Author name: Booksquare

Dissecting the publishing industry with love and skepticism.

Hubris Meets The Critics

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How good, how experienced a writer do you need to be before you are able to judge your work with a casual reader’s dispassion? Do you, the author, have such incredible skill and judgment that you can say, absolutely, that every word, every sentence, every plot line is exactly right? The New York Times takes a look at Anne Rice’s, well, misjudgment when it came to responding to negative reviews on Amazon. Here’s a hint: if readers don’t like your work, that’s an opinion. Our analysis is that Rice missed the mark on this book. We do not believe that […]

Square Pegs, Tools and Craft

But Whose Story Is It?

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Writing is weird — you get into a story and sometimes it takes a life of its own. To non-writers, it seems the author has full control: you are, after all, putting the words down on paper. It’s your imagination. You can shape the text however you wish. But, if you’re a writer — and when this happens for the first time, it’s often a surprise — the unexpected, unplanned, unwanted happens. In the end, whatever the flaws or missteps, the story is the story. In fiction, it is hard to weigh the real world (such as it is) against

Books/Mags/Blogs

It’s The Lists, Baby, It’s The Lists

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The Literary Saloon gets appropriately snarky about the tangle of dates surrounding book releases (do not put out for customers to buy before the sun hits its peak the day of release under penalty of death and all that) and an attempt to clear up matters that will surely make things worse. Any time an industry needs an initiative to clear up the simple matter of A versus B, there will be more paperwork and confusion. Of this we can assure you. We have to agree that the concept of embargoing a title is antiquated. How often does a line

Square Pegs

Speaking of Booze-Filled Events

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Sarah (and of course we’re not implying anything) has survived Bouchercon and reports on the various awards, well, awarded. For details on The Barry Awards, The Macavity Awards, Shamus Awards, Hammett Award, and Anthony Awards…seriously, how did she find time to report on all this…visit Idiosyncratic Mind. Awards, awards, awards

Square Pegs

Soon To Be a Major Motion Picture

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Or maybe a television series. We can see it now: the wacky adventures of a sane man at a book fair. Our hapless hero tries to fight the good fight (which will have be worked out in story meetings) while resisting the urge to bring literature down a notch: If The French Suite suggests that nothing works better than literary Sturm und Drang , plenty of Frankfurt’s habitues are happy to enthuse about slightly more ephemeral projects. In addition to the aforementioned vogue for books about war, pestilence and not eating crisps, for example, there is an alleged boom in

Square Pegs

On Networking

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Here, it is still socially acceptable to smoke cigars, and pretty much de rigueur to get ragingly drunk. Told that all this was a central part of the Frankfurt experience, I sheepishly give it a go: after six glasses of wine, I have half-convinced a French publisher that the time is right for a Gallic-flavoured biography of Pink Floyd, and managed to get myself pencilled in for dinner in London with PJ O’Rourke. You read it here first

Quote of the Week

In The Beginning

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Not to brag or anything, but we rarely have trouble beginning a new novel (we are cursed in that we get bogged down in the middle and end). Our process is generally to collect a bunch of unconnected things (many of which grow up to become full-fledged scenes; an equal number become exercise for the delete key), and then wait until the perfect first line or scene pops into our head. Once this happens, we are writing. We like to think we are good at this. That’s not to say we stick with our original concept come hell or high

Tools and Craft

When Words Come Rushing, Why Do We Build Dams?

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While it’s rare that we point to the same article twice (except when it’s not rare), Elissa Schappell’s review of the new Nora Roberts book raises a question in our mind: what’s so bad about being prolific? Schappell’s review starts with: More than 150 novels by Nora Roberts have been published in the last 23 years. In 2004 alone, this one-woman romantic-suspense-novel mill will crank out half a dozen…All this is enough to make Anthony Trollope, with a paltry 47 novels, and Joyce Carol Oates, still plugging away with over 50 works of fiction, seem like mere plodders. If we

Tools and Craft

Hearts, Flowers, Hunks

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Jill thought it would be fun to attend the Romantic Times convention and drag us along. Apparently she can’t get enough of our sarcasm in real life. We suspect, without any real evidence, that said convention would bring out the worst of our cynicsm. Jill has a warped sense of humor; we suspect she hasn’t given up the idea as much as she’s waiting for the next perfect moment to spring her plan. For years, we’ve read about this convention. It sounds, frankly, awful. Perhaps you have to be there, but the descriptions make the whole experience sound like every

Books/Mags/Blogs

It Is Our Biggest Fear

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When one leads a rich and full fantasy life, it is inevitable that you imagine yourself in all sorts of dire situations. Or rather you imagine you, the character, in those dire situations. You wonder what would happen if you suddenly became very ill, getting lost in the grand detail, the feeling, the scent of antiseptic. We can imagine just about anything, have imagined just abouto anything — except blindness. That, to us, is the no-go zone. We cannot imagine life without reading. We cannot imagine life without writing, yet we don’t seem to panic over the loss of our

Square Pegs
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