Timothy's Thoughts

J anet Reid writes concerning a query that had been sent her, “What would make me think I was wrong is if you mention you're a touring musician. The value of a writer's bio in a query letter is for just these moments. As I'm reading along, and I think, "oh this isn't how that stuff works" and then I see you're actually in that industry, I'd give you the benefit of the doubt.” ( Query 161 ) It’s usually pretty obvious when a writer has been in the industry he is writing about. One the good side, such a writer gets things right. You don’t have unbelievable things happening. On the other side, such a writer puts to much emphasis on things that aren’t important to the story. It is usually hard to read a medical story written by a medical doctor, for instance. The average reader probably doesn’t care about the details of a patient’s treatment and doesn’t care what kind of drug was used. All the reader cares to know is that the doctor either knows what he is...

W hat are the dangers of putting too much information about yourself online? I don’t mean unprotected credit card information and stuff like that; I mean stuff like what you might put on a networking site. I saw a novel the other day that dealt with this topic. Apparently, the victim had been involved with a networking site and the killer found her through that site. Now the victim’s sister is trying to bait the killer through the same site so that she can catch him. I think the risk here is in implying that by not participating in such a site people can protect themselves from would be killers and rapists. The fact is that the online community is just an extension of the public community in which we live. Unless we hide ourselves away like monks, we are putting ourselves at risk no matter what we do. There was a woman in our area who had taken her kids to the park and as she watched them playing a man came up behind her and stabbed her, paralyzing her. While he must have had a motive,...

C onsider this as a followup to my post on booksignings from the other day. I didn't do the video, but it seems realistic.

A song writer did a video to explain a song he had written. It was a product of him losing a friend to death. In the video he was talking as he looked through a notebook he used to write lyrics and he said that after seven years it was still hard to look at what he had written there. He teared up as he spoke and it was easy to see that these tears weren’t fake. It got me to thinking about art in general. He is a singer/songwriter, but there is carry over in all forms of art. The thing I thought about was that as artists, whether we be songwriters, or novelists or painters, our art should be a product of our strongest emotions. There are times when we’re just writing to be writing, maybe to pay the bills or to communicate, but our best writing comes from strong emotion. We should feel so strongly about the subject that we take it personal when someone disagrees with us. When someone asks us about it, we should be able to talk for several minutes, if not hours about the subject.

I keep saying that I’m not going to review any more books unless I really like them. I’m compromising today by reviewing Rooms by James L. Rubart because I mentioned it in a previous post, saying that I intended to read it to see if there was any truth to the reviews showing up on Amazon.com as a result of people who read the free version. In a word, this book is weird . It is about the owner of a software company who inherits a house on the beach. The house is modeled after the man’s heart. We later discover that the house is demon possessed, so perhaps that means the man is also demon possessed, but that isn’t made clear in the book. In any case, the more attached the man gets to his life at the house on the beach the more he loses of his previous life. People who were once a big part of his life become as if they had never met him. He has memories of these things, but they don’t. I might as well tell you that it’s a case of deus ex machina all over the place. I found the book par...

B ook signings are on of those things that authors are supposed to do. One of the notions is that by doing book signings an author will sell more books. I’m not sure where this notion came from, but the evidence doesn’t appear to support that. Stick an unknown author behind a table at a bookstore and he might sell one or two books that he wouldn’t have otherwise sold. Follow the advice of some people for the author to go around the store begging people to buy his book and he might sell more, but he probably won’t get many repeat customers. As a reader, I’ve attended a few book signings. Dan Quayle showed up on campus one time when I was in college. I paid for his book and stood in line with hundreds of other people waiting for him to sign their books. I then went and listened to him speak. I’ve also gone to book signings to support fellow authors. What I have never done is purchase a book by an author I didn’t know because the author was having a book signing. So let’s get one thing cl...

A s I was driving to work the other day I saw a city bus. The lights were on inside so I could see all of the seats. They were all empty. But there was the driver, following the route, not knowing whether there would be someone at the next stop or not. I wondered how he feels about that. Does he feel like he is wasting his time? Sure, he gets paid, but what’s the point? It made me thing of writers. Most writers have very few readers and it make you wonder what’s the point? There’s no money in it, so the bus driver has one up on us, but we keep on writing. I suppose we do that because we hope that it will turn into something great and sell a bunch of copies, just like the bus driver hopes that someone will get on the bus at the next stop. But see, the bus driver’s job isn’t to drive people from stop to stop as much as it is to provide the opportunity for people to ride the bus. If the driver quit because no one was on the bus then people wouldn’t be able to make the choice one day to le...