Occured to me I should note this over here as some great background photos to inspire scene descriptions in an underground base / bunker / facility: an abandoned Russian submarine base.
Russian submarine pen
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Monthly Archives: July 2006
Living hard and straight and writing about it
Quoth Real Live Preacher:
If you want to write you must have faith in what is. You must respect what exists, because it has earned the right to exist. Of all the possibilities, of all the things that might have existed, this thing exists and you should write about it. Be fearless. Explain nothing. Justify nothing. See things as they are and write about them. Don’t waste your creative energy trying to make things up. Even if you are writing fiction, write the things you see and know.
If you want to write you must have faith in yourself. Faith enough to believe that if a thing is true about you, it is likely true about many people. And if you can have faith in your integrity and your motives, then you can write about yourself without fear. With the right kind of faith, you can be at peace with people knowing things about you and passing judgment on you. And they will judge you. Those who will never dare to write and who will never bare their souls in words will pass judgment on you. And the more hidden they are behind masks of lies and pretense, the more eager they will be to turn the spotlight on you. You will be a scapegoat. You will speak our sins, and they will lay hands on you and drive you into the wilderness.
This is old school. This is primitive. This is the way things are. We look for someone to bear the burden of our sins, then we drive them away so that we don’t have to look at them and can go back to our sinning with peace of mind.
But if you can live with all of this, if you can let people know things about you, keep your eyes on the ball, and keep moving forward, living hard and straight and writing about it, then you can be a writer. And maybe a writer is something you want to be.
Hardcover book design
The elements that go into designing the exterior of a hardcover book — and how many of them are left over from the Old Days.
It’s a constellation of little details, most of which hark back to ye olden days. A dust jacket used to be just that—a wrapper to protect the book in the store; the buyer would throw it out before shelving his or her new acquisition. So the spine die and case stamp would be on display during most of the book’s working life. Now collectors put plastic wrappers over the dust jackets to preserve them from harm. In Jane Austen’s time, the pages of a new book would still be joined together at the edge, where they’d
been folded; the first reader would use a paper knife to cut the folds open. The edges would be uneven, a look mimicked now by an artificial deckle edge.Today these conventions are invoked to impress the buyer/reader; to complement the inside and outside design; to make a book seem fancier, more covetable. You may not consciously note whether a book has colored endsheets, but the detail probably influences your perception of its value. Will you ever see the spine die or case stamp on 90 percent of your books? Probably not, unless you’re like me and take the jacket off so you can carry the book on the subway without shredding it. (Then you might wish there wasn’t a
spine stamp, so the rest of the passengers couldn’t tell what swill you were reading.)
It is ironic that those under-the-dust-cover elements never show up. I actually like the look of non-dustcovered books, but I like the jacket artwork, too, so I hate to get rid of the latter to show off the former.
Bad English that isn’t
I tend to be a tad pedantic in my proper, formal English — but I also recognize that English has a lot of exceptions, colloquialisms, and various rules that are design more for the sake of rules than for clarity of communication.
Here’s a fun list of some of the “rules” that aren’t. The fact is that, really, there are no rules to a language. There are conventions, styles, and gentlemen’s agreements as to how to be clear in communication. The closest we have to “rules” are spelling, and beyond some fundamentals, a lot of what the grammar cops nail folks on are not really rules at all. And while grammar is critical for clear communication,
recognizing how communication is already clear (in spite of the “rules”) is also important.
Regime vs. regimen
Some people insist that “regime” should be used only in reference to governments, and that people who say they are following a dietary regime should instead use “regimen”; but “regime” has been a synonym of “regimen” for over a century, and is widely accepted in that sense.
Near miss
It is futile to protest that “near miss” should be “near collision.” This expression is a condensed version of something like “a miss that came very near to being a collision” and is similar to “narrow escape.” Everyone knows what is meant by it and almost everyone uses it. It should be noted that the expression can also be used in the sense of almost succeeding in striking a desired target: “His Cointreau soufflé was a near miss.”
“None” singular vs. plural
Some people insist that since “none” is derived from “no one” it should always be singular: “none of us is having dessert.” However, in standard usage, the word is most often treated as a plural. “None of us are having dessert” will do just fine.
Note also that the first two (and, arguably, the third) of the above are not so much grammar (how language is structured) as definitions (what words mean). And, as anyone will tell you, dictionaries are meant to be descriptive, not proscriptive. I.e., they describe language as used, not define how people “should” use language (except insofar as people should try to communicate clearly).
Beyond this, note that all the rules are tossed out the window, pretty much, when writing dialog. Dialog is how people talk. It is rarely fully grammatical (unless that’s what a character is noteworthy for). It’s conversational, something very different.
Good stuff, and worth a read. In addition to grammar, there’s spelling and definitions and even folk etymology discussions. And, as always, consider what you’re trying to convey and what your audience is likely to understand (or misunderstand).
But don’t try that “irregardless” crap on me. Or I will hurt you.
(via Marginal Revolution)
Font and layout design for books
It’s a lot more complex than it seems.
When I’m designing a book now, the most important thing I have to do is make castoff. This means figuring out a way to fit enough words on a page so that the book comes out to the number of pages that were budgeted for. The page count is determined very early on, by people who’re more concerned with profit and loss than with beauty, and it’s intimately tied to the price of the book and the projected sales. Some books need to be stretched so the publisher can justify charging a certain price; many, many more need
to the crammed so that they don’t cost more to produce than sales are likely to recoup. I do not have any input into this decision-making process. I just receive a stack of manuscript and a standardized worksheet showing how the page count was estimated. This worksheet shows not only the total number of pages but also the number of characters per page that will be needed to hit said length.Because of the way printing is done, pages ideally come in groups—signatures—of thirty-two. Theoretically you can tack a sixteen-, eight- or four-page signature onto the end of a book, but it costs more to print 8 pages than to print 32, so many publishers won’t allow it. So a book might have 304 or 320 or 352 or 384 pages, but not 316. And most publishers avoid leaving more than four blank pages in the back, because blanks make the buyer think he’s being cheated. There are certain pages in the front of a book
that can be added, reshuffled, or deleted in a pinch, but the goal for the designer is to make everything fit just so without reorganizing anything.
Interesting stuff.
(via kottke)