Author: Virtual Stranger

            So, a month or so back I outlined a simple experiment to check some of the ongoing stories , articles, and rumors about Amazon reviews and who can post them.  It’s been a month, so I figured I could toss down a few lumps of data for your perusal.

            First off, the books I reviewed.  There’s a full list below.  I’ve included links to Amazon just to make it quick and simple for anyone to follow up on each review. There’s also a few letters by each name that cover a bunch of other variables.

t  = I follow the author on Twitter

T = We follow each other

F = Facebook friends/followers with said author

A = Amazon verified purchase

C = Control review. This should be rejected immediately, for reasons

            The dates I’m listing are the dates I wrote and submitted the review.  As mentioned in the earlier post, they all had at least twelve hours between them.  Most of them went up in minutes.  In a few cases cases, there was a delay of anywhere from hours to almost two days before the review actually posted on Amazon.  And yet… every one of them did go up.

            They’re roughly alphabetical, except in a few places where I had to swap out titles for one reason or another (a few books I’d planned to review for this didn’t actually come out yet…). That’s more a function of the original list I threw together, not anything else.  All of them are books I’ve read in the past year, more or less.

            I know originally I said I’d only do positive reviews.  After the second or third day, I decided to only do five star reviews (to smooth out one more variable).  Again, these are all honest reviews. I really, truly loved all of these books and I think you should read a bunch of them right now or at least put them on your Christmas list.  On a few, I mention that said book was maybe a 4.5, but I rounded up since Amazon doesn’t allow partial stars.  This also meant I had to switch out one or two books (because believe me… not everything I read is five-star-wonderful by a long shot).

            All the control books either have a blurb from me right on the cover or there on the Amazon page in the editorial/press material. The one exception is Kaiju Rising, an anthology I have a story in, where Amazon lists me as the sole author, and most of the editorial/press stuff mentions me as well.  On all those reviews (as you can see) I openly, blatantly stated my connection to the book, both for Amazon and also so it wouldn’t look like a cheap/bogus review that might reflect back on said author.
            If there’s some factor you can think of that I missed, please let me know and I’ll see if it’s something I can include the next time around..

            Anyway, here’s the list of books/reviews…

1st Alight—Scott Sigler (T)

2nd Life Debt: Aftermath– Chuck Wendig (T)

3rd Anamnesis – Ellie Knapp (T, F, A)

4th Chapelwood—Cherie Priest (T)

5th Crooked—Austin Grossman (t)

6th The Crooked God Machine – Autumn Christian (T, A)

7th Creeping Stones— Cullen Bunn (T)

8th Experimental Film – Gemma Files (T)

9th Grave’s End—Sean Patrick Travers (T, A)

10th Head Full of Ghosts – Paul Tremblay (T)

11th Hoo-Doo Mountain Horror – Jonathan Moon (T, F, A)

12th Mistakes I Made During the Zombie Apocalypse– Michelle Kilmer (T, A)

13th Made to Kill—Adam Christopher (T)

14th Ms Marvel: Generation Why—G. Willow Wilson (t, A)

15th Lois Lane: Fallout –Gwenda Bond (t)

16th One Dead, Two To Go—Elena Hartwell (T, F)

17th Panacea – F. Paul Wilson (T)

18th Perdition Score – Richard Kadrey (t)

19th Railroad! : Collection 3— Tonia Brown–  (T, A)

20th – Okay, I spent the day at the LACMA Guillermo del Toro exhibit and went out to dinner with friends.  Sue me.

21st Shoot This One – Javier Grillo-Marxuach (T, F, A)

22nd The Unnoticeables—Robert Brockway (T)

23rd Dark Ascension: A Generation V novel—ML Brennan (T)

24th The Water Knife–Paolo Bacigalupi (t)

25th Zero World – Jason Hough (T, A)

26th The Big Sheep—Robert Kroese (T, C)

27th Desert Bleeds Red—Jason Hornsby (F, C)

28th Impact Earth – Timothy Long (T, F, A, C)

29th  Kaiju Rising –assorted authors (T, C)

30th Phoenix: A Road Less Traveled novel—C. Dulaney (T, F, C)

31st The Voodoo Killings—Kristi Charish (T, F, C)

            Now, with those titles and dates in mind, here’s a few things that’ve happened already…

            First off, doing a review a day becomes oddly time-consuming. Especially trying to write an honest-I-read-this-review without giving away any spoilers.

            Also, I never knew this before, but… things people buy as gifts off your Amazon wish list do not count as verified purchases.  Yeah, I know—weird.  Creeping Stones and Experimental Film were birthday/Christmas gifts, yet neither reads as a verified purchase. I mention it just because I’m trying to put down all the info I can.  I’d guess it’s because even though the item was clearly bought for you, you’re not the one who purchased it. Something to work on, Amazon…

            And as of this writing, all thirty of them are still up.  It’s been six days since I reviewed The Voodoo Killings and over five weeks since I reviewed Alight. 

            We’ll check in on this experiment one more time in early October and see where things are at.

            Hey, everybody…

            Hope you’re enjoying your Labor Day, even if you’re not in southern Califonia.  And if you do happen to be a SoCal resident, I wanted to remind you that this coming Sunday, the 11th, is the second Sunday of the month—which means it’s time for Los Angeles Writer’s Coffeehouse. 

            We’re going to be at Dark Delicacies in Burbank from noon to three (as always).  It’s completely free and it’s open to everyone—writers of all ages and skill levels.  You can be just starting out, halfway through your first project, a seasoned pro, or a complete hack like me. 

            This time around we’re going to be talking about drafts and editing, and also about working with editors in general.  Please feel free to show up with your questions, your own thoughts, and your clever ideas and tips.

            I’m moderating, so it’ll be highly adequate, as always.

            Hope to see you there.

            Pop culture reference!  Hasn’t been one in ages.  This one’ll make sense in a few minutes.

            I wanted to take a moment to rant about one of my favorite topics—spelling.  Any of you longtime readers know how I feel about misspelled and misused words.  But this week I’d like to approach a specific facet of that problem.

            One thing I see a lot is folks who misuse compound words.  If, for some awful reason you don’t know, a compound word is when you mash two words together and create a new word. And much like the lions that merge into Voltron or the Combaticons combining into Bruticus, sometimes that word is greater than the sum of its parts.

            In fact… sometimes the word is very different from the sum of its parts.  For example, a kneecap is a floating bone in your leg that protects the hinge joint.  But a knee cap is a little hat you wear above your calf.  By extention, kneecapping is the brutal practice of breaking that bone, usually with a bullet, while knee capping is the weird and somewhat creepy habit of putting tiny headgear on other people’s joints.

            Or your own joints, I guess.

            But that almost makes it weirder.

            Want another one?  Whiplash is a condition caused by a sudden thrashing of the neck.  A whip lash can refer to either the leather straps of the whip or the whip’s actual strike.  Like in Pirates of the Carribean,when Davy Jones threatens Will Turner with five whip lashes.

            See the problem here?  The compound word and the phrase refer to two different things. And if my reader has even a faint grasp of vocabulary, they’re going to stumble over my un-compounded word and go back to read it again.  I might know what pissantmeans, but if I come across piss ant… well, is that one of the creepy crawlies from Chuck Wendig’s new book?

            Take a look at a few more of these and see if you stumble on any of them…

straitjacket vs. straight jacket

something vs. some thing

hardcore vs. hard core

breakneck vs. break neck

kingpin vs king pin

connectability vs connect ability

maybe vs. may be

lovesick vs. love sick

sometime vs. some time

            Did you feel it?  That little pause when you were reading?          How many of these did that to you? A few?  Some? If you’re reading this, I’m guessing you’ve got a thing for writing, so maybe a lot of them.

            Y’see, Timmy, once I break the compound word apart, it’s… well, two words. And as long as those two words are spelled correctly… well, that’s all that matters, right?  Most people will get the general meaning from context.

           I think folks do this because they don’t know how to spell the compound word correctly and break it apart to “fix” it.  Maybe my spellchecker kept rejecting straightjacket but once I broke it into two words… oh, well that must be right now.  It’s one of those cases where I’ve assumed the machine is much smarter than I am.

            But that flow-break becomes even worse when people aren’t even using the right words.  I’ve seen people talk about mere cats in Africa and the turn styles in the New York subways.  My spellchecker will accept those, too, just like it will any other misused word.

            Hyphens don’t help the situation.  Most spellcheckers will accept a hyphenated word as correct if the two individual words are correct.  For example, mistake, missed-take, miss-steak, and mist-ache are all spelled correctly.

            The real problem here is that—like any spelling mistake—these sort of mess-ups will break the flow of my story.  If my reader spends just two seconds trying to figure out what liberated bricklayers have to do with an urban fantasy story, they’ve stopped reading in order to analyze.  And once they start analyzing… it’s hard to get them to stop.

            And yeah, a lot of folks will almost immediately figure out that when I said free masons I actually meant the Freemasons—that semi-secretive service organization that so many hack writers use as a fallback source for historical mystery (check out my new book, Paradox Bound, coming out next September). 

            But…

            That pause is still going to happen.  After three or four instances of breaking the flow like that, the reader’s going to set my book aside for something easier to understand.  Like an Overwatch hint guide. Or a rewatch of Stranger Things.

            I need to know how words work. Including compound words. Knowing the two halves doesn’t mean I know the whole, and vice-versa.  I have to know how words work. And what they mean.  And how to spell them.

            In closing, being able to proofread something is a skill every writer needs to develop.  But anyone can proof read… provided the proof is in a language they understand.

            Next time, I want to talk about that guy.  No, no,not him. The other guy.

            And I’ll probably have an update on the whole Amazon review thing, too.

            Until then, go write.

             Grrrrh. Running behind again. Sorry.  Juggling too many things right now.  Honestly, I think I’m thinking about juggling too many things and just being hit with a paralysis by analysis situation…

            Anyway…

            Speaking of things that aren’t immediately apparent, I wanted to talk about a problematic character point for a moment.  It’s one I’ve stumbled across a few times (and fallen victim to once or twice myself), and once I worked out exactly why it was problematic, I thought it was worth mentioning.

            A few quick examples…

            I saw an older movie recently from the dark era of superhero films. You know, that time before Blade when studios (and writers, and directors…) really didn’t believe you could do a serious superhero movie. Well, not without changing everything about it. Play it more for laughs.  Minimize the costume.  Avoid logos. Avoid masks.  Absolutely no capes.

            Really, how could you hope to do a movie about superhero characters who wear masks and capes and get anyone to take it seriously?

            Anyway, this film had a scene where the superhuman hero waded into a minor gang war while wearing his street clothes.  To be clear, at this point, the hero knew the full range of his abilities. Super-strength.  Near-invulnerability. Enhanced reflexes.  So the bad guys were throwing themselves at this skinny guy and ending up with bruises, cracked knuckles, broken limbs, maybe even one or two concussions in there.  By the time they figured out something wasn’t right, the hero’d probably sent a dozen of them to the emergency room.

            Here’s another example from the book side of things.  As usual, names, genders, and genres have been changed to protect the innocent.  Or maybe they haven’t, just to throw you further off the trail…

            A friend of mine had been doing a western horror story recently and asked me to take a look at his current draft.  His main hero, Wakko, was a pretty solid gunslinger/sharpshooter type (yeah, named his lead Wakko—weird coincidence, isn’t it?).  At one point, Wakko and the other heroes find themselves taking refuge in an old frontier fort that’s run by some less-respectable types. Wakko wanders around and finds the local tough guy, and inwardly notes a few things that confirm the guy may have been the best in the fort, but that doesn’t mean he’s particularly good.  To prove it, and make a point, Wakko teases and insults the other guy until he finally leaps up, grabs for his pistol—

            And Wakko flicks out his own gun and shoots the guy dead.  Justified, of course.  That guy was trying to draw.  Everyone saw it.

            I made a note that this scene didn’t make Wakko look particularly heroic.  In any sense.

            This sort of thing is a hustle.  A con.  If you’ve ever played pool, nothing annoys people more than to discover the cute “rookie” who tricked them into wagering everything on their third game is actually a pool shark with countless notches on her belt.

           One thing about a hero—in real life or in a literary sense—is that we expect a sense of fairness and general decency from them.  They shouldn’t abuse their power.  They won’t deliberately harm people.  Yeah, they might have to do awful things at some point, and they might not hesitate to do them when they need to, but it won’t be something they want to do.

            Y’see, Timmy, a superhero in regular clothes is… well, just a dick.  Yeah, even when it’s Christopher Reeve.  Let’s be honest, that was a cheap move, beating up that guy in the diner.  A green beret who goads people into taking a swing at him is also a dick.  Or a gunslinger who forces somebody into a quickdraw contest.

            Honestly… it’s a bully move.

            Now, when my villain (or just a general antagonist) does something like this, it often works well for my story.  How often have we seen our hero throw a punch or kick or hail of bullets that had no effect?  What appears like a minor obstacle  just became a much more serious challenge for my heroine or hero to deal with. And challenges are great.

            But bullies aren’t.

            Especially when they’re supposed to be my protagonist.

            Next time, I wanted to talk about some thing.

            Until then, go write.