Rainbow over Paris

You must click here to see it, and scroll to the March 27, 2009 edition of Paris Daily Photo. Then do yourself a favor and click on the photo itself to see it in all its enlarged, enhanced, magical glory. Evening lights reflecting off the Seine, the fainter of a double-rainbow terminating at the Eiffel Tower...just breathtaking!

Opening Lines and Hooks

Hook 'em. It's not just for Longhorns anymore.

It's the advice writers hear at every conference, seminar, webinar, class, panel discussion, and club meeting. Hook 'em with the first paragraph, the first line. One of my how-to books says that "Jack Bickham, author of several dozen novels...claims you've got to hook the reader in the first twenty-five words." There's even a book available on Amazon called Hooking the Reader : Opening Lines that Sell

Here are some samples of this ubiquitous advice:

• What we want is that ka-pow! The horses out of the gate. The pop in the corn. The fizzle in the shanizzle. A writer should want to hypnotize the reader, make their blood pump, take their breath away. (from the Musetracks blog)
• The first line of a novel is like the first four notes of Beethoven's Fifth: everything else follows from it. (from author Crawford Killian's blog) (Love this!)
• Start your writing with conflict if you want to guarantee sales, grab an agent or publisher, get paid a big advance. (from ISnare articles)

Jennifer Jensen (in an article titled "Write Compelling Opening Lines") gives some great examples of opening lines, like:

• It was one hell of a night to throw away a baby. . . (Julia Spencer-Fleming, In the Bleak Morning)


• Lately, I’ve been spending a lot of time rolling on the ground with men who think a stiffy represents personal growth. The rolling around has nothing to do with my sex life. The rolling around is what happens when a bust goes crapola . . . (Janet Evanovich, Hard Eight)

There's also this gem, from Earl Emmerson's Fat Tuesday: "I was trapped in a house with a lawyer, a bare-breasted woman and a dead man. The rattlesnake in the paper bag only complicated matters."

Yes, those do compel me to read on. But is that the right tactic in every book?

I'm not saying that advice is all wrong. I guess my quibble is not with the advice, in fact, but in the rapacious manner that we writers, hungry for publication, suck it in. We think we must have dead bodies or life-or-death decisions in that first paragraph. But seriously, is that what a reader is looking for?

Glance at the opening lines of your favorite books. Do they conform to this idea of hooking the reader through shock and awe techniques? Chances are, they don't.

• Mr. and Mrs. Dursley of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say they were perfectly normal, thank you very much...
• When Mr. BIlbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton.
• It was morning, and the new sun sparkled gold across the ripples of a gentle sea. (Jonathan Livingston Seagull)
• Along with teaching us that lamb must be cooked with garlic and that a lady never scratches her head or spits, my mother taught my sisters and me that it is a wife's bounden duty to see that her husband is happy in his work. (The Egg and I)

Maybe humor is the way to go.

I can picture a future writing seminar in which teachers mock the book opening that begins in the middle of a car chase, or where shots are fired, bombs blow up, or a man screams "I'm leaving you!!"--all as being so, well, early twenty-first century.

Indeed.com

Great site. Did everyone know about this BUT me?

Well, since no one reads this po' li'l blog, I won't bother to keep it to myself.

Indeed.com is a job-hunting site that allows me to put in a key word, then break down the results by pay level, location, part/full/contract/temp assignments, and even by type of writing.

Indeed.com must troll other sites constantly, because their jobs are from all over--Monster, freelance sites, writing sites, private companies, etc. Well, wonderful. Free sites that want to do all the work for me? I can live with that.

Recommended Reading

This book was soooo much fun, especially after a bunch of nonfiction. (Why is most nonfiction written by PhD's so dull?)

Anyway, great characters, great settings and history. Puts you right there in an Anne Rice sorta way, only the people are far more individual and differentiated. Full of surprises.

Reading Lies

Do you ever lie about the books you read?

I fudge. If I get more than a third of the way through I say I've read it. I've read the first half of The Horse of Pride three times but never finished it.

Well, readers in Britain lie a lot! This article about a survey in The Guardian says that 61%...SIXTY-ONE PER CENT!...admit to claiming that they've read a book when they haven't even cracked it open!

I'm too chicken to be that blatant. I hate getting caught in a lie more than I hate looking dumb. But I'm not a Brit.

However---11% of those folks in the survey said they'd written a book. They'd finished a manuscript, but not gotten it published. Wonder if they're telling the truth?

The paper published a list the books folks are most likely to lie about, and 1984 by George Orwell is at the top. 42% of the folks in the survey said they'd fibbed about reading it. How silly--it's a good book. It's not overly long. I can understand no. 2: War and Peace. That's a hefty tome, and I don't know anyone who's read it.

Some of the others on the list surprised me: The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. Why would anyone bother to lie about reading that? And The Bible came in at #4, with 24% saying they lied about reading it. Um...doesn't that double your time in purgatory?

Writing Doesn't Pay

The Week Magazine asks, Is Writing for the Rich?

Good question. The answer according to The Week's Executive Editor Francis Wilkinson, is, yeah, more or less.

Although the world is full of more opportunities than ever for writers of every ilk (it costs nothing to start up a blog like this), few of those opportunities come with paychecks. As Wilkinson sums up: "movie stars, business executives, even accomplished authors all write for free these days. Why should some kid nobody’s ever heard of get paid?"

Ouch. We all know that, but why does it hurt so bad to see it in print?

Anyway, it's an interesting editorial, especially if you have friends or children who might want to become writers. Make them read this, and have them take dancing lessons. That way, they'll have a skill to fall back on, as my mother used to put it.

Here's the irony: You can read the editorial for free, online.

I don't subscribe to The Week anymore, even though it's my favorite publication. Why bother? By reading it for free, I help create the situation that keeps me from getting decent pay!

Enabling. It's what for dinner.

PicApp Drawbacks

I'm about to stop using PicApp, in spite of the fact that they have great pictures for free. I don't mind the obtrusive google-ad so much as the fact that the wrong captions come with the picture. I don't know enough html to figure out how to cut out or correct the caption, which seems to want to be the same for every picture visible on the blog. Very annoying.

Horses Were Domesticated 5,500 Years Ago

I actually know something about this topic, having written the entry on "Chariots" in the Encyclopedia of the History of Invention and Technology (coming late summer from Facts on File Books). I researched the earliest known instance of chariots: burials in Sintashta-Petrovka, east of the Ural Mountains--which sits in northern Kazakhstan.

What was in those burials? Racing chariots! Built to hold only one man. Those date back to 2000 BC, and it was thought that horses were domesticated about that time too, or just a couple of centuries earlier. (Earlier, heavier carts had wheels that were solid, not spoked. They were pulled by oxen, usually.)

But as these two articles, one from the Los Angeles Times and one from Radio Free Europe describe, new evidence has been found--in Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan is the 9th largest country in the world--didn't know that. The picture above, btw, is of a man riding in Icic, Kazakhstan.

Anyway, archaeologists figure that the Botai culture of northern Kazakhstan domesticated horses around 3500 BC. The evidence? Horse milk residue in pottery, horse manure used as roofing material in pit houses, horse skulls with bit-wear-marks on their teeth. Oh, and 90% of the bones in the garbage piles belonged to horses, and the leg bones were more slender than wild horses' would be, suggesting they were being bred for speed.

And--hate to say it, but if those bones are ending up in the garbage, maybe bred for food as well?

The research is published in this month's issue of the academic journal, Science.

Olympic Site (UK) Finds

How fortuitous! The excavations in Stratford, east London--trenches and the like, necessary to construct the Olympic Park sports complex for the 2012 games--have turned up all sorts of nifty stuff. The rendering at right shows what the park parts of the Park will look like in future. For what it looked like six months ago, see below.

This Daily Mail article has pictures of a 19th century boat, a 4th century AD Roman coin, four Iron Age skeletons, and a 4,000 year old flint axe. The remains of a Bronze Age hut, likewise 4,000 years old, and lots of pottery were also found. The Discover Project website has more, including pictures of 1941 gun emplacements that were uncovered.

Confused? This press release from the Olympic Authority something-or-other gives the background of the site over the last 5,000 years. The place was the site of :a marsh/wetland for a coupla thousand years, then an Iron Age village, a Roman road, a channel dug by King Alfred to divert the river and thus divert marauding Vikings, a bridge crossing, a mill built or operated by the Knights Templar, a calico, porcelain, and eventually a petrol factory, then a sewer, and finally a Yardley cosmetics, soap, and lavender factory. Talk about multi-use facilities!

Since the construction requires that over 140 trenches be dug, I guess they were bound to find something. This is all pretty cool and I hope we hear more about it soon.

Watching a Wreck

Why is bad news so addictive?

I can pass on the story about the little girl who raised a thousand dollars for Recording for the Blind (hint hint) but the headline that screams "Chapter 11" draws me in every time.

So here is today's dose of gloom and doom, even though I swear I will think only happy thoughts for the rest of the afternoon: Reader's Digest has hired a bankruptcy expert and is considering ... yeah, Chapter 11.

The New York Post says that "the company faced a potential restructuring over the next 18 months as revenue and profit slump." Barron's has a story on RDA too.

Blago Gets Big Bucks

Blagojevich.

Six figure deal for book.

Blagojevich, who isn't worth the trouble it takes to figure out how to spell his name. A potty-mouthed liar who tried to sell the Senate seat of the new president. Six figures--for what?

To tell us one is born every minute?

Lascaux Cave fungus

Neolithic art and fungus are not good bedfellows. Or wallfellows.

The black fungus that is creeping across the 17,000-year-old murals of animals and hunters in the cave of Lascaux, France, causes great concern. So the Lascaux Caves International Scientific Committee and other international experts met in Paris for two days to discuss solutions.

Apparently a fungicide was applied (I prefer the words "smeared" or "glopped" but scientists like to use more clinical terms) a year ago, in January of 2008. No one but scientists have been allowed to visit Lascaux since 1963 (tourists actually visit a replica cave), so the cause is a bit puzzling.

An air-conditioning system installed in 2001 seems to have kicked off the first mold. More details about that and the fungal progression are available in this News24.com article.

In this AP story from WTOP.com, the Committee chief, Marc Gaulthier, blames global warning for raising the temperature inside the cave, which interferes with the air circulation and allows the fungus to grow. A couple of solutions are floated in this story, too, which other news pieces lacked.

FYI: Woo-hoo! New Publications!

Not that I get royalties or anything, but the first two books in a series of eight have been published. I contributed to them, and (nice surprise) I'm even listed as a contributor.

So--presenting the FYI books, edited and compiled by Ken Leiker. For now, you can only get them at Barnes and Noble online. (Don't know why Amazon is dragging its feet.)

In spite of the titles, the 150 questions in each book covers all sorts of topics. The animal kingdom, food and drink, sports, science--weird (bodily functions) and otherwise (space, meteorology, all that stuff), health, traditions, history, etc. Here are some sample questions:

• How many idiots owned a pet rock?
• Who gets the royalties when "God Bless America" is sung?
• Did some popes have children?
• How terrible was Ivan the Terrible?
• Why do we wear costumes on Halloween?
• How many First Ladies were crazy?

Those are my topics, btw, along with Typhoid Mary, castrati singers, the ancient Maya, mistletoe, red skies, and femme druids. I can vouch for the accuracy of the information !

I'll blog again--with links--when they get on Amazon.

Paris Daily Photo

Parisdailyphoto.com. Oh, what a lovely and easy-to-read blog! I'm adding it to my favorites over on the right as well. Each and every day, a new photo taken in Paris. Some are whimsical (fashion faux-pas, for example) and others show well-known monuments.

I'll add my own--this picture of the statue of St. Rita in the church of St-Germain-des-Pres. I took this in 2004 and assume that supplicants are still writing their prayers all over lovely Rita with their Bics, in spite of the paper thoughtfully provided on a nearby pillar.

St-Germain-des-Pres exists today (after about 1500 years) mainly due to Victor Hugo. It was badly damaged during the Revolution, turned into a gunpowder factory, and many felt it should be demolished. But Hugo had a passion for Paris' old churches and rallied people to rebuild and preserve it. Read more about the history of St-Germain-des-Pres here.

Time's Idea to Save Newspapers

I like it--charge per click, a la Itunes.

"Under a micropayment system, a newspaper might decide to charge a nickel for for an article or a dime fer that day's full edition. . . I suspect most [consumers] would merrily click through if it were cheap and easy enough."

The light bulb has flashed on but has not been implemented yet, so you can read Time Magazine's piece "How to Save Your Newspaper" online for free. And if you google the title, you'll get to see what all the bloggers are saying about the idea. But who cares about bloggers?

Walter Isaacson (the author) does. He is kind enough to include us in his idea: "magazines and blogs, games and apps, TV newscasts and amateur videos, porn pictures and policy monographs, the reports of citizen journalists, recipes of great cooks and songs of garage bands." Go, us!

The next article in the Feb. 16 2009 US edition of Time covers the new generation of readers that will be competing with Kindle in 2009-10: Plastic Logic, Pixel Qi, and Adobe AIR. Something on which to spend our tax refunds, oh joy.

I would love to have a Kindle, but the price of books for the device--given that there's no printing involved--still seems exorbitant. I'd rather go to the library.

As for the others, the Plastic Logic won't really be available until 2011 and the AIR's screen is to small for me. The Pixel Qi looks very promising but is not out yet. It all depends on how expensive the books and magazines will be.

Recommended Reading

Inkdeath !

The third book of the series starts out slow...about 200 pages of slow. Hang in there, it gets better--it always does. And if you're reading the third book then you made it through Inkheart and Inkspell, so how could you NOT read this?

I loved the Inkheart movie, btw, but since they tied up all lose ends so neatly at the end, I'm not holding my breath waiting for the sequel. Too bad. And while I love Helen Mirren, whose bright idea was it that she'd make a good Elinor (who is supposed to be fat) and should go charging around on a unicorn?

Bicycle Vandals of Paris

The rentable bikes of Paris get press coverage in every large city, because every large city wonders of fleets of bikes would work for them. Reduce air pollution and traffic? Yeah! But there are drawbacks.

A lot of cities (Los Angeles included) are simply not bike friendly. Here where cars rule, vicious violence against bike riders happen frequently. Things like deliberately causing accidents, slamming bike riders with hands or bottles, or spilling drinks on them. I wouldn't say it's common, but if you ride daily, it will happen.

Why? My guess is because you don't need to pass an IQ test or be sober to ride in the passenger seat of a car, from whence much of the violence occurs.

But in Paris, 42 million rides have been taken on the bikes--the velibs--provided by the city, in just 18 months of operation. Slide your credit card and go. Yay! Go green!

Sadly, half the original 15,000 velibs have been stolen or destroyed, and 1500 a day need repairs.

New bikes cost over $500, so the city is rethinking the system. Replacing all 20,000 bikes would cost $20 million, and at the rate they are being destroyed, that's about $10 million every three years. All per this BBC article, February 2009. And here's a YouTube video link called Velib Freeride.

And the vandals of Los Angeles, to whom storefronts and freeway signs are nothing more than fresh canvas for taggers, are probably thinking, "Eighteen months? Hell, we could destroy those bikes in eighteen days!"

The New York Times points out that their own proposed bike program has been put on hold.

Newsflash: Blogging Doesn't Pay

Yeah, like you didn't know. But as David Lyons wrote in a Newsweek column ("Time to Hang up the Pajamas," Feb 7, 2009): "that day more than 500,000 people hit my site—by far the biggest day I'd ever had—and through Google's AdSense program I earned about a hundred bucks."

Ouch! Lyons' site is The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, btw--no small potatoes. And "that day" was the day his identity was revealed.

He also quotes eMarketer analyst Paul Verna as saying, "People have not figured out a clear way to monetize some of these vehicles." (Hey, Ma! I'm a vehicle!), adding that the real issue is "the lack of a clear business model that can generate substantial revenues."

Bloggers with business models doesn't compute.

I blog for fun. I did the Adsense stuff but quickly realized that my monthly emails report no revenue. In that sense, they're not even worth the five seconds it takes to open and read them. I still blog. And you're reading it, though I don't expect you're paying anything to do so.

For the record, I know of one person who claims to support a family of four on blogging, and she's about the conduct an online class through The Renegade Writer. A class on blogging, of course, and on how to make money at it. Here's the link to the class, and I may poke you there.

Shipwrecks and brooches and cults, oh my!

Huzzah! The HMS Victory has been found! The flagship of the British Royal Navy sank Oct. 4, 1744 in choppy seas. Here's how the Independent puts it:

Laden with four tons of Portuguese gold, the pride of the British navy – and direct predecessor to Admiral Nelson's vessel of the same name – sank with all 1,150 of its crew. Only the shattered remains of its top-mast were found on a Guernsey beach as evidence of its terrible fate.

Until now. Odyssey Marine of Florida found the 100-gun HMS Victory ("the mightiest vessel of the 18th century") and its gold, estimated at 700 million pounds' worth in today's currency. (no wonder it went down. 100 bronze cannons and more than 100,000 gold coins [per the BBC]? That was one hefty ship!) A great deal of controversy surrounds Odyssey's intention to salvage the treasure, as reported here in The Independent.

But I'll see your 265-year-old shipwreck with a Saxon burial in Sussex--and raise you another Saxon grave! So there!

A couple of bright members of the Eastbourne District Metal Detecting Club were doing what metal detecting enthusiasts do when they stumbled across a pair of highly impressive 6th century Saxon graves. Spear, shield, male skeleton and bronze bowl, silver belt buckle, gilded brooches, and female skeleton. The two discoverers, Bob White and Cliff Smith, did NOT ransack the site, but called authorities so that the site could be properly excavated. Yay! Here's the BBC story.

Finally, a 4th century pagan cult mosaic was unearthed about 13 feet under a Catholic Church. 140 square feet of naked, carousing Romans! Read about that one here.

Amazon Break Through Novel Contest

It's time, it's time! If you're an unpublished novelist with a finished product on your hands, you can enter Amazon's Break Through Novel Contest! Grand Prize is a $25,000 advance and a contract with Penguin Books.

Go here, between Feb 2 and Feb 8. Sooner is better, because the contest closes once 10,000 novels have been entered. You will need a dynamite pitch of under 300 words (the first cut is made on the basis of that pitch, so it better be good!) and a completed novel. You'll need other stuff too (the first 5,000 words, a little bio) but those are the main things.

Go!