The story of Katherine and the fish

After living in Iqaluit for two weeks now, I've had some... interesting, shall we say?... experiences, but before I get too deep into those, here's a story one of my co-workers told me about her attempt at ice-fishing.

So Katherine went out on to the ice to try her luck, and she stayed there for what felt like several freezing hours without a bite. Nearby, though, an Inuk woman was at a similar hole in the ice, pulling out big fish after big fish with ease.

Finally Katherine felt a tug on her line. Excited, she hauled on it, only to bring up a tiny fish the length of her finger.

The Inuk woman looked over at it. Obviously trying to be encouraging, she said, "Catch eleven more of those and you can make soup!"

At that moment a large raven swooped down, grabbed Katherine's fish and flew off.

The Inuk woman said, "Twelve."

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Movin' On Up

 

I've been offered a job in Iqaluit, which is a little distance from Toronto (see map for further details). It's a four-month contract position, so I should be back before the winter really sets in, which is a bit of a relief since winter temperatures in Iqaluit can get down to -45 C. -65, with wind chill. You can see how close the place is to the Arctic Circle, which means the sun rises just after 3 am.

It's going to be quite the experience. I've never lived anywhere so far north; apparently that's all permafrost, so there are no trees or even much vegetation. Iqaluit is also the only territorial capital which is not connected by highways to the mainland, so all groceries have to be shipped or flown in except for local fare such as caribou, seal and Arctic char. I'm going to be flying up there Monday morning, and I don't know how reliable my Internet connection will be after that, but I'll use any free time (when I'm not working or taking in the local culture) to get some writing done.

Wish me luck, guys!

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Ella Minnow Pea

The island-state of Nollop was named after Nevin Nollop, who devised the pangram “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”. His accomplishment is commemorated in a memorial monument with 35 tiles spelling out his immortal sentence.

The problem begins subtly, though, when the Z tile falls off.

Ella Minnow Pea, one of the islanders, writes to her cousin Tassie to explain that the islanders’ Council has met to discuss the implications of this. They conclude that, rather than the tile’s fall being a random event, it must be a sign from the island’s favorite son. Nollop no longer wishes the letter Z to be used, and therefore it must be removed from use and vocabulary.

Mark Dunn’s Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters tells the story of how the island’s community and culture spirals down from there. Eliminating the Z doesn’t seem too difficult at first, but when Tassie’s mother, a teacher, accidentally refers to twelve eggs in a different way, one of her students reports her to the Council. Penalties are imposed for such misdeeds, and a third offense means banishment from the island.

The Q drops off next, and the J. As news spreads, the editor of an American journal arrives with the news that chips from the broken tiles have been smuggled to a laboratory for analysis. The glue affixing the tiles to the monument is faulty, and chemists predict that more tiles will fall.

As that happens, the islanders’ vocabulary shrinks along with their numbers. People who have not been banished have fled; those who remain have to change their names to avoid forbidden letters. And Ella tries her best to devise a new pangram that will replace Nollop’s all-but-deified sentence, because only this will convince the Council to relent.

Storm.
Tiles plop. 8 tiles plomp plomp plomp all in one nite.
Tee ent is near.
So lon A!
So lon E! (Nise to no ewe.)

The book starts sedately, but once the islanders take their first steps on to the slippery slope of censorship and totalitarianism, the plot picks up speed. It’s both fascinating and unnerving to see how fear eats away at their common sense and social structure, turning otherwise good people into informers and fundamentalists. And yet the story unfolds with both elegance and humor, such as when the Council sends written notice of deportation to a woman, concluding with: “You may bring two suitcases. We will permit, also, one hatbox.”

As well as being an engaging satire, this is a great read for anyone who enjoys the written word. It was on my must-buy list, and now it’s on my shelf.

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The Writer’s Essential Tackle Box

When it comes to books about writing and publication, Lynn Price’s The Writer's Essential Tackle Box is a great all-rounder. I’d recommend it to any new writers, and some chapters would be interesting to those of us who have been around the block a few times as well.

The book is divided into four sections—interviews with industry professionals, the submission process, publishers and troubleshooting problems in manuscripts. My favorite section was the first one, which showed the perspectives of the numerous people involved in getting a book from its writer to bookstore browsers. If you ever wondered what a book shepherd did, how professional cover designers pick colors or how distributors accept clients, this is the go-to book. Also, just a couple of the familiar names in the interview section were Victoria Strauss of Writer Beware and Laurie McLean of Larson Pomada Literary Agents, so this is quality information.

The second section covers query letters, pitches, log lines and synopses, but the most entertaining part was, as always, the what-not-to-do chapter. The SASE that was actually an empty coconut, the chocolate that melted in the envelope and the flower-scented envelope that had little hearts dotting the i’s.

It felt inherently wrong to put a rejection letter into something so frilly and fluffy. This was a happy envelope that should hold happy things… I swear I could see its little paper edges begin to curl and the little hearts deflate.

If I had a complaint, it would be that I’d read the horror stories about the dark side of publishing before, on Lynn Price’s blog, but there’s something to be said for a book that gathers them all together and adds plenty of new material. I thought I’d read her "Punctuation Beerfest" before as well, but it was fun to see this for a second time, and to have it close at hand in this book. I might not call this book “essential”, but it was a lot of other e’s – educational, energetic and entertaining. For everyone.

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I did it!

After much studying and even more worrying, I passed the national certification exam of the Canadian Society for Medical Laboratory Sciences. I made it! I'm the prettiest! Uh, well, not that last one.

The last few days of waiting for the results were the worst, because I started dreaming about the damn results, or lack thereof. I was also consumed with the utterly irrational fear that I had forgotten to sign the form that came with the exam, meaning the whole thing would have been invalidated. But it's finally over. Now I can celebrate! And get a job, of course.

*dances around*

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Five uses for sharks in fantasy

1. Variety

Go beyond the Great White. Sharks come in an incredible range of shapes, sizes, colors and types. As well as the hammerheads, there are thresher sharks, where the upper part of the tail can be as long as the shark itself, and sawsharks have long serrated snouts to slash prey.

Megamouth sharks, as the name suggests, swim along with their giant mouths open to swallow and filter plankton. Cookiecutter sharks are small, but they feed by gouging out round plugs of flesh from larger animals, hence their name. What’s scarier than this? The fact that they sometimes travel in schools.

And the names of milk and angel sharks just sound cute.

2. Scouts

If I lived in or on the sea, I can’t think of anything else I’d rather have watching out for me than a shark.

As well as some species being able to detect one par per million of blood in seawater, others have external features that further enhance their senses—the hammerhead’s widely spaced eyes, for instance, or the nurse shark’s whiskerlike tactile organs. Their lateral lines contribute to their hearing.

The most fascinating sensory feature they have, though, is the ampullae of Lorenzini, electroreceptor organs that detect the electromagnetic fields all living organisms produce. I keep trying to imagine what sensing these must be like, how the sea appears to a shark in consequence, and if there’s any way to deceive or circumvent such a sensory system.

3. Weresharks

I rarely read books about shifters—burned out on werewolf novels a long time ago—but if there’s a book about people who turn into sharks, that will be the exception. It would just be a great change from wolves and big cats. One caveat: the weresharks shouldn’t be mindless killing machines to be destroyed in the end or destined for soup. They have too much story potential for that.

4. Despots

But do you want terrifying, thousand-fanged leviathans of the deep? Go for the ocean version of the mob boss.

These sharks patrol a territory and every other creature within it pays tribute by bringing in prey (such as luring unsuspecting humans in?) or sacrificing members of their own species which are weak, ill or which have just pissed off the rest of their shoal. In return, the sharks defend their territories fiercely, especially from rival sharks. Better the devil you know…

5. Submarines

The world is covered with water, or the land is just not habitable. People have to live beneath the sea, but why go to all the trouble of building submersiles that must be maintained and resupplied when the submarine could carry out self-repairs and defend itself?

Living inside a creature that dwarfs a megalodon would be an interesting experience. Such a shark would have to be genetically modified to contain living spaces for humans, and to reroute oxygen to interior chambers. Though a convincing argument would have to be made for the humans being symbiotes rather than parasites on a creature which could do very well without them.

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The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

"Your cells will make you immortal."

In 1951, Henrietta Lacks lay in a "colored" ward of the Johns Hopkins Hospital, losing a battle against an aggressive type of cervical cancer. She was thirty-one. When she died, she left behind five children, the youngest not even a year old.

She left behind something else, though--something taken from her without her permission or even her knowledge. When she was operated on, the doctors took a sample of tissue from her cervix and tried to make the cells grow.

The science of cell culture was still in its infancy at the time, mostly because human cells were difficult to propagate in vitro. Experimenting to find any cells which would grow well in a flask, doctors tried hundreds of patient samples. Informed consent wasn't considered necessary or even relevant at the time. None of the samples yielded results; the patients' cells died.

But Henrietta's... didn't.

HeLa, as the cells are now known, were the first immortal human cell line to be grown in a laboratory; they can multiply an infinite number of times provided they have the right growth conditions. Even compared to other cancer cells, they grow fast. Highly adaptable, they can become airborne to infect other cell cultures in the same laboratory.

They revolutionized cell biology and virology. HeLa cells were used to test the first polio vaccine and used to create the first hybridomas--cell lines producing large quantities of antibodies. They were shipped all over the world and sent into outer space.

Slowly, a multi-billion dollar industry selling human biological materials was born.

The tragedy, though, was that no one told Henrietta's children about any of this. Her name was revealed in the media for the first time in 1971, and her children only learned of the industry surrounding her cells in 1975. They struggled to deal with the fact that people were buying and selling cells from the mother they never knew, when they couldn't even afford medication.

"I would like some health insurance so I don’t got to pay all that money every month for drugs my mother cells probably helped make."

Rebecca Skloot researched and vividly described The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Ever since she took a biology class in college, she was curious about the unknown person behind HeLa, the woman who was buried in an unmarked grave, yet who impacted science--and medical ethics--long after her death, and the mother who left behind a daughter longing to know more about her.

Finally the cells popped into view for Deborah. And through that microscrope, for that moment, all she could see was an ocean of her mother's cells, stained an ethereal fluorescent green.
"They're beautiful," she whispered.

Striking a perfect balance between the science and the people involved, this book was a New York Times bestseller. Although I knew of some failures of medical ethics, such as the Tuskegee syphilis study, others were new (and horrifying for someone who studied medical laboratory technology in a different time and place). Most of all, though, this is the story of an ordinary family who learn about an extraordinary legacy from a woman who should be remembered for her life, and death, and immortality.

Read an excerpt here.

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Imaginaerum

For most of my life, my tastes in music were predictable. I liked pop and New Age/Celtic, so my playlists featured Enya and Michael Jackson, with Roxette and Loreena McKennitt backing them up.

But then I heard a Finnish symphonic metal band called Nightwish.

Heavy metal, or any kind of metal with loud drums, electric guitars and snarled lyrics, didn’t work for me. What hooked me on Nightwish, though, was their unusual combination of the drums and guitars with a truly operatic voice—their singer, Tarja Turunen, has an incredible vocal range. As a result the songs have a sense of depth and drama, and the lyrics often contribute to this as well. “Wishmaster” references both The Lord of the Rings and DragonLance, while "7 Days to the Wolves" is inspired by Stephen King’s Wolves of the Calla.

Nightwish and Tarja Turunen parted ways in 2005, however, and while I listened to a few of their songs after that period, they never quite did it for me. The band had a new vocalist, Anette Olzon, but her voice was just too different—the grand soaring quality was gone. I’m not so invested in music that that came as a disappointment, though, so I just listened to the Nightwish songs I did like, and thought it ended there.

Then I heard of their latest album, Imaginaerum. Maybe it was the name, the lovely cover, or just curiosity which made me listen to a few of the songs, but… they’re superb. Fast-paced but haunting, infused with atmosphere, just right for a night carnival, a dark-side-of-the-mind wonderland and an “Imaginarium/dream emporium”.

I am the voice of Never-Never land,
The innocence, the dreams of every man,
I am the empty crib of Peter Pan…

Storytime

Last Ride Of The Day evokes a roller-coaster ride under the moon. Turn Loose The Mermaids is another of my favorites—sad and dreamy at the start, yet seguing into an energetic C-part that’s apparently influenced by spaghetti westerns.

Then again, the album is the soundtrack for an musical fantasy film, and it shows—the songs reflect the panorama of the big screen. Anette’s voice fits perfectly with this new style. I don’t think Nightwish will ever reach that operatic plateau they did in the past, but they don’t need to—they’re brilliant, bold and evocative. Metal has never been easier to listen to.



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Word counters

Does anyone else use a word counter when working on a novel or story? If you know the length you're aiming for (in words or chapters), it's fun to watch the little counter inching along towards your goal.

I usually use Ticker Factory. It's got a lot of different styles to play with, so the counter can be customized for any setting. Here's the one for the book I'm working on right now:




Now, back to writing.

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Fake literary agents

Writer Beware’s latest blog post referenced this literary agent profile. It’s either hilarious or jawdropping or both.

I'm an hungry hunter... YES, but only of... bestsellers!!!

Maybe there’s so much merda taurorum on this page that even the greenest of newbies will steer clear. I’d like to believe that. I really would.

Our policy is FREE (for first reading!) and very different from other agents:
1. We accept to read all your book (the first 3 chapters, in my opinion, are not sufficient to judge the whole book! They are sufficient only to mock you!).

Scammers are usually consistent in telling writers what they want to hear. We’ll read your book from cover to cover. We’ll reply fast. We respect you. We believe in your dream. Sometimes they go further—hopeful clients were conned out of hundreds of thousands of pounds by Robin Price, who told them Johnny Depp and Martin Scorsese were among his contacts. He was convicted in 2011, not that that’ll help the retiree who mortgaged his house to pay Price.

I entered “fake literary agents” into Google, just to see what cropped up. One result was an article about the increasing number of literary scams in India, which was something new, so I read it with interest. Unfortunately, the advice it gave about how to avoid such scams was not very good.

Talk to them: All these agents have fancy websites and online profiles. However, a chat with them over the phone can be a revelation. It is very important to know about their intellectual level and the seriousness with which they are going to try and place your book.

Firstly, this may work with legitimate agencies in India. I can’t say how they operate. I really hope, though, that aspiring authors don’t try it with agencies in the States.

Secondly, it’s easy to say “talk to them”, but do writers know what kinds of questions to ask? If they’re inexperienced, scammers will find it easy to take them in. Anyone can make any kinds of promises over the phone, and some salespeople come off as very convincing.

Finally, “intellectual level”? An agent can have a PhD or be a member of Mensa, but this is irrelevant to the question of whether they’re experienced at selling books.

Talk to some of the authors these agents claim to have represented: A candid feedback from them can be invaluable.

Talking to authors is a step up from talking to agents, but again… what are the questions to ask?

“Hi, I was wondering if you’re happy with your agent.”

“Oh yes. I signed up with him last week and I couldn’t be more thrilled. He made my dream come true.”

This is certainly candid feedback, but it’s not going to help the first writer make an informed decision. Plus, some writers are honest about mistakes they’ve made and some aren’t. I know someone who signed with PublishAmerica because she asked two PA authors about their experiences—and they both provided glowing reports that failed to mention overpriced books, lack of availability, poor royalties and so on. New writers need better information than that, or at the very least, they need to know where to go to get such information if they want it.

This Is Nothing Like An Official FAQ – from Absolute Write’s Bewares and Background Checks forum.
Writer Beware.
Preditors and Editors
Publisher’s Lunch – a free ezine with the latest industry news and a weekly deal report. People who claim major publishers don’t sign unpublished writers have never seen one of these deal reports.

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