Unusual things found in books: Part three

It seems rather appropriate.

Last week, while browsing through some old books at Plaza Books, my favorite used bookstore in Las Vegas, I came across a postcard that someone had left behind as a bookmark.

Call it synchronicity for this particular card to be found at this time, just a week before Christmas Eve.

I asked for permission to take the card home to scan, a request graciously granted.

It's a bit difficult to see  but the date on the postcard is 12-22-15 and the cost of the stamp? A mere one-cent!

I'll use this post to wish everyone a peaceful, Merry Christmas.

This blog isn't dead

This blog isn't dead. It's just in hibernation, sort of.

I've read several articles lately that focus on whether or not blogging is dead. It's almost as if there's a bandwagon someone built, one that a lot of writers are jumping on. The folks agree that blogging is not dead; it's just fading away. I disagree. I think it's dying for those people who have discovered it's too hard to write anything useful, creative, interesting, or fun on a regular basis.It's dying for many people who have no focus and in some cases, limited time. It's probably true for people who have little to post except pictures of grandkids, sunsets, and self-promotion. (You can get all that on social media sites.)

It's probably true for many companies that do not employ freelance bloggers or full-time writers to maintain a blog.

 But blogging offers so much more than a person can get out of a 140-character post or a social media comment. It's great for offering detailed perspectives, for instruction, for a reader how-to, for making someone laugh, or to invite debate and comment. It's a good place to present and defend an opinion. It's a good start for a company or an individual to promote something without taking on the expense of a website.

None of those things is dead.

Acting, interacting, social networking .... aaarggg

I don't know about the rest of you but I have trouble keeping up with everything internet. There's the posting and commenting on facebook; the tweeting, retweeting and readtweeting on twitter; the confusing and blankness of googleplus; the kindle boards; the blogger sites;  linkedin; the ____ (You fill in the blank.)

Add to that email accounts and the mobile apps by the way.

How do you manage all that and still have a life, one that doesn't involve a keyboard or a screen?

I know I can't.

I have solved the problem for myself. It's not the best solution but it will have to work for now.

I log on to my facebook account daily and scroll through, reading the pertinent (family and friends) posts, comment if I think it will add something, then log off.  I check both my email accounts, my amazon seller account, my local newspaper headlines and then I either go off to my part time job or begin to putter around the house ... you know, doing the dirty word (chores).

Once a week I check in with twitter. That's on Tuesdays. On Wednesdays, I read the posts of blogs I follow.Thursdays I check out the kindle boards.

I compose my weekly column for on Friday nights and email it immediately since it's due on Saturday.

I've limited my blog posts to those moments that inspire me. 

Let me ask again: How do you manage your social networking and interacting and still have a life?  

Write what you know. Is that good advice?

I was working on an article tonight and had to do some research to verify some information. Suddenly a phrase popped into my thoughts.

Write what you know.

I'd heard that advice in high school; heard it again in college; heard it once or twice during my graduate studies; read it on the web.

Now I'm wondering, should I be writing about this particular subject?

"Wait a minute," this voice in my head said. "If you write only about what you know, why do you need an imagination?"

Think about it.

Did Lewis Carroll know about what it was like to fall down a rabbit hole?

Did Clement Clarke Moore actually have to meet Santa Claus to describe him so endearingly? 

How many vampires did Bram Stoker run into before he created Dracula?

How much science fiction and fantasy would we enjoy if we had to know everything about other worlds?

See where I'm going with this?

Now, if I have a character who is undergoing a surgical procedure, I would have to do a lot of research to get the procedures accurately on the page. I still wouldn't know how to perform them but I'd could write about them.

I guess if you're writing a memoir, it's best to know what you write, or at least write about what you THINK you know.

So to all those people who told me, who told you, I say go ahead, fall down a rabbit hole before you pen your version of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, but make sure you're female because otherwise ...

Who needs a proofreader?

Who needs a proofreader?

When I read blogs and forums about self publishing I find numerous suggestions that authors either hire a proofreader or go over their manuscripts thoroughly again and again.

I agree. But even with numerous readings, a manuscript can still have errors.

One of the (supposed) advantages of having a manuscript published by one of the major houses is the availability of professional editors and proofreaders.

But even that doesn't ensure a perfectly clean product. And if you think a little mistake will go unnoticed, think again. Case in point is a copy of Cold Case by Stephen White, which I picked up and read recently. It was a used copy, a hardbound published by Dutton.

Whomever owned the book before me didn't just notice errors he or she highlighted them and wrote above the highlighting. On page 181, for example, the sentence read in part, "...the local corner is an M.D." The reader corrected it with the word coroner.

On the very next page, a sentence read, "A second perimeter of yellow crime-scene tape blocked any closer access to the body."

At this point, I assumed there was a body but there wasn't. And, later, the body was discovered far away from the scene.

On page 189, the sentence read, "You're the psychologist--people wanting vengeance tend be your angry people, right?"

Except for the error referring to a non-existent body, it's easy to see how errors can slip by. And overall, the mistakes don't interfere with the plot or the writer's skill ...  Little errors, yes, but wouldn't it have been shocking if the invisible body showed up later -- alive and well?

Little errors, yes, but not unnoticed.

More unusual things found in books

I've found uncounted number of items used as bookmarks. In a recent post, I write about one of the more unusual, a marriage license.  Maybe it was an unhappy union? If so, I wonder if I'll ever find the certificate of divorce anytime soon.

A week or so ago, I was riffling through another book when a bookmark fell out.

Now, I'm not old enough to remember when hosiery sold for a buck a pair and I sure didn't know what Service Weight meant. Of course, I had to look it up. 

After stumbling over google's search results -- and finding a lot of information about service weight in regard to plumbing, I finally found a rather unusual site (But then, isn't the web full of unusual sites?) that explained it.h

Apparently, service weight refers to the fabric, which is 60 and 70 deniers. Hmmm. What, then, is a denier? Back to the google board which sent me to wikipedia where I discovered a denier is a unit of linear mass density of fibers.

The postcard, which was addressed and featured a printed stamp, was a sales pitch from a Philadelphia store, Bryans Ladies Shoes and Hosiery.

Certainly not as unusual (interesting) as the marriage license but more educational,

No free books

I know. Current wisdom advises indie writers to offer readers free copies of their eBooks. The purpose, I suppose, is to introduce readers to the writers in hopes that the style, plotting, characters and all the factors that make for a good novel, will entice readers to buy the writer's next book.

I guess this is sort of similar to going to a used book store or a thrift shop and picking up a book by an unknown writer. The difference is, in the beginning, what that less expensive tome came off the press, somebody paid for it.

It didn't start off being free.

So, why should an eBook start off being free?

Anybody can get a taste of a writer's work because books available for your kindle (or kindle for the PC) can be previewed. You get a set number of pages from the beginning of a book just by pressing a button. If that's not enough copy for decision making then I don't know what is.

I think the first question an author should ask is "How much is my book worth?" If the answer is zero, nada, nothing, if all that hard work was just to have a name under a title, then my advice is to keep the darned thing on your hard drive. If it's free, that's exactly what it's worth.

I think the only free copies that should be out there are the classics, the out-of-copyright works, especially those that are required reading for school kids.

Writers have a tough enough go at making money.

I know this is harsh thinking but the electronic reader isn't going to go away. People are still going to download books. Granted, with the current economy, readers are likely going to be very choosy about what they purchase.

My take? Get rid of the free eBook. Get out there and promote yourself and your work. Don't know how? Check out the eBooks written specifically for you.

I recommend Robert Kroese's $2.99 work (shown at left).  It's not the best but it's better than some of the others I've looked at.

You'd have to do it if you had a major publisher putting your stuff on paper and in stores.

Oh, and by the way, I was going to try the John Locke book but I downloaded a preview of one of Locke's Donavan Creed novels before deciding whether or not to purchase one or more.And, when I read the reviews of the book, I opted for this one,