Tag Archives: article

Articles I Like: Indie Author: 6 Dialogue Traps To Avoid

PolyWogg.ca
November 12 2017

I’ve been going through some of my saved/bookmarked pages, and I came across this one from April Hamilton from back in July 2011. It’s a great summary of some problems that newbie writers (like me) have with dialogue (Indie Author: 6 Dialogue Traps To Avoid).

So it mentions that newbies often have the characters talking the same way i.e. with the same “voice”, which doesn’t happen in real life and is really boring to read. I’m not sure I like her examples of fixing it, as it starts to sound a bit cliché to have 20-somethings or ex-military people talk like caricatures, but it can give flavour to their voice. Equally, newbies often go for melodramatic scenes that are tripe for soap operas, or heavy on the exposition dump. And I like the overall premise of “when in doubt, read it out loud”. If it sounds wrong, it probably is.

However, I’m not sold on the third trap related to newbies not differentiating enough between men and women. Here’s the excerpt:

In the masculine, words are used to accomplish some goal. The goal is usually imparting necessary—and that word, “necessary”, is key here—information, but it can also be to quickly size up a person or situation, or to establish or reinforce the pecking order (e.g.,

… Read the rest

Articles I Like: How to Take Good Photos of the Moon

PolyWogg.ca
November 11 2017

I’m frequently on the lookout for tips and tricks for astrophotography, although my ambitions are a bit basic to start with — smartphone use at the telescope eyepiece for now, maybe graduating to DSLR and webcam stuff later. And some of the easiest of the early photos are for moon shots. So, of course, I clicked when I saw an article on HowToGeeek.com entitled How to Take Good Photos of the Moon (by Harry Guinness, September 13th, 2017).

He breaks the challenge down pretty succinctly: the brightness and the distance. On the technical side, he recommends a tripod (duh), plus a 200mm lens for full-frame and 130mm on a crop-sensor. The tip, and why I thought the article was useful, came with a rule I’ve never heard of — Looney 11.

Astrophotographers have a rule for taking photos of the moon (it’s more of a guideline really) called Looney 11. The idea is that if you set your aperture to f/11, the correct shutter speed will be the reciprocal of the ISO. In other words, if your aperture is set to f/11 and your ISO is set to 100, your shutter speed will be 1/100; if your ISO is 400, the shutter speed is 1/400.

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Articles I Like: Thoughts on the publishing industry in Canada

PolyWogg.ca
December 16 2016

Back in September, Carla Douglas published an article on the website “Publishing Perspectives” interviewing Merilyn Simonds on the state of publishing in Canada (A Leader in Canadian Writing Takes Stock of Self-Publishing). When I saw the title, I thought, “Cool, must read that.” Then I saw Simonds’ former job as chair of The Writers Union of Canada and thought, “Oh. Maybe not.”

I am not a giant fan of TWUC or their approaches to some issues. Like the Author’s Guild in the U.S., many of the members are sheep who think the publishing world is still flat and haven’t noticed that Amazon’s disruption was in giving authors the opportunity to bypass traditional publishing and go direct to readers, often with not only greater ease of access but also greater revenues. This of course is the 3rd sign of the Apocalypse for the Author’s Guild who surprisingly support the position of agents and publishers on issues almost 1:1. Considering those three groups have some issues that divide them pretty substantially for self-interest, the alignment is often puzzling at best or frustrating in the mild or infuriating in the worst.

So I almost didn’t read the article. Kind of a “yep, read that, got the narrow view t-shirt, thanks”.… Read the rest

Articles I Like: Remember Amazon is always the bad guy

PolyWogg.ca
May 1 2012

The NYTimes had an interesting article on Sunday from David Carr writing about an author, Buzz Bissinger, who had a book promotion going on with Apple that Amazon matched and thus must somehow be evil.

…Apple, which had been looking to get into shorter works in a digital format, decided to include e-books in a promotion that it does with Starbucks. It selected Mr. Bissinger’s digital sequel as a Pick of the Week, giving customers a code they could redeem online for the book. (Mr. Bissinger said he still received a royalty of $1.50 for each copy sold.)

Amazon interpreted the promotion as a price drop and lowered its price for “After Friday Night Lights” to exactly zero. Byliner withdrew the book from Amazon’s shelves, saying it did so to “protect our authors’ interest.”

…

Mr. Bryant, who formerly edited a sports magazine for The New York Times, said that Amazon’s “price bot” had picked up the fact that the book was being given away as part of a weeklong promotion and responded by dropping its price to zero. (In an e-mail later, Mr. Bryant said that when the company told Amazon about the promotion, before it began, Byliner was warned the price might drop to zero.

… Read the rest