Breaking the rules. Is it OK?

I recently finished reading Charlie Huston’s Caught Stealing. Great book.  It’s a rollercoaster ride that takes off on Page 1 and doesn’t stop. It’s brutal and profane, but it’s a ton of fun.  I loved the voice, and I loved the structure of the novel. It’s not written in long chapters, but shorter chunks. Sometimes they are only a few lines long. They really helped establish the book’s pace – which is rocket-like.

One thing you’ll notice reading the book, though, is the lack of quote marks. Instead, Huston uses dashes at the beginning of a line to indicate someone’s speaking. There are no dialogue tags either.

It was something I thought would bother me when I first started reading, but a page or two into it I was fine without the quotes. I did get me wondering, though, what others thought about this kind of rule bending.

How much are you willing to put up with something like creative punctuation in a novel? Does it bother you when an author breaks the rules?

A look ahead to 2012

I know I was supposed to write this post some time last week and post it yesterday. But I've been enjoying spending time with Gina while she's been on Christmas break from school. Besides, it doesn't seem like a new year until Monday when everyone goes back to work.

I haven't had a lot of motivation to write much here, especially nothing that looked back at 2011. It was a weird year for me. There were a lot of downs. I lost my aunt in January and my grandmother in October. I lost my job in September. But there was one really huge up in 2011. In October, Gina found out she was pregnant. That sort of helped gloss over all of the bad stuff. It sets up 2012 to be my best year so far.

On the writing side of things, 2011 wasn't too bad. I published two stories, and hit almost 200 sales. I started to build a readership. I've got a few plans for 2012. I'm not calling them resolutions. The only resolutions I've made are with Gina and probably of little interest to those of you who are here. The plans I've made are goals.

1. Publish the second book in the New Eden series.
2. Write and publish the rest of the Jackson Cane series. It's five stories right now, and I've got the second almost finished.  The remaining three are loosely plotted. They should be easy to write.
3. To keep building my readership. Or following. Or presence. Or platform. Or whatever they call it. That's going to include blogging more regularly. Tweeting more and with the right people. When I started using Twitter I was getting so much more out of it. I'm not getting that now and I really think it's because I'm not using it like I should. I'm planning on making some changes there, but that's another blog post for another time.

Pretty simple goals, honestly. And all stuff I can control. Notice, there are no sales goals on there. That's because I can't control those. I can make sure people know about my books, and I try to do that, but I can't make them buy. But, hopefully, if I can be successful at goal No. 3 then sales will follow.

So, auf wiedersehen to 2011 and guten tag to 2012. It's going to be a good year. I'm going to be a dad.

Get to know Neal Hock

As part of this interview series I wanted to talk to more than authors. I wanted to talk to book reviewers. I wanted to talk to editors. Well, Neal Hock is both. He's also another person I met through Twitter. Are you noticing a pattern here?  I think I got his name through Misty Baker, but I'm not sure. Take a few minutes and get to know Neal and what makes someone want to be an editor or book reviewer tick. 

On your blog you are a book reviewer, yet there's a link to your editing services on there also. So which came first, the editing or the reviewing? And is that one your first love?

Well, I guess it depends on your perspective. When I worked in the corporate world, I was the informal editor of performance reviews and business-related materials. However, I didn’t consider pursuing editing at that time. I started a book-review blog because I have a consuming passion for good books. So with regards to sharing my views on the Internet, the reviewing came first. As to what my first love is, I’d have to say I have a love of well-written, good stories. That’s my motivating passion for both editing and reviewing. However, real life has a way of funneling you in certain directions, and due to time constraints, my book reviewing is taking a backseat right now.

What makes someone decide that they want to review books?

A love for good stories. At least that’s what motivates me. I love the exhilaration I get when I finish a good story, and I can’t wait to find the next one.

What about editing? Were you the one weird kid in class who looked forward to diagramming sentences?

It’s funny, but I wasn’t that interested in grammar-related topics in school. Hell, I didn’t read a lot books throughout high school. I just didn’t get excited about The Scarlet Letter, The Good Earth, and The Great Gatsby. However, when I went to college, I had a professor for freshman English that encouraged us to discover modern authors, and from that moment on, my passion for interesting stories was ignited.

As to being a weird kid, I had my quirks. I’m probably a much weirder adult. My wife still gives me a strange look when I bring my Chicago Manual of Style to bed for bedtime reading.

Seriously, though, what kind of editing services do you provide? Do you work primarily with independent authors/self-publishers?

I provide proofreading, copyediting, and concept editing. The vast majority of my clients are independent authors, but I’ve also worked with publishers and websites.

What's the biggest error you find yourself correcting? Do you have a most infuriating mistake you find?

Wow, I’m not sure there is one that stands out. Each author has personal tendencies, so that kind of evens everything out. There are always wayward commas and misspelled or missing words. I guess the most common mistake I find across the board is missing hyphens in compound modifiers. I’ve never been infuriated when I find mistakes. It’s really quite the opposite, because mistakes mean I’ll continue to have work.

For years I did newspaper copy editing work. My favorite Associated Press style rule was for under way. It's two words except when it's used in a nautical sense. Do you have a favorite style or grammar rule? Please say you do. It will make me feel much less like a language loser.

Anyone who can appreciate such a nuance is not a language loser in my book. I’m a sucker for a hyphen in a compound modifier, and I love apostrophes of omission. When to use everyday and every day always gives me the warm fuzzies, too. See, now I look like the language dork.

Since you review books, it stands to reason that you've read a lot of them. What are three books that came across your desk that surprised you? And they don't need to be surprisingly good books. We all know that something can be unexpectedly bad.

Well, I’ll stick with the good. The whole point of my book-review site is to share good books. If I read something that I’m not crazy about, I usually just set it aside and keep my mouth shut. You know, the whole “if you can’t say something nice” thing. The biggest thing that has surprised me since I started reviewing books is the number of quality works being self-published. There are a lot of talented writers out there that are relatively unknown.

Three books that blew me away when I read them: As I Embrace My Jagged Edges by Lee Thompson, The Pack: Winter Kill by Mike Oliveri, and Identity Crisis by Debbi Mack.

I'm sure there are a few indie authors reading this. How can they contact you if they wanted to?

The website for my editing services is http://www.hockseditingservices.com. The website for my book-review site is http://bookhoundsden.blogspot.com. An e-mail address to contact me directly is on each site.

Can you give us a recommended reading list? What books do we need to read if we haven't yet?

Sheesh, you’re trying to get me in trouble here. I’m afraid I might leave someone out. Here’s a few authors everybody needs to try: Guido Henkel, Stephen James Price, Debbi Mack, Mike Oliveri, Lee Thompson, Anthony Neil Smith, Scott Nicholson, R.E. McDermott, Willie Meikle, David T. Wilbanks, and Jeff Bennington.

What's the biggest piece of advice you have for authors as a reviewer? What about as an editor?

From a reviewer’s standpoint, I’d advise authors to not argue with a reviewer about the reviewer’s review. Especially if you solicited the reviewer. Recently I’ve seen a couple of authors say all kinds of things about reviews they didn’t agree with. If you get a review that’s bad, see what you can learn from it and then move on.

From an editor’s standpoint, I’d advise authors to always continue to learn more about their craft. Continue to put tools in your writer’s toolbox. If there are things that you struggle with, pinpoint them and try to improve. In this new digital age a writer can’t afford to put out a subpar product.

Self publishing and editing

I've been in a bit of an editing mode lately, ever since the lightbulb moment actually. Now that I know the bigger story here I wanted to make sure that what I'd written was going to line up with what I am going to write.

I am trying to be very diligent with the editing. I want this thing to be squeaky clean before it gets put up for sale. I know that some errors may, and probably will, get through. But it won't be because I'm lazy. Unfortunatley lazy editing is one of the things that has given self publishing a bad name over the years. I was reminded of that reading a thread on the Kindleboards web site the other day. Some writers there took offense to another author saying most self published books were amateurish and unprofessional. Problem is that he was right. One of the reasons self published books have a reputation for being of lesser quality is a lack of proper editing. That's why I want Filthy Lucre to be a tight, well-told story that doesn't have any distracting errors that pull the reader from the tale.

You can read a little more on editing at Self Publishing Review. That's right here.