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"Imagine if dogs ever figured out how to put that spunkiness and bite of theirs into action verbs, or to root around for bon mots with those lubricated snoots. We dry-and-fleshy-nosed writers could be in big trouble."
---Introduction, Spunk and Bite
June 8, 2008
Goodbye SASE: The New Digital Rejection
Flush with the popularity of Spunk & Bite, Plotnik hates to confess that he receives the odd rejection form or letter. He admits, however, that like most career writers he could paper the proverbial wall with rejection slips over the years.
But now something is changing all that: Publishers are replacing the slip with an e-mail.
Not all publishers, not yet. But it's certainly happening with literary journals. Many of them either invite electronic submissions or encourage senders of paper manuscripts to provide an e-mail address (for response) in lieu of the fabled SASE (self-addressed stamped envelope).
Not that any author will shed tears over the SASE. Half the time one forgets to enclose it. Or it is misaddressed, or enclosed with outdated, insufficient postage. And one must first decide whether to ask for return of materials (and pay the freight) or for "response only."
Paper rejections often come on slips the size of one sheet of toilet tissue, with messages worthy of a toilet-paper lookalike. Something like, "We regret that such-and-such did not meet our needs at present, but wish you the best luck in placing it elsewhere."
Editors (Plotnik has been one) have no more love for SASE's or paper rejections than do authors. The envelopes bulk up the files and the mail. A paper slip hints at some palpable message, not the soulless rejection that compassionate but busy editors are forced to render.
Digital rejection, then, with no SASE required, addresses the problem. It is a fast, free, appropriately insubstantial medium. It can be deleted or printed out for wallpapering, albeit with no decorative letterhead. The publisher can file it for (usually negative) reference.
Yet, isn't there something sad, so sad, about impaling one's creative guts only to receive a form e-mail? An e-mail that looks like any other piece-of-crap mail in your in-box---like spam, like a bank message, like a lame joke?
It's like the whole exchange never happened.
May 21, 2008
Another neologizer heard from
In a Spunk & Bite chapter on inventing new words, Plotnik offered a challenge and exercise especially for writers: To name certain as-yet-unnamed subjects in the writer's world. For example, "a terse rejection note."
Many writers, eager to put names to their pet woes, responded to a similar challenge Plotnik posed in one of his columns for The Writer. But, prompted by an excerpt from the book, an author checked in this week with a list well worth reproducing here. His name is Steve Pridgeon, a member of the Professional Writers' Association of Canada. (Plotnik considers No. 10 an existential oxymoron worthy of Samuel Beckett.)
1. A terse rejection note
Forget-me-note
2. A great idea you forgot to write down
Paradigm Lost
3. The joy and pain of seeing a friend¹s work published before your own
It should have been glee
4. An inept muse
Illspring
5. The agent who won¹t communicate, loses your manuscript, and bills you anyway
An agent
6. A draft of a poem that you loved yesterday, but hate today
Fallen stanza
7. The almost-right word
A côté mot
8. An activity performed as an excuse to avoid writing
Draft-dodging
9. A merciless editor
Pendragon
10. A news event that renders your completed manuscript out-of-date
Reality malfunction
11. A passage you know you should cut from a piece of writing, but can¹t
Reprieved sentence
12. The act of turning your book face-out on bookstore shelves
Shelf-promotion
May 9, 2008
You gotta love Britannica
Many of you who bloggeth have received—and perhaps taken advantage of—Encyclopedia Britannica's offer of free, full access to its online site, with free links from your blog to EB articles---a nice lagniappe for your blog readers.
For example, if The Lubricated Snoot mentions something about surrealism, you can be linked right here to EB's 411 on the topic. With EB's further options, you'll likely learn something more than what you were looking for. Is that so surreal?
All EB asks of bloggers is that they have a legit blog and post to it fairly regularly. Obviously, it can even be a "snog," with posts as much as a month apart. If you're interested in taking part, click here and improvise on the form.
It's a win-win marketing strategy. As EB admits, the company hopes to introduce more Web users to its resources, maybe sell subscriptions down the line. After all, this venerable well of knowledge now has to compete with Wikipedia and the Web in general. In EB's mind, it's no contest when it comes to the care and authority that goes into each entry---or the universe of quality information to be drawn upon. Although Plotnik himself uses the big Wiki for fast takes on recent topics, EB is in his blood as a source you can quote without fear of saboteurs or smart-ass wikipods potchkying with each entry.
EB links have been added to some topics in earlier entries, below. Future posts will add 'em when it's the cool thing to do.
4/18/2008
Tips for Teen Writers
As you can see from the post following this one, Plotnik doesn't usually go around giving writing tips to teenagers (EB link). What if he should inadvertently disrespect them? Some of those big teens an be fracturing when it comes to payback.
Recently, however, a writer for the Web site education.com, asked Plotnik to offer such tips to the site's viewers—mostly parents who want to point their teens in good directions.
Because the writer—a sunny young pro named Cheri Lucas—stoked Plotnik's ego, the author of Spunk and Bite retreated to the Bat Cave to grind out some fresh ideas. Below are the headings for his resulting advice. For the advice itself—brief admonitions that could benefit many writers---click here.
—Think outside the dragon
—Lose the "awesome"
—Chill the potty mouth
—Be a language geek
—Love your library
—Be ya own loopy self, yo
2/26/08
A special "fan" letter
The word "fan," as used in "fan mail," is thought to derive from "fanatic," or possibly from "the fancy," an 18th-century term meaning the group that follows a particular pastime like pigeon-raising or boxing (EB link).
Neither derivation does honor to readers who express appreciation to writers they enjoy. Most of those who write "fan letters" to authors are neither fanatics nor groupies. Just gracious people who want to say thanks.
Plotnik gets a number of these kind letters for his various books, but he found a recent one especially gratifying. It came from a young woman, age 14, an aspiring author who is already working on a mythical trilogy, complete with Gaelic pronunciation and translation guide. Concluding an elegant account of discovering Spunk & Bite, she wrote:
"Your book is an absolute godsend to idea-starved writers of all genres."
Plotnik hadn't been sure the book would speak to young teens, but apparently it spoke to this one, and she generously spoke back.
1/07/08
Bloggers who love Spunk & Bite too much
What should writers be doing with their time?
a) writing great works
b) blogging about their great work
c) blogging about how great Spunk & Bite is
If you answered a or b you've got it right, according to conventional writers' advice. But there's an argument for c. It goes like this: If a writer is so enamoured of Spunk & Bite that she's compelled to tell her blog audience, then she does herself good by articulating the emotion. Plus, she benefits her writer-readers by leading them to the beloved book, with its infinite capacity to be adored.
Some fifty bloggers have confessed a love of the book, doing so in all the varied ways of writers. Below Plotnik offers links (still alive at this writing) to some of these blogs, not merely to heap petals upon his head and opus, but to stir a breeze of cross-pollination among writing enthusiasts.
11/15/07
Killing dead air
As much as it pains him, Plotnik tends to pause a moment in interviews to come up with the bon mots, which sometimes leaves a little more "dead air" than is ideal for radio or podcasts. What can he do? He's talking about expression and can't throw out just anything.
But recently, interviewer Brenda Power of Choice Literacy---a heavyweight Web site among high school reading and writing teachers---applied a technique she has used to tighten taped interviews: she edits out the dead air.
The result makes for a snappy pace, though sometimes the volume of two sentences wedged together varies in a curious way. Still, Plotnik was delighted with the result, which made him sound like the fluent performer he would like to be---like Power herself, smart and polished.
Some 10,000 literacy people subscribe to this site. And you can hear the interview at Choice Literacy / Plotnik.
10/27/07
A wet kiss to all
Plotnik just learned that "snog" rears its snoot as a word in British slang---what utterance doesn't? Although the slang term can be nuanced, its general meaning seems to be tongue-kissing, as in this passage from Will Self's short story collection, Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys:
Bill has been snogging--and the adolescent term is quite appropriate here---in a way he remembers from youth. . . . the palpings of lip-on-lip, tongue-on-lip, and tongue-on-tongue . . . .
Well---blog, snog, shmog; who cares if a little tongue gets in the mix? Plotnik had a harder lesson in British slang with the title of one of his earlier books, Honk If You're A Writer (republished as The Elements of Authorship.) "Honk" as in "honk your horn" turned out to mean "to vomit" in British street parlance. The idea of vomiting if you're a writer, however, was not entirely anithetical to the book's view that writers must purge certain myths before they can move on.
10/15/07
Pick a card, any card
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Plotnik is touched. His publisher (Random House) sent him 2,500 of these wallet-sized promo cards to hand out. He's thinking of dropping them from the Snoopy Blimp, ideally over a locale in grave need of spunkitude. Any suggestions?
 
Back of card Front
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10/05/2007
Columnitis
It’s a lovely thing to be given column space in a national magazine. But when you feel you’ve spieled all you have to spiel for a while, Plotnik says, step aside and let others have a go. Not to do so is to succumb to "columnitis," a malady in which you hang on as long as permitted, with nothing fresh or useful to offer.
After doing 39 columns for THE WRITER magazine, plus the lead article in the November 2007 issue---this on top of Spunk & Bite---Plotnik felt somewhat written out on the topic of language and style in writing. And so he decided to hang it up as columnist, with the option to write articles when inspired. The staff---about as congenial a bunch as you’ll ever find in publishing---graciously retired the column ("Syntax"), named Plotnik to the magazine’s Editorial Board, and gave him a fancy lunch in Milwaukee September 28.
From left: Plotnik; Ron Kovach, Senior Editor (write him with queries); Jeff Reich, Editor; and Sarah C. Lange, Associate Editor.
Having promoted Spunk & Bite to a degree just short of obscene, Plotnik is now free to try some other projects---poetry, op-eds, short fiction, and a top-secret enterprise or two. As for novels---who doesn’t want to write one? But it’s so dismaying to face the odds of publication unless you’ve built an early track record as a novelist. All that hustling to get a nibble from agent, editor, reviewers---years of it!
But, as E. L. Doctorow says, it’s the book that gives you the gift---not the vagaries of the publishing world. Can Plotnik afford to give himself such a gift? We’ll see.
10/1/07
For a good time . . .
Plotnik is still exhibiting that weirdly spumescent behavior of writers pimping their work. He froths like a hound thrown a stick when anyone buys Spunk & Bite or has something good to say about it. (And recent Amazon comments as well as blog reviews have been hot stuff.)
He managed 25 minutes of good repartee and advice Aug. 16 on the radio show "Writers on Writing." The host, Barbara DeMarco-Barrett, is the author of the motivational book Pen on Fire: A Busy Woman’s Guide to Igniting the Writer Within, and an angel for writers known and lesser known.
For a good time, as they say, you can check out the interview via podcast (scroll to Aug. 17, click, and skip the intoductory music and announcements) on Barbara’s Web site. She also interviewed Plotnik for the October 2007 newsletter of the American Society of Journalists & Authors (ASJA), which—oh, God, enough frothing for now!
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6/5/07
The glamour of authorship
It happens to every author, even the big names: a time one is reminded of Martin Amis’s dictum, that "the universe is 30 billion light years across, and every inch of it would kill us if we went there."
Plotnik came home the other night from a bookstore presentation he’d worked on for two weeks. The trade paperback of SPUNK & BITE had just come out, and he’d wanted to do a talk worthy of the book.
His publicist at Random House had arranged the event: A Friday night talk and signing at a bookstore in a trendy Chicago neighborhood. Her excited e-mails had Plotnik pumped up like an inflatable turkey.
But he returned from the event deflated. "Here I am," Plotnik mewled, "a so-called distinguished author, major writing columnist, and seasoned speaker. Hot off a successful hardcover edition of Spunk & Bite, and . . . and . . ."
Okay—no need for you to suffer through writers' bathos. The short of it is this: The bookstore dropped the ball on publicity. Didn’t get an announcement in the literary listings of the city’s media. No books in the windows. No mention on its events chalkboard, which sits outside the store on a busy square. Allegedly, a staffer who does publicity was out sick. No one picked up the task.
Five people showed. Two said they were interested in writing. A third listener, tagging along, winced throughout the talk as if watching a hemorrhoidectomy. The other two had drifted into the café setup and seemed too kind to leave. During Plotnik’s intrepid march through the presentation, a pair of bookstore staffers busied themselves closing up the shop and its café.
A second scheduled writer, who had traveled two hours through traffic to do her half, bravely wrapped up the calamitous evening.
All this, Plotnik cautions writers, is part of the glamour that follows publication. Horror stories abound. It’s competitive out there, and book fans are few and fickle. Sometimes even your books fail to show up. It’s dispiriting. You can’t go on.
You go on.
Selected earlier blogs
3/22/07
The paperback phenomenon
Plotnik has been preoccupied lately with the trade paperback edition of Spunk & Bite---hitting the shelves in May (2007).
What’s to be preoccupied? First he wanted to fix the little gremlins that had crept into the hardcover; then he added an appendix of thirty exercises for applying the book’s advice on bright prose; next he was working with Random House on promotional activities, including review-copy lists, a magazine article, press-release copy, and so on.
Plotnik says that for some books the paperback can be like a new beginning, appealing to a market some five times the size of the hardcover’s. For example, The Memory Keeper’s Daughter (Kim Edwards) had sold about 30,000 copies in hardcover before the paperback took off to soar past 150,000. The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini) sold an estimated 50,000 in cloth, and then about 3.5 million in paperback.
What is it about a paperback? Something tactile perhaps. The paperback weighs a little less. Reading clubs prefer it, chain stores stock it. Then there’s retail price: the paperback Spunk & Bite: A Writer’s Guide to Bold, Contemporary Style (new subtitle) is just $10.36 at Amazon; students can hack it by foregoing one clueless movie.
12/24/06
Plotnik's snowclone update.
Plotnik says that when people are good enough to tell you that B is the new A, they are offering you a type of "snowclone"—a variation on a cliche word pattern. For example, the familiar expression "Eskimos have 300 words for snow" prompts such snowclones as "politicians have 300 words for pork."
The snowclone "B is the new A" can be critical to survival, Plotnik says. It’s the new orange alert. If you’ve been counting on A, he says, you need to know right now that B has replaced it. You must welcome this received knowledge and not ask why it should be so; chances are the Internet broke the news, which means everyone knows it but you. Basis and cause are irrelevant; by the time you ponder how B evolved from A, C has become the new B, because, in case you haven’t heard, chaos is the new stasis.
Writers, who must be au courant, need to know (at this writing) that sixty is the new forty, Kim Jong il is the new Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, YouTube is the new MySpace,
and peanut butter is the new shmutz
In a burst of altruism, Plotnik offers some of his latest observations here. If you crave a more manic, if dated, roundup, see radar blog.
small is the new big
fake is the new real
iPod nano is the new worry beads
free is the new cheap
Spunk & Bite is the new Strunk & White
black is the new pink
(red) is the new black
small is the new grande
Monday is the new Thursday
February is the new April
Greenland is the new Vermont
Chicago is the new New York
ninety is the new seventy
six is the new thirteen
5 br is the new 2 br
$4.19 is the new $1.14
Obama is the new Clinton
"new is the new old" is the new "old is the new new"
Crocodiles are the new Ferraganos
enemies are the new allies
guilty is the new presumed-innocent
fear is the new freedom
booty is the new brain cell
C is the new A+
politics is the new pedophilia
Netflix is the new nooner
Halloween is the new Christmas
water is the new oil
Wiki is the new wrong
Vosge is the new Viagra
Clint Eastwood is the new Clint Eastwood
pomegranate juice is the new pinot noir
"this is not chick-lit" is the new chick-lit
platform is the new talent
hardcover is the new paperback
"wasn’t" is the new was
sorry is the new safe
faith-based space station is the new peter piper picked a peck of pickled peppers
"May I help you?" is the new "Freeze, Terrorist scum!"
lost is the new found
NASCAR is the new metaphysics
Little Loca is the new Paris Hilton
nasty is the new awesome (says Little Loca)
$40 entree is the new $30 entree
Patriot Act is the new Anarchist Act
ugly is the new beautiful
one million is the new 10 grand (Christie's auction house)
5/29/06
Chintzy star-givers.
As writers will do---about every five minutes---Plotnik was surfing Amazon.com to see how readers of Spunk & Bite were sizing up the book. Seven readers have now posted reviews [17 as of Oct. '07--A.P.], all of them giving the big thumbs-up---or paws-up, allowing that some reviewers might be four-legged.
One thing is puzzling, though: How come, after a rave, some reviewers give only four stars instead of the full five? What's with the retention?
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3/23/06
Amazon rankings
You should have seen Plotnik a few weeks ago, when Spunk & Bite soared in the Amazon.com rankings. In one day, it went from the pack of middling sellers to the 147th best-selling book in the whole Amazon universe—No. 3 among writing books. It made Amazon’s "Movers and Shakers" list, and Plotnik was leaping skyward like a dog in the Frisbee Challenge.
The big jump was triggered by a review and interview by Chip Scanlan of the prestigious Poynter Institute. Poynter.com featured the piece, and other sites soon picked up the link. Scanlan is a revered journalist, teacher, and author, and one of those rare worthy humans. Great blogger, too.
But things have calmed down. Gravity has brought the rankings back to earth, and Plotnik is busy figuring out Myspace.com, which someone conned him into joining.
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1/26/06
Searching for sales figures
Not even a hound’s nostrils can penetrate the mysteries of "sell-through," as they call it in the book trade. Publishers can claim impressive opening sales to retailers, but those figures mean nothing until the books actually "sell-through" to a store customer. Otherwise, the retailer can eventually return unsold copies for a refund—and about half of all books, on average, usually do get returned and subtracted from the author’s sales and royalties. (Can Intelligent Design explain a cockeyed business like publishing?)
In the past, authors looking for sales figures had to wait for the publisher’s semiannual royalty statements, which reported sales for a six-month period beginning about 9-12 months earlier. So in December 2006, for example, Plotnik will find out the sales totals from fall 2005 to spring 2006.
Now, however, the cruel Web provides, if not numbers, some sneaky glimpses of sales trends. One can watch the rankings on Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com to see if a book catches fire—i.e., goes to the top few hundred, or, for slower selling books, jumps a few thousand places from a single sale.
One can also track library purchases through the Web, online catalog by catalog (the WorldCat of reported library holdings is incomplete); check the online Borders inventory (in stock or not) store by store; and, through public library databases, see how book wholesalers like Baker & Taylor are stocking and moving the title. And, of course, one can Google (or MSN) the title and author to see if there’s any buzz developing, forums and blogs included.
If you think dogs look silly digging up yards in search of bones, just watch your literary bipeds clawing for such scraps as I’ve mentioned. Because for most authors, the numbers are going to be nickel-and-dime, ever faltering, and generally depressing.
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1/15/06
A Plotnik exclusive! Poet Billy Collins's dog, "Jeannine."
Courtesy Billy Collins. (Copyright Billy Collins, 2006)
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12/15/05
"Facing out"
Plotnik was a Border's store yesterday, turning his books face out on the shelves. It's what all authors do when they find their darlings with only the spines showing. They shove the nearby books to the next shelf to make room, then turn their own books out to show the front covers. It makes plenty of sense with Spunk & Bite, Plotnik says. "To see it is to love it. Do everyone favor: You see this book spine out, whip those copies around and let the sun shine in, know'm'sayin'?"
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