Publishing Crap

It happens all the time, but it still gets under my skin.

You pick up a novel that looks somewhat interesting. It’s by an author you’ve never read, an author who has several books to his/her credit. It’s worth a shot, right? And so you start reading.

And it’s crap. I mean not just bad, but so bad you want to join the Save the Trees Foundation and picket the publishing company until the author of that pile of debris takes a vow to flip burgers from here on out.

I won’t tell you the author or the publisher, but they’ve both been around for years. I kept reading the book, hoping it would get better or at least not get any worse. I’ve only thrown one book across the room in my life and it was better than this one. I started to heave it, but thought the action would use too much precious energy. Besides, I was in the basement and I was afraid it would hit one of my bookcases, thereby infecting a great work such as The Sound and the Fury or Pride and Prejudice or one of my beloved Nero Wolfe mysteries. (My sf books are all upstairs. If anyone breaks in, they’ll have to sift through all the general fiction first, and by that time, Bullet will probably have his teeth sunk into some very painful portion of their anatomy.)

I couldn’t believe someone actually published this. So naturally, I marched up to the computer and started a new story.

Of course, it’s crap too.

But it won’t be forever. It’ll get better. I’ll figure out who the characters are, what they want, what’s at stake, who has the most to lose. I’ll let the characters speak, let the story tell itself in the way it wants to. I’ll work out the setting, the descriptions, the details. Then I’ll agonize over the language, spending time weighing one word against another, finding what I hope is the right flow.

And when I’ve gotten it as good as I can get it, I’ll send it out.

And when it comes back, I’ll do my best to heal the cuts and bruises and send it back out into the world.

All because some lousy book made me mad.

I guess that junk is good for something.

Now Playing = So Long, So Wrong – Alison Krauss and Union Station