn novels I can. I’m not in the business of pushing paper pulp. I write. It’s the story that counts.

And, while my house will slowly sink into the ground under the weight of the books it contains, in the meantime I decided that, as a 21st century author, I should get an e-reader. It was important for me to understand how some members of my audience are taking in my work. (Shut up. It’s the truth. Just because the iPad is smooth and shiny and tells me I am fabulous, that’s not why I bought it. Not at all.)

So I grabbed my new electronic friend a couple of months ago. How has it been? Wonderful. Compared to a laptop, it’s lightweight and easy to haul around. I can get my email and browse online. From the photo above, it’s also clear that my kids have gotten hold of it, and loaded a bunch of free games. I don’t mind at all. The screen is beautiful, the images crisp, the colors rich. I can instantly increase or reduce font sizes, to make reading easy on my eyes.

And because I read a lot of manuscripts, the iPad is a Godsend. Now I don’t have to choose between reading an entire book on my computer screen (tiring, annoying) or having to print the entire manuscript (300-400 pages). I can read the manuscript in either iBooks or as a PDF. The iPad is the size of a trade paperback and weighs approximately the same. It has made life much simpler.

And when my broadband crashed in late September, the iPad saved me. It’s 3G enabled, so I could connect to the net via my mobile phone network. While my computer was isolated and helpless, I could do almost everything I needed to do using the iPad.

That said, it isn’t the same as my computer. It uses a touchscreen keypad. It’s like using the iPhone to type. For emails, it’s fine. For blogging, it’s a bit less convenient. For writing anything more than a few hundred words, I would hate it.

And it’s not the equivalent of my Mac. It uses Mac iOS, not OS X. It’s not as powerful, and not always as flexible. If I really wanted to do any blogging — which often requires links, and uploading photos — I would probably want to link a bluetooth mouse to the iPad, and perhaps even a wireless keyboard.

It’s also more expensive than a Nook, Kindle, or Kobo. But it does a lot more. And for me, it’s like having a lightweight computer adjunct at my side, ready to go at a moment’s notice.

I use it every day. I’m glad I bought it.

On Jane Austen and editors

Recently there’s been a kerfuffle (“kerfuffle” is literary street slang for bitch-fest) about an Oxford professor’s discovery that Jane Austen’s letters had inconsistent spelling, careless punctuation, and corrections inked in. Some commentators — ill-informed and sensationalistic commentators — have taken this to mean that far from being a brilliant novelist, Austen had a “shadow writer” or was even “illiterate.”

Ron sends this link to an interview by NPR, which begins:

The beloved novelist — author of Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park and Emma — is known for her polished prose, her careful phrasing and her precise grammar. “Everything came finished from her pen,” Austen’s brother, Henry, said in 1818, a year after his sister’s death.

But now — though it may pain die-hard Austen fans — it turns out that Austen may have simply had a very good editor. Kathryn Sutherland, a professor at Oxford University, has been studying more than 1,000 original handwritten pages of Austen’s prose. She’s found some telling differences between the handwritten pages and Austen’s finished works — including terrible spelling, grammatical errors and poor (often nonexistent) punctuation.

The best riposte to this nonsense comes from novelist Stephanie Barron, who wrote an op-ed for the Jane Austen Society of North America.

I ask you: What writer born in 1775 conforms to 2010 spelling standards? What writer forced to compose with a quill and ink is likely to run to error-free pages? What first draft is NEVER revised? Only the lousy ones.

Exactly. For critics to assert that Austen was illiterate, or some kind of literary Milli Vanilli, because such trivial details in her letters were imperfect, is nuts. It would be equivalent to claiming that a composer was a fraud if he had trouble copying a symphony onto music manuscript paper. It’s nonsense. An editor’s suggestions do not strip authorship from the writer. They enhance the work. But it’s still the author’s work.

I’ll let Barron have the last word:

[S]he crosses out words. She forgets to put “i” before “e.” She inserts omissions with tiny carrots. She didn’t have a Letter Editor.

None of that matters. Because the letters sing with wit and vicious humor, intimate nonsense and sometimes sorrow–but above all, with the fluent voice of a woman whose pen was an extension of her febrile mind, a woman who was never at a loss for words.

UPDATE: In the comments, an editor, English professor, and Austen Society member explain things better than I have.

Sleuthfest 2011

I’m very excited that I’ll be one of the guests of honor at Sleuthfest 2011. Along with S.J. Rozan and Dennis Lehane, I’ll be one of the featured authors at the convention, which will be held March 4-6, 2011 in Boca Raton, Florida.

I hope I’ll see some of you there.

Super Mamika

This should cheer you up on a Monday morning. Photographer Sacha Goldberger photographed his 91-year-old Hungarian grandmother Frederika as a superhero. Fabulous.

Grandma’s Superhero Therapy.

Watch out, that mouse is gonna blow. Or glow.

Hanford, Washington, is way up the Columbia River, but it’s still in the same state as Kitsap County.

Radioactive mouse hunted at Hanford Site.

How? “Another theory is that a mouse may have gotten into contaminated rabbit droppings.”

Next: watch out for radioactive jackalopes.

Combat rescue

Readers of the Jo Beckett novels know that her boyfriend, Gabe Quintana, is a PJ — a pararescueman with the 129th Rescue Wing of the California Air National Guard. PJs perform search and rescue on land, at sea, and underwater. They also serve as combat medics. This video, by filmmaker and veteran MrGlory, offers a glimpse of the work they do in combat search and rescue.

These guys are awesome. And that’s an understatement. The epigraph at the end of the video — “So That Others May Live” — is their motto.

Editing! Is! Finished!

Or rather, this round of editing is finished. Revise! Or! Die! has now ended. I finished my major revision of The Nightmare Thief last night, sent it to my editors, and pitched face down on my desk. Then, almost immediately, I sprang back up like a jack-in-the-box, thinking of all the changes I still want to make to the novel. Then I pitched forward on my desk again.

Eventually, awakened by my drooling, I sat up, picked off all the paperclips that had stuck to my face, and staggered to bed, where visions of Jo Beckett and Evan Delaney danced in my head. Actually, they didn’t dance — they opened a couple of beers, clinked bottles, and put their feet up, waiting to see what I’ll do to them on Monday.

They have no idea.

John Cusack to play Edgar Allen Poe

Dear Mystery Writers of America: Could you grab John Cusack and send him to my house to play the role of my Edgar award? Even for one day? Please?

John Cusack playing Edgar Allan Poe in film about the author’s life.

Still editing

Edit! Insanity! is in its final week. Me and the book, going to the mat. I’ll let you know which of us is winning.