Writing without a clue

From Wiki Commons: Legend below, left

 

 

   News

3.9%

   Spam

3.75%

   Self-promotion

5.86% 

    Pointless babble

40.54%

   Conversational

37.55%

   Pass-along value

8.70%

 *******

This morning, I checked out a bunch of author websites I found through Twitter.

Doing that saved me money. I won't have to buy lunch because my stomach is too upset to eat. Why, you might ask? How could author websites do that?

Simple. On sites of two Agatha Award winning mystery writers, I found egregious grammar and usage errors my fifth-grade teacher would not have allowed to get by.

One author said she loved her writer's group because they were more picky than her family, who let all sorts of grammer (sic) errors slip through.

The other author wrote about her two dominate (sic) cats.

I didn't have the stomach, you should excuse the pun, for more. I had to stop to maintain my sanity and my breakfast where it was. But it had revealed to me how greatly the publishing industry still needs editors and copy editors. And why the American educational system has gone to hell in a handcart. How can anyone even propose to be a writer if they can't...you should excuse the boldness...write the English language with any degree of accuracy and skill?

I am appalled. I am, on the heels of all this, somewhat happy that I'm fairly old. I might get through this life before people stoop to grunting and pointing instead of verbally explaining what they mean.

Or maybe not. I saw a TV advert last night that was so vacuous--in England, land of extraordinarily well-produced TV spots compared to what the United States suffers through--that I feared for the continued existence of the race. Really. See for yourself:



Lame, no? Maybe advertising needs to get its cocaine mojo going, because its creativity quotient has sunk to new lows, along with its ability to use language to persuade. Nothing about this advert is visually persuasive, and the drab language...well, it is what I would expect from a fairly low-functioning fourth grader in terms of its "heehee" quotient.

I expect it won't be long before writing in books descends to the level of the advert above. That unhappy day may be hastened by the appearance of the Espresso Book Machine. 

Among other things, this machine may be the death knell of used book dealers; it can print, for ten bucks, an out-of-print, out-of-copyright title a used book dealer would sell for $47, apparently. Of course, whoever installed the 100-grand machine would have to have some darn good book traffic to make the machine pay. But it's coming. It's coming as surely as POD, once a gleam in publishers' eyes, came and via which Crash Course was produced. It is coming as surely as the end of paid journalism in the wake of the Internet and Wiki came.

I saw the Wiki phenomenon coming as far back as the early 1980s, when I bought my first computer. "Nicky," I said to myself, "It's time to change from journalism to fiction, because information is about to be free, but people will always pay for a good story." And I ignored it. Until now. Almost too late.

Or maybe it is too late. The population has been so dumbed down that they don't even require that the authors whose work they read actually know how to write in their native tongue.

But maybe there's a bright side. Maybe the current sad state of affairs opens a niche market: Mysteries for readers who are annoyed by lousy grammar, clumsy diction and malapropisms.

Nah. Even the category name is too long.

Never mind. I'll just keep working on Rat Bastards so it can join Crash Course on amazon.com and amazon.co.uk before amazon.anything is vanquished by the Espresso Book Machine. It's Gutenberg to the logical conclusion, I expect.

Next stop: Thought transfer, no writing required. Noooooooo.........

NB  The legend for the chart above suggests that no matter what one does, one is going to deal with futility and pointlessness on Twitter, leading no doubt to feelings of anomie and for all we know suicide. I know Twitter often makes hara kiri seem attractive to me!

Shelf Barker's Diet, Unplugged

Scotch eggs, which could be made with Mrs. Shelf Barker's Luganica; some doctors say this is heart attack food. Shelf says it's darn good. (Wiki Commons)

Apparently, if I want Shelf Barker to live a long, happy life with minimal bathroom breaks, so he will be able to voice his unique brand of intelligence in a couple of adventures a year, I should, according to the doctors, take away all his favourite foods, including:

  

• Alcohol
• Coffee
• Orange juice
• Prunes
• Fizzy drinks
• Spicy foods
• Onions
• Aged cheese and cream cheese
• Condiments

Also listed as dangerous to one’s health on the HealthCentral website  were artificial sweeteners and processed foods. But Shelf doesn’t eat those anyway. Regarding the first, he’s not an idiot, just a driving instructor. Regarding the second, see the first.

But the rest of it? Here’s what Shelf would say:

• Alcohol: “I’ve got to relax after a day on the roads with the likes of hedgerow man. Who’s that? The 17-year-old who, on pulling into his own driveway at the end of his third lesson, scraped my entire  learner car down the hedgerow.” (Hint: Hedgerows in the UK aren’t made of hedges. They are made of rocks, thinly veiled with vegetation, but quaintly named.)
• Coffee: “What? You want me to fall asleep at the wheel? I really do need to be awake and alert while teaching, as annoying to my higher self as that might be.”
• Orange juice: “Possibly you recall that England is sun-deprived. How else will I acquire sufficient vitamins to survive the stress of my life?”
• Prunes: “OK, few people really need prunes. But look at it this way; the only exercise I get is yelling “STOP” so my muscle tone isn’t always as hardy as I might need it to be, what with sitting on my bum all day. Lounging about, you might say.”
• Fizzy drinks: “And I should rehydrate myself with what? Water? WATER? Please. The only chance I have to get rehydrated is during petrol stops. If I began bringing a bottle of water to the car rather than two Cokes, I’d get NO respect from the boy racers.”
• Spicy foods: “You do recall I am married to an Italian woman, right? She cooks little enough; turning down a meal would probably be the first step toward divorce. And as I mentioned, she’s beautiful. And she puts up with me.”
• Onions: “It might be better to avoid onions. But I long ago realized that eating a good few onions before some of my worst nightmare students got in the car would at least help them keep their distance. There was that one whose hand kept wandering toward…well, never mind. Onions remain.”
• Aged cheese and cream cheese: “See Spicy Foods.”
• Condiments: “Only little kids eat sandwiches and chips without sauces of any sort. I’m old enough that my saliva is worn out, and I need some sauce on the bread to help the Spar store sandwich slide down. Not that Spar sandwiches aren’t good; they just need a little help from some mayo or brown sauce.”

 “It’s hard to figure out what the medical profession is thinking. You should see the list of foods (a mere five categories, one of which is water; is that a food?) they suggest to calm down an overactive bladder. Maybe they aren’t thinking, at least of anything except ways to get people to clean out the larder and restock it, until next time the medical profession gets a wild hair about this or that. Maybe they’re in cahoots with the major food companies. Maybe that would be a fit inquiry for BarkerBarker Investigations Ltd. Maybe I’ll have to suggest it to The Cobra.”

***

Crash Course is available in paperback from amazon.com; shortly from amazon.co.uk. To order a paperback in the UK, just click here. Not only will you get a nice, clean copy; it will be signed by the author at no extra charge!