Query critique: Hazel B West – Ballad of the Highwayman

 Editorial, Writing  3 Responses »
Jan 222012
 


I found this query via Goodreads and thought it would be fun to read (i.e., the story idea is interesting but the query needs work). I’d post these comments to her site, except that there’s no formatting available via Blogger comments, so I’m writing this up here and will post a link to this post as a comment to her blog post.

via Hazel West’s Character Purgatory : And After Long Last, I Present….The Pitch!!

Kilroy Allen has been searching fifteen years for the man who sent his father to the scaffold. Executed under false pretenses of treachery against his king, Charles I, Kilroy’s father was betrayed by a man whose face he never saw. Now with the same man after him, Kilroy has no choice but to take on a false identity and lure this unknown man out of hiding so he can exact justice for his father’s murder all those years ago. Now he’s become the infamous highwayman, Emerald Sword, by night and the not so infamous merchant, Jeremy Glennon, by day. But no plan is without its complications. If Kilroy cannot catch the man soon, it could mean his true love, the formidable, yet beautiful, Sylvia Davies, may be forced to marry an insufferable dandy she has no feelings for.

With time running out, Kilroy seeks the sort of help that only his fellow highwaymen can give: Jeffcoat Mullins, his faithful partner in crime, Roster Scarcliff, a dashing rival he has dueled with for years, the famous Thomas Blood and Claude Du Val, and lastly, the Scarlet Blade, who is none other than Sylvia herself. With his band of comrades,* he sets out to honor the vow he made to his father as a boy—find the man who betrayed him and clear his family name once more.

With adventure, romance, humor, sword fighting, wrestling, treachery, and a cast of memorable characters, Ballad of the Highwayman, in the tradition of Alexandre Dumas and Rafael Sabatini, is a revival of the classic swashbuckler that is sadly hard to find in today’s “all the rage” paranormal novels. I wrote Kilroy’s story because I think it’s just what the world never knew they were missing but desperately needs.

Now with critique:

Kilroy Allen has been searching (Passive voice) searched for fifteen years for to find the man who sent his father to the scaffold. (While I like this opening, it’s history. It’s not the inciting event that starts your story, unless you’re starting with a scene from Kilroy’s childhood. And that just might be an awesome opening.)

Executed under false pretenses of for treachery against his king, Charles I, Kilroy’s father was betrayed by a man whose face he never saw.

Now with the same man is after him Kilroy, (How does Kilroy know this? What happened? How? Why?) and Kilroy he has no choice but to take on a false identity (Why does he have no choice? What happened?) and lure this unknown man out of hiding so he can exact justice for his father’s murder all those years ago. (We already know he’s seeking justice, it’s implied in the first sentence of your query. You reinforce the conflict between the mystery man and Kilroy in your second and third sentences. Your original wording introduces the antagonist by reference as “the bad guy is after the good guy”, which is vague, but you end the sentence with the “Kilroy wants to exact justice” which is awkward wording and sounds like you mean “wants to exact revenge.” It’s my opinion that you skipped the transition between bad-guy-tracking-good-guy and good-guy-seeking-justice, but the transition is pretty critical to your plot.)

Now he’s become the infamous highwayman, Emerald Sword, by night and the not so infamous merchant, Jeremy Glennon, by day. But no plan is without its complications. (Don’t overwrite this, too many alter egos in the first paragraph muddy your story. Which is more important? Play that one up, leave the other for the manuscript.)

If Kilroy cannot catch the man soon (We’re all over here. First the bad guy is after the good guy, then the good guy is seeking justice, now the good guy is trying to catch the bad guy.) bring his father’s killer to justice,  it could mean his true love, the formidable, yet beautiful (false dichotomy, are beautiful women never formidable?), Sylvia Davies (If she’s a major character, you should probably introduce her in the second sentence.), may be forced (passive voice, rewrite) to marry an insufferable dandy she has no feelings for. (Why?)

With time running out, Kilroy seeks the sort of help that only his fellow highwaymen can give: Jeffcoat Mullins, his faithful partner in crime, Roster Scarcliff, a dashing rival he has dueled with for years, the famous Thomas Blood and Claude Du Val, and lastly, the Scarlet Blade, who is none other than Sylvia herself. With his band of comrades,* he sets out to honor the vow he made to his father as a boy he sets out—find the man who betrayed him and clear his family name once more. (This is your plot, move this to the start of the query. Third sentence at latest.)

With adventure, romance, humor, sword fighting, wrestling, treachery, and a cast of memorable characters, (this is tell and won’t get you the attention you want) Ballad of the Highwayman, in the tradition of Alexandre Dumas and Rafael Sabatini (most of the time when I read query advice, agents and editors say don’t do this. It’s ok to change this wording to say that your work “will appeal” to readers of Alandre Dumas and Rafael Sabatini. However, you need to ask yourself– how big is that market?), is a revival of the classic swashbuckler (this isn’t a genre, but it’s a fun description you could add to show your voice as a writer– just be sure to include a genre) at XX,000 words. that is sadly hard to find in today’s “all the rage” paranormal novels. I wrote Kilroy’s story because I think it’s just what the world never knew they were missing but desperately needs. (talking down paranormal novels may discourage someone from picking your book if they already enjoy (or make money from) paranormal novels.)

I break up the sentences in to different paragraphs to improve readability of my comments. Ignore my paragraph breaks for the purposes of reading the end result. Since this looks like an Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest entry, I’m not sure that any changes can be made once the entry has been submitted. The book is available now from Amazon (self-published.)

 Posted by John Williams at 5:59 pm  Tagged with: , , ,

Reread: “The Madness Season” Chapter 13

 Books  No Responses »
Jan 222012
 
In this Chapter, we see the world through the Tyr’s eyes. What might otherwise be considered “a day in the life of” provides meaningful hints about future events. The scene also hints and suggests at themes tied to the title of the novel.

C.S. Friedman’s The Madness Season Chapter 13.

This chapter comes in at approximately 900 words. A single scene that depicts the interaction between the Tyr-whole and the Talguth-Tekk (who is also starsha), we’re told that two children have died and that the Talguth must trade Tekk for genetic diversity. The brief scene provides us a look in to the mind of the Tyr-whole,

… One of its Raayat on board the Kamugwa was in the presence of an acceptable human contact, and therefore It used that body as a mouthpiece, even though it was far gone in to season. (Soon, soon. How long must It wait? It needed/ they needed/ a Burning …)

I could make all sorts of inappropriate (out of context) comments here, but I’m not that snarky.

The scene also provides us hints as to the actions and motivations of the Tekk. The Tyr decide that the Talguth-Tekk will transfer to the Domes where eventually the Kamugwa will retrieve her (the Tekk). We’re given a feel for how information passes between the Tyr bodies:

… It consulted Its charts through a distant Kuol, …

and

… It paused, to question its distant contact. …

and

… It accepted the lists from here, and transfered [sic] them into its other brains. …

Lastly, a hint is thrown out about the titular season (it happens midway through the scene, but I’m putting it at the end of my write up for emphasis):

There was no time in the foreseeable future when the Talguth and the Kamugwa could rendezvous. And with summer coming, things would become even more difficult…. [sic, yes, there really are four periods, at least in the kindle version.]

 

Concluding this chapter, we end with the following hooks:

Stakes:

 Posted by John Williams at 1:54 pm  Tagged with: , , , , , , ,

Review: “Starship: Mutiny” by Mike Resnick

 Books  1 Response »
Jan 222012
 

The starship Theodore Roosevelt is fighting on the far outskirts of a galactic war, its crew made up of retreads and raw recruits. A new first officer reports, Wilson Cole, a man with a reputation for exceeding his orders (but getting results). He’s been banished to the Teddy R. for his actions, but once there he again ignores his orders and again comes away triumphant.

It is when the captain of the ship stubbornly follows orders that Cole knows are wrong that he takes command of the ship and wins a major battle. But victorious or not, the service cannot condone a mutiny, even a bloodless one, and he is brought back to stand trial. But Wilson Cole realizes that a guilty verdict is a foregone conclusion…

This is the first of five proposed novels about the starship Theodore Roosevelt. The next four will be, in order, Pirate, Mercenary, Rebel, and Flagship.

The description of the book (from Goodreads) is actually misleading, because the story doesn’t happen that way. It would be more accurate to depict the story thusly:

The starship Theodore Roosevelt is patrolling the far outskirts of the Republic during a galactic war, its crew the unwanted and untrustworthy, at least from the Navy’s perspective. Wilson Cole joins the ships crew, as a new officer, recently demoted, with a reputation for disregarding his orders (but getting results). Though Cole was banished to the Teddy R., he refuses bad orders and once again comes away triumphant.

When the captain of the ship, stubbornly following orders, does something that Cole knows is wrong, he takes command of the ship to avert the death of millions. But, victorious or not, the service cannot condone a mutiny, even a bloodless one, and he’s brought back to stand on trial. Wilson Cole soon realizes that a guilty verdict is a foregone conclusion…

And you’ve pretty much summarized the book. It’s a fun romp, almost a space opera. The story is really the inciting event for the five-part story; the life of the Teddy R. (and it’s crew.)

Read further only if you don’t mind spoilers.

There is a lot to like in the first book of the Starship series, and I’ll list a few of the things I like. The writing is great (with a few notable exceptions), the humor is enough to make me smile more than once, a lot of the antics in the book are exploited to world build for readers who are not familiar with Resnick’s Birthright Universe (i.e., me). When you reach the end of the book, you get treated to several appendices, one of which is a timeline of his universe (somewhere in the area of eighteen thousand years 72 stories of indeterminate length.) The richness of the universe and its history really comes through in Resnick’s writing, and you can really see the degradation of the Republic’s government towards a government where the will of the people (stupid as they often are) becomes more important than the will of the representatives who are voted in to power.

Which segways nicely in to some of the things that were wrong with the book. Wilson Cole is the consummate hero, but he is also the consummate cynic. His history, and how he got demoted to the Teddy R., is presented in dialogue and narrative description. It’s history, and Resnick is unapologetic in skipping over the inciting events that lead Cole to the titular Starship. Furthermore, there are some fairly gaping holes in the plot and a few obvious failures in rendering natural dialogue. (If you don’t think about them, everything reads smoothly, but once you do it’s jarring.)

  1. The Bortellites (the bad guys in Act I) are on the planet to obtain power to fuel their ships. Geothermal energy. The natural question is, since most planets should have a geothermal core, why are they in Republic space (enemy space) collecting geothermic energy from this planet? The answer we’re given is that the planet is geothermically active, and with unstated exclamation points. The energy they can get from this planet is greater than any available in their own territory (because if it wasn’t, why would they enter enemy space to steal it?) Considering the fact that this is some three to four thousand years forward in time, it seems a marked lack of imagination on Resnick’s part. Why couldn’t they just build giant solar panel planets in space and collect all the excess heat and photonic energy that every star (closer to the enemies’ home territory) produces rather than going to where Wilson Cole is located?
  2. In Act II, the pilot of the Teddy R states “I’ve put some ground between us and them,” except that (you guessed it) they’re in space. The use of this archaic term aboard a vessel which, we are told, never sets down on planets (and the crew haven’t seen shore leave in a very long time, and the pilot who makes the comment is plugged in to the navigation systems, permanently.) The anachronism is jarring.
  3. In Act III, Cole’s military counselor says, “You  didn’t make your captain walk the plank, or whatever they do these days.” Ok, first the military lawyer demonstrates an intimate familiarity with common practices aboard navel vessels four thousand years prior to the present (in the book), and then he displays a complete lack of familiarity with what passes for common practice aboard present day naval vessels. Wait, what?
  4. In Act III, the political climax of the book, we’re told that everyone is against Cole because he failed to prevent the death of three million Benidottes (but saved five million humans, and his former Captain has been telling the press that he’s bigoted and xenophobic… so the reason he didn’t save the Benidottes is because he hates all other species except humans. This prevents the Navy from finding him innocent.) I’m struggling (like the characters in the book) to understand how the entire civilization is so firmly under the control of the mass media that no one is capable of thinking for themselves.
  5. In Act III, after Cole accepts defeat so that his service mates are not sacrificed to politics along with him (but he’s planning to attempt an escape from prison), Resnick narrates “… Cole lay down on his narrow, uncomfortable cot, dwelling on the realization that he’d spent his entire adult life in the unquestioning service of a military that could do this to him.” (Emphasis mine). Except that the whole point of his history is that he’s never, ever served unquestioningly. The very reason he was sent to the Teddy R. in the first place is because he questioned (and disobeyed) orders, and he’s been questioning (and disobeying) orders throughout the last 245 pages.

Lastly, the climax of the book is political where the first and second Acts of the novel are both action. The result is to cause the quick pacing of the story to grind to a near halt while the protagonists “rot in jai.” Since this is the start of a series, and there are more books to come, I’m willing to forgive. I like Resnick’s voice (as a writer) and Wilson Cole is fun to spend time with.

 Posted by John Williams at 1:52 am  Tagged with: , , , , , ,

Commenting is now open

 Personal  No Responses »
Jan 212012
 

I just opened the blog up to comments again. We’ll see how that goes.

 Posted by John Williams at 1:15 pm  Tagged with: , ,

Nortel/Avaya UNIStim Table

 Nortel, PBX, Telecom, VoIP, Work  No Responses »
Jan 212012
 

The 2033 Conference phone firmware versions are approximations. I’m recreating this table from documentation, since Avaya doesn’t seem to care to keep such a thing current. I do have some old UNIStim 3.0 documentation. I’m debating whether or not to include the now-manufacture-discontinued IP phones (i.e., i2001, i2002, i2004). I’m very tempted to do so, since I still see a lot of 4.5 and earlier systems (which still support the older IP Phones.)

 Posted by John Williams at 1:10 pm  Tagged with: , , , , , ,

Google Analytics, the focus of this blog

 Nortel, PBX, Personal, VoIP, Writing  No Responses »
Jan 212012
 

I installed Google Analytics a few days ago, and discovered something really amazing (i.e., amazing for me.): the most searched for pages on my blog are pages that I generated about three and a half years ago.

  1. Writer’s Acronyms: i.e. and e.g.
  2. How to reset a Nortel IP phones to factory default

The Nortel Factory Default reset article was written to help me remember the code. Between my previous job and my current job, I found myself needing to reset phones to factory default irregularly, but often. In fairness to Nortel/Avaya, it’s not always the phone’s fault, but especially when you’re providing remote support and you’re uncertain what the field guy is doing or seeing (because, well, you’re not physically there to look over his/her shoulder), I found it useful to instruct people to factory default the phones as part of a troubleshooting process.

The following month, I posted the article on Latin acronyms. In retrospect, it’s not as much a surprise to me now that I’d already been concerned with how to write well. I am, after all, embarking on my own journey as an author of fiction. When I wrote that article, I was working for my current employer and I’d been writing more and more documentation. In documentation, proper use of acronyms greatly enhances readability. e.g., the latin acronym for exempli gratia is useful when you want to give an example, and much easier to use than throwing around the clunky “for example” or colloquial “forex”. When you want to add clarity to a sentence, the acronym for the latin phrase id est is useful. That is to say i.e. is a lot easier to use than saying that is.

In previous posts, I’ve covered someone else’s great list of building a platform and followed up with an explanation of why I critiquing other people’s work (and post it to my blog). I’m not sure how, going forward, I can capitalize on the popularity of the acronym post. I’m going to have to put some thought in to it. For the IP Phone procedure, there’s a lot of documentation that I can turn in to articles, so I’m going to be doing that at least once a week. I already started with reviewing QOS Notification Levels and Manually Upgrading Firmware on Avaya IP Phones.

 

 Posted by John Williams at 12:18 pm  Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,

Upgrade Avaya IP Phones Manually

 Nortel, PBX, Telecom, VoIP  1 Response »
Jan 202012
 

There are several reasons why you might want to enable manual provisioning of your Avaya IP Phones:

  1. Branch office scenarios, where you want to reduce bandwidth requirements for provisioning or firmware distribution.
  2. Large site scenarios, where you want to offload provisioning from the DHCP server or offload firmware distribution from the signaling server.
  3. Secure environment scenarios, where phone security is paramount and phones should not allow themselves to be reconfigured.
  4. Any scenario where a signaling server is not available, such as a home office scenario or staging warehouse scenario. This includes scenarios where you want to load VPN client licensing on to the IP phone to allow it to be deployed remotely (e.g., a home office.)

The provisioning phase of the boot process can use DHCP or HTTP. To use HTTP, you must configure DHCP Option 66 in the IP Phone VLAN to point to the HTTP server name and prefix the server name with “http://”. For example DHCP Option 66 “http://httpserver/”. Whether you select TFTP or HTTP, the provisioning phase process checks the system.prv file and if it exists, may load one of the other provisioning files. If multiple provisioning files are loaded, the configuration parameters take effect in the following priority:

  1. DEVICE (e.g., <MAC>.prv, or, 001365FEF4D4.prv)
  2. TYPE (e.g., <TYPE>.prv, or, 1140E.prv)
  3. ZONE (e.g., headqrtr.prv)
  4. SYSTEM (e.g., system.prv)

The provisioning files provide the Info Block, which contains all the information you might normally stick in DHCP (or manually configure on the phone if  you’re especially sadistic towards your telecom analysts). The Info Block can also contain information that is not normally provided in the DHCP string (e.g., Node and TN.) After the provisioning block is loaded, the IP phone will load the configuration file to determine how it should obtain firmware and font file updates. At some future point, I might come back and write another article to cover provisioning via HTTP or TFTP, but for now, we’re going to focus on the configuration file and manually upgrading the firmware on an IP phone.

  1. TYPE (e.g., <TYPE>.cfg, or, 1140E.cfg)

The Configuration file can contain a lot of information:

  1. [FW] Set Firmware
  2. [GEM FW] Expansion Module Firmware
  3. [USER_KEYS] User keys
  4. [DEVICE_CONFIG] Device configuration
  5. [IMAGES] Backgrounds and screensavers
  6. [FONTxx] Custom fonts
  7. [LANGUAGE] Language (associated with customized fonts)
  8. [LICENSING] Feature licensing
  9. [DIALING_PLAN] Dialing plan (SIP only?)

We’re going to focus only on the [FW] values in this article.

[FW] Section header for SET FIRMWARE download information.
DOWNLOAD_MODE AUTO Recommended value. Download firmware only if the VERSION on the provisioning server is newer than the version on the phone.
FORCED VERSION of the phone is ingored. Firmware is always downloaded.
VERSION e.g., 0625C8J The VERSION string is compared to what is on the phone. VERSION should match the firmware FILENAME exactly.
FILENAME e.g., 0625C8J.bin Image filename. Must match the filename of the actual IP phone FW file to be downloaded
PROTOCOL TFTP Download protocol. Must be TFTP Documentation for CS1000 7.5 says that this must be TFTP, but the sample CFG files available from AVAYA show that HTTP is supported. Further testing is recommended.
SERVER_IP x.x.x.x IP address of the TFTP server in decimal notation.
SERVER_PORT 0 to 65535 The port used by the TFTP server at SERVER_IP. Optional
SECURITY_MODE 0 For future use

Example 1140E.cfg file:

[FW]
DOWNLOAD_MODE AUTO
VERSION 0625C8J
FILENAME 0625C8J.bin
PROTOCOL TFTP
SERVER_IP 192.168.0.101
SECURITY_MODE 0

After placing both the configuration file (e.g., 1140E) and the FILENAME (firmware image) in the root of the TFTP server at SERVER_IP, the next step is to choose the method of configuring the IP Phone to know about the external provisioning server (if you haven’t already done this). The options available are:

NOTE
While it is possible to configure the DHCP Option 66 to point to an HTTP server (to retrieve the *.prv or *.cfg files), other files must be available via the protocol specified within the *.cfg file. For the purposes of this article, that means a TFTP server is required whether you provide the <TYPE>.cfg via HTTP or TFTP.
  1. DHCP Option 66 – TFTP/HTTP Server Name
  2. DHCP Option Nortel-i2004-B specification
  3. Manually configuring the Provisioning Server on the IP phone.

Select a method and implement it. To keep this article short and focused, we’re going to assume you know how to do this.

Plug in your phone and power it up. Assuming that (your DHCP configuration or manually configured provisioning server is correct and) it is able to reach the provisioning server, it will download the <TYPE>.cfg file from the TFTP/HTTP server, then using the instructions contained within, determine if a firmware download is required and perform that download if necessary.

If you use DOWNLOAD_MODE FORCED, the IP phone will force a download of the firmware each time the phone boots. This will increase the boot time for all IP phones configured to use that <TYPE>.cfg file.

I hope you found this article helpful. If you did, please share it.

Addendum:

Note regarding i2007.cfg file

Early versions of the IP Phone 2007 FW will fail to download newer versions of FW if the [FW] line is present before the FW download information in the .cfg file.

If the FW version currently on the IP Phone 2007 is prior to any version of 0621C4x, then delete the [FW] line. Once the phone has FW version 0621C4x or greater, the [FW] line must be present. Example: Phone has 0621C3A – comment out or delete the [FW] line in the i2007.cfg file Phone has 0621C4J – keep the [FW] line in the i2007.cfg file

 Posted by John Williams at 7:23 pm  Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,

Avaya CS1000 QOS Notifications

 Nortel, PBX, Telecom, VoIP, Work  No Responses »
Jan 202012
 

When troubleshooting QOS issues (including dropped calls, one way talk path, etc.) on an Avaya CS1000, sometimes it’s helpful to look at all of the alarms (even the unnacceptable or warning alarms) on a per-call basis. This gives you an idea of when there are problems in an entire zone vs individual users within the zone, or zone-wide and ongoing versus intermittant and individualized alarming.

LD 117
CHG ZQNL <zone> <notification_level>

Level = 0-(2)-4, where:

Level 0 = All voice quality alarms are suppressed.

Level 1 = All zone based Unacceptable alarms.

% QOS019 QoS unacceptable packet loss: [42.3] % in zone [1]

Level 2 = Allow all level 1 alarms PLUS zone based Warning alarms.

% QOS013 QoS warning jitter:[30.6] % in zone [1]
% QOS015 QoS warning R factor:[43.0] % in zone [1]

Level 3 = Allow all level 1 and 2 alarms PLUS per call Unacceptable alarms.

% QOS007 Unac pkt loss:[PL:8.2 LT:0 JIT:0 R:75]
%   Near [192.168.16.23:5000],TN[067 16],NZ[0:1]
%   Far [10.1.152.121:5200] TN[063 23], VPNI:Zone[0:1]

Level 4 = Allow all level 1, 2, and 3 alarms PLUS per call Warning alarms

% QOS001 Warning packet loss:[4.3 %]
%   Near [192.168.16.23:5000] TN[067 16],NZ[0:1]
%   Far [10.1.152.121:5200] TN[063 23], VPNI:Zone[0:1]

% QOS002 Warning latency :[50 ms]
%   Near [10.1.152.121:5000] TN[063 23],NZ[0:1]
%   Far [192.168.16.23:5200] TN[067 16], VPNI:Zone[0:1]

% QOS003 Warning jitter :[20 ms]
%   Near [10.1.152.25:5000],TN[064 22],NZ[0:1]
%   Far [10.1.112.28:5200] TN[067 18], VPNI:Zone[0:1]

% QOS005 Warning R factor:[75]
%   Near [192.168.16.23:5000],TN[067 16],NZ[0:1]
%   Far [10.1.152.121:5200] TN[063 23], VPNI:Zone[0:1]

 Posted by John Williams at 9:48 am  Tagged with: , , , , ,

SFWA Guest Post: Long Sentences

 Editorial, Education, Writing  No Responses »
Jan 192012
 

via Guest Post: Long Sentences.

This article is long winded and misses the point. Meandering, due to the lengthy quotes, this article presents several ideas and manages a conclusion towards the end. Despite the claims that topic is long sentences, this article’s content is really about rhythm, and how there is just as much value in long sentences as in short sentences. That Theodora struggled with the topic of her article seems evident in the structure of the article itself. She spends the first 550 words of her article quoting an article by Pico Iyer and offhandedly refuting Pico’s article (with only a 150 word response to the 242 word quotation). She then continues with a quote that formed the basis for her article, from Pico’s article, and concludes, “And you know, I see his point.” (at the 76% mark in her 1015 word article.) While there is more to the article, I’ll let you read it for yourself. The point of my article is about what drew me in, what I thought of this opinion article, and what the content of the article was (to me) versus what Theodora claimed the article was about.

The start of her article didn’t grab me at all, and it wasn’t until I reread it carefully that I realized that what really drew me in was the start of the article she spends most of her time quoting (and refuting).

“‘Your sentences are so long,’” said a friend who teaches English at a local college, and I could tell she didn’t quite mean it as a compliment.

So says the first line of that Theodora Goss is quoting. That hook is excellent, but Theodora’s beginning: “Recently, the Los Angeles Times published an article …” is less enticing. Pico’s article (at least the part that is quoted) is flush with long, multi-clause sentences, sprinkled liberally with adjectives, adverbs, and conjunctions. His writing is readable and complex, bordering on being florid without being convoluted. I am certainly inspired by his style of prose; I find myself tempted to try longer sentences (Theodora felt the same way), but I also find myself thinking that Pico’s writing is too long. There is no urgency to his writing, which might be perfect for journalism, but for fiction it just does not work.

Ironically, Theodora ends her guest post succinctly (at odds with the title):

So, long sentences. But more important than that, nuance and depth. Those are the lessons for today.

So, long sentences, indeed. Which leads me to the conclusion of my article: this article by Theodora Goss is a mess. While it presents some interesting food for thought, the topic not discussed is rhythm (a topic which is currently plaguing me). Rhythm is at the heart of Theodora’s article, even if she never mentions the word. Pico’s use of long sentences, multiple clauses, and verbosity may provide the information dump (i.e., “bombardment of the moment”) that he so desperately desires, but it also creates a languid, almost soporific feeling to the prose. Amazingly, Pico’s hook is short, being a five word quote. The next shortest sentence in the quotes (provided by Theodora) is eight words.

Long sentences may communicate nuance and depth, but short sentences are like punctuation: Proper use greatly improves your writing. What’s more, sometimes the best way to say something is by not saying it at all.

And that was the lesson I learned today.

 Posted by John Williams at 11:24 pm  Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,

Fireflight – Unbreakable

 Music/Audio  No Responses »
Jan 192012
 

 Posted by John Williams at 12:24 am  Tagged with: , , ,
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