Author Shlomi Harif – Home – Page 3 – On Creativity, Writing & Reality

Dogs, Tricks, New. Damnit!

shlomi on May 12, 2023

I’m a recalcitrant writer when it comes to technology, which is funny considering I’ve been neck-deep in emerging technologies for, um, four decades?

It took me over ten years to slide from Word to Scrivener. I still think it’s got a clunky UI, complex more than necessary. But when writing 90k-150k novels spanning many chapters, it made sense. “Compiling” the manuscript to Word or other formats is an excruciating pain in the ass. But here I am.

Grammarly has been around for years, and I’ve scoffed at using such a crutch. But, lured by claims linking it to AI technology (a whole other post, but let’s not go there now), I signed up for the free version.

I’ve paid the $120/year subscription after spending 2 hours taking a story I deemed finished and being marketed through its wringer. I. Am. Humbled. Not bad: 50 or so corrections for 6,300 words. I didn’t accept about a fifth of the suggestions; they were inappropriate for the dialog or tone I was looking for. However, when I looked at the corrections I made in one of my writing groups and read their feedback on my scenes, it was clear that, had I run them through this tool, I’d have far more effective critiquing.

So I’ve got a new trick, one that’ll help my writing sit up and beg.

On Measurements

shlomi on May 10, 2023

A Pork Sandwich Meteor In fantasy, describing quantities can be challenging — way beyond the metric/imperial wars uselessly raging for many decades (especially crazy when designing interstellar craft based on using both systems). A Yorkshire friend of mine once said that, in the original tongue, counting there was “one, two, three, four, five…many.”

I have a novel manuscript that featured counting due to a differently advanced culture. Fingers are good measures for humans (better than barleycorns, royal (?) strides, or other “standards”). The difficulty was in scaling. Sure, ten is two hands. And twenty is either “arms and legs” or four hands. Fifty? A hand of two hands? It didn’t scale without changing some kind of measurement standard.

It was odd to see the post from the Jerusalem Post (now devolved to be the UK’s Sun or New York’s Post intelligence level), measuring a meteor to the size of a premierly non-Kosher food item. In a media venue that slavishly caters to the American Evangelical, and Israeli right-wing and ultra-Orthodox factions, they choose this measure.

But really, how big is a “pork sandwich?” Are we talking white bread with crusts removed? A bagel (why not go all the way on culinary blasphemy)? A Subway not-quite-16″ sub? Is it measured by area? Length?

Weight would help, but I’m betting there’s no sandwich of any kind that would weigh what that meteor weighs, chondrite or otherwise.

Wolfram Alpha has a way to express whale weight in pineapples. It’d be fun to see force defined in terms of grand pianos falling from a number of floors. Or lift as a function of the number of chickens (trying to) take flight.
But pork-based measurements in this context goes beyond that absurdity and enters the realm of “are you kidding me?”

P.S. This blog took 47 knee twitches, a nosepick, and 2,460 keystrokes, less the backspace key.

Publishing & Reality… and Magic

shlomi on July 4, 2022

My series, under a nom-de-plum, is finally back in process, after a bout of reality-induced depression and anxiety courtesy of religious fundamentalists in all branches of government. Oh, and nazis. They’re feeling empowered more and more. “This can only end in tears” — ancient parental saying. This was compounded by my having a discussion with a publicist who refused to work with me on the series because the owner is pro-life. (And apparently Jewish practices are anti-life, but I’ll let that one lie.)

So I’m close on the release date of the next book in that series, but having said it would be in “the fall of 2022,” that’s not a small bullseye target.

To restart my engine I returned to a novel I’d completed in first draft, shown to a couple of folks, and knew I needed to make many changes. It’s a YA fantasy novel, with a large world-building component (points a finger at Marshall Maresca’s thoughts and work on that topic).Getting magic right is tricky. Don’t know if I nailed it, but I’ll be reaching out to a few readers in the next couple of weeks.

Publicity for the Indie Author

shlomi on April 30, 2022

The second book in my murder/mystery series is done except for incorporating my editor’s edits, and getting a cover finalized.I didn’t do any advertising; I wanted to see how the process worked until publishing. The answer was well and also that, without marketing, there’s just a stealth book out there.

So I’m on the search for someone or a firm to get the new book’s name and author recognition going. Talked with a possible publicist from the Jewish community, and have a contact in the Israeli publishing scene to see if I can get a Hebrew-language version of the books out there.

On more this-author’s-site-related side, I’m going back to the novel I’d like my agent to push. She needs a few things like a synopsis, summary, tag line(s), back cover blurb, and other all-related-but-different collateral. Also, another last reader to make sure nothing’s slipped past me.

I’ve got a few short stories in play, including one that’s already available for purchase: Shloshim. Yes, click that link, buy that story (I mean, it’s only $0.99!). That one might appear in Israel as a reprint, but we’ll see.

That’s all for now. I’m sure any publicist I hire will insist on my getting into a regular publishing schedule, both for this and my nom de plum’s sites. Stay tuned!

On the Writing of Romance Novels, and Plot Problems Therein

shlomi on March 26, 2022

Wow, I’ve neglected the site for an entire year! Apologies. I published a suspense/murder-mystery novel under a nom de plum, with novel #2 at an editor with an artist teed up to create the cover. #3 is written and past first draft, and #4 is being written. That last one is a departure from the first three, with a focus on character relationships and the consequences brought on by the previous books. Book Three was hard to write–the saying that if an author doesn’t cry while writing it, readers won’t when reading it is true. And Book Four is where pieces get picked up.

That, in turn, brought me to looking at a trunk novel that I’d buried after writing myself to the point where characters and plot needed complications and messy feeling-type issues. Need I say I wrote this a long time ago? I described my issue to a developer while on Focusmate: “Someone hands you 20,000 lines of code and says ‘clean this program up: it’s supposed to be used to count spiders.’ Then you start looking at the code, and it plays music, and a great game a chess, all with cool graphics… but doesn’t count spiders. Now I have to ‘edit’ it to make it do that.” Okay, weird analogy.

Image from Wikipedia

My point is that it’s got good bones, this 20-year-old discarded 80k of writing. Interesting characters, great visuals, nice location. All the elements, but not enough plot points to make it a novel. A romance novel. A genre I’ve never written in. About a triad, becoming a quartet. While there’s tons of interesting (and sometimes contradictory) advice on creating a romance novel, (a) it feels more like ingredients and directions for making a very fiddly cake, and (b) it’s all focused on CIS het couples. The only poly novel I’ve read to this point, and one that piqued my personal interest, was Donald Kingsbury’s Courtship Rite.

My takeaway from a few hours searching is that, while LGBTQIA+ realities have (finally) moved more into the mainstream, “Romance,” at least as defined by literally dozens of coaching and writing sites, are still back in the 90s (except for the BDSM components for a little more spice). So, better armed, I’m looking for the “story arc” and “formulas” that do focus on the plurality that love can be.

Or maybe I should stick to SF and M/M? {sigh}

Manuscripts vs. Entropy

shlomi on August 1, 2021

I’m prepping a manuscript (Last Run) for shopping, after a HUGE number of great changes suggested by the White Gold Wielders writers group here in Austin. Having one’s novel read and commented on in group format is a blessing I would hope for all my novels.

I fired up Scrivener, started making changes, moved from my laptop to my desktop, and Uncle Murphy struck. The result: A few dozen “recovered” files, blank scenes where once text resided. What’s been updated? What’s had changes? Between a Word copy used for the group discussion, a text comparison tool, and a lot of careful scrutiny of the recovered files, I was able to bring the manuscript back to wholeness, with only one scene flagged as “deleted right before the crash–” and therefore not an issue.

Save. Save again. Save yet more. One of the first things a writer learns is “keep a backup.” I have Dropbox, exports to Word, saved zip files of scrivener folder structures for major edits. And still, Murphy manages to get a word in edgewise. Or at least cost me three hours of quality time repairing, because things went splat at exactly the wrong time.

On Authors Finishing Their Book Series

shlomi on June 5, 2020

Ilona Andrews, the estimable urban fantasy writing team of Ilona and Gordon Andrews. They’ve done single and series stories and, if UF is your groove, their Kate Daniels and Hidden Legacy series are must-read. They also co-write a great blog, filled with everything from progress reports to yarn (the textile, not stories) to rants and to raves for fellow authors’ new releases. In her latest blog post, she posted a letter about whether authors should finish their book series. I’m not going to go quote her; you can read it for yourself.

Here’s my response to that “writing prompt:”

Great topic! I think Jim Butcher is, from a purely reader perspective, a good example. He got to book 16 out of a professed 20, and then stopped for… years. (He’s coming out with the next two books in the series in 2020.) I’m not getting into reasons on his side, or anything else, but from a reader’s perspective, I’ve got an emotional investment in not just the characters, but the dynamic results of the worldbuilding. For full disclosure, I’ve got all the Dresden books, even {shudder} the graphic ones. Some things are best left, IMHO, YMMV, to the imagination. The Dresden TV series, which lasted all of one season, was pretty good as well, and it was a pity it was canned.

But TV and graphic novels aren’t the issue. The issue is that, for readers, there’s an implicit contract between the reader and the author that they’ll buy the next book in the series — and that it’ll get written. There are caveats to that statement. The Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Sherlock books, Agatha Christie’s books… even the Rabbi Smallman books, are, similar to the Simpsons, episodic. There’s a reset button. There’s previous history that accrues, but the end of one book does not insist on a continuation.

George R.R. Martin’s series also doesn’t, in my opinion, require additional books. So many characters come and are killed in each novel that, once the saga reaches a certain point, it can stop. There’s a joke I’ve heard many times that Martin could write a 900-page book just describing snow and people would buy it because it’s in the GoT series.

There’s a flip side to all this. I think there are authors who wrote one last novel in a series to cap it all. (Or for other, less-understood reasons.) Louise Bujold McMaster’s last book in the Barrayar saga, “Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen,” feels to me like an afrterbirth: the essence but not the substance of previous novels. Elizabeth Moon, for all that I’ve loved her space operas and “The Deed of Paksennarion,” ended her Serrano space opera with a pair of novels that, while they were entertaining, were less credulous, and lacked some of the real tension in the previous books in the series.
But I bought them anyway. Because of the author, because of the worldbuilding. But… I won’t buy the next in those series, if there is one, because the joy I felt in the previous books wasn’t matched in their latest.

Hopping back up to the Dresden series, it, at least for me personally, got less and less interesting as Dresden the person became Dresden, the Man Who Talks with Gods (or, at least, the royalty of the Faerie). The tension, the personal loss, the existential danger of Dresden as a human person, has dissipated. Leaving the novels more space opera-esque and less about the man…

And Who By Fire…

shlomi on January 27, 2020

Five Jewish teens re: Auschwitz

This is a more poignant Yom Hashoah — Holocaust Memorial Day — than usual for me. It’s been a couple of years since my mother, an Auschwitz and death march survivor, passed away. Life for many years before her death lost relevance, obliterated by Alzheimer’s Disease.

She survived. She returned to her hometown of Sosnociec, married, moved to Sweden and then the United States, and had two of children. She raised them and, when my father was struck by a series of brain aneurysms, was his caretaker for the last ten years of his life.

She survived but was never truly free. She left chunks of herself behind in her home town and in the death camps. For all the freedom she enjoyed, it was a brittle construct, always with a tinge of fear, of anger, of worry that it might all slip away. My sister and I experienced very different childhoods in the same house. My takeaway was that those feelings drove her vituperation, her xenophobia, her need to manipulate and control.

Not all who lived survived to be free again. For some, only death frees from struggle, the rest of oblivion.

Now, as we grow the next generations of traumatized children and young adults, let’s consider how their lives will color whole generations in places like Syria, Myanmar, and, yes, in America. How their pain will inform their lives, their hates, and their legacy, in turn, to their children.

We have to stop the cycle. As best we can, with the tools we have.

Here’s thinking of you, mom…

Countersinking

shlomi on January 20, 2020

In the throws of editing (yet again) a manuscript after paying for a professional editor to go over it. In the process of trimming the piece, I realized how much a countersink. Say the same thing and then say the same thing. Over and over. Each time differently. But don’t just make the point, screw it in tightly. And saying it a different way to be sure the reader knows what I’m trying to say.

Argh.

Is “Victim” the Right Word?

shlomi on November 16, 2019

Words have power and meaning. Cancer patients after their treatment are “survivors.” So are those sexually assaulted. It implies strength. Victimhood implies disempowerment, helplessness, and weakness.

I suggest we consider replacing “victim” with “aggrieved.” Someone that a criminal has wronged. Someone with a grievance. Someone, as “grieve” also implies, has suffered.They have a grievance against the aggressor, with the protest and anger that that might imply.

This isn’t going to change crime statistics, nor reduce the suffering of those assaulted, burgled, mugged, or scammed. But it changes that person, in description, as someone not weak or disempowered, but as someone against whom a wrong has been done that must be righted.