Zen Master: Blog

Imagine that you are driving to your local Ford dealer to buy a new car. On the way, you see a billboard that shows your chosen model. Unfortunately, it has a mis-spelled word. Would you buy a Ford Fucus?

No. They are advertising incompetence. If they can't even spell the name of their own car right, what else did they get wrong? You know that it wasn't the factory's fault, that was an advertising wage-slave that did that, not the workers in the factory, but the mistake made it all the way to the billboard.

It shows a serious lack of care about integrity, getting everything right before their name goes on it, at the corporate level. The marketing people, the advertising people, all the people who paid for the ad and all the people who set it up, none of them cared enough to check that the work was correct. With that level of 'care' at the decision-making level, you know that no one is checking the actual car, either.

Nope, I ain't buyin' that! Instead, you turn around and go to the Chevy dealer to see what they have, right?

Here on SOL, the author chooses the title. The author chooses the 'teaser', or the text that is displayed that describes what he or she wants the reader to know about their work. He is advertising his work just as much as any corporate executive does. His customers pay in time spent reading their work. There are a lot of people writing stories here. Readers have to pick and choose what they want to read. They choose based upon what they see first, the title and the teaser.

For God's sake, at least get the title right! A couple of years ago, I saw one story here on SOL with a screwed-up name in the title. I opened it up just to see....Nope, the character is named something else. The author mis-spelled the name in the title! Who would have read my last story if I'd titled it "Jasen's Tale?"

Then, the teaser. Just a couple of sentences. Take the time to make sure they make sense. They should draw the reader in, not repel him.

What Tony Tiger is trying to tell another author is that if the author can't even be arsed to get the TITLE right and the TEASER right, the two things that a prospective reader will see first before downloading or opening anything, you know what quality of work went into the actual story.

Nope, not buying that Ford Fucus. I'll go to another car lot and see what they have.

-ZM

I seem to be...caught up on my proofreading? That can't be right! I'm ALWAYS behind on my proofreading! I've missed something here. So, whose work am I behind on? I think I'm organized, but I can't find it.

-ZM

(expanded a little from an email)

This year is the 2500th anniversary of the twin battles of Thermopylae and Salamis. The first Persian invasion of Europe ended at Marathon. After several years of preparation, Darius' son Xerxes tried again with an army that some historians have claimed had more than a million soldiers. That number is absurd, but it is telling that the Persians never needed 10 years to prepare for any of their other conquests.

Thermopylae was a classic pass defense and the defenders held until the attackers got around them to attack from both ends of the pass. Eventually, the Persians crushed the defenders and moved through the pass into Greece.

If that was the end of the story, no one today would know about Thermopylae. The men who died showing the biggest empire in the world how much it would cost to add Greece to that empire would be forgotten, because imperial rulers don't care about peon casualties, and there would have been no Greek cities to write about theirs.

Xerxes went about systematically destroying Greek cities that had defied him. One month later, however, the complete loss of his fleet at Salamis ended any chance of resupply or reinforcements.

Xerxes took a look at the map, compared his casualties against the Greek casualties, thought about losing more than 20,000 of his personal guard, the "Immortals", who were his best soldiers just to take a single stupid mountain pass and only getting less than a thousand of the defenders in return, thought about how many more mountain passes there were all over Greece, thought about all the rebellions all over his empire that would only get worse the longer he stayed stuck in the quicksand, and grabbed half of his remaining army and went home.

The half that stayed in Greece was wiped out during the winter. The Greeks ensured that they kept naval superiority to prevent another Persian invasion, and went back to squabbling among themselves. No Asian army ever crossed the Dardanelles again until the Turks finally took Constantinople in the 1400s and started thinking about Europe. They took Greece and held it for four hundred years, but they couldn't get much further into Europe. Greece's children felt the same way about empires.

As I'm sure all of you read about in my masterpiece "...In The Shade", the Greek survival of Persia's massive second invasion meant that, for the rest of the world's history, the Eurasian land mass has been divided between Western Civilization, with small nations which counted people as more important than the government, and Eastern Civilization, with huge empires which counted the government as more important than the people.

If you value your freedom, if you value even just the CONCEPT of individual freedom embedded at the heart of Western Civilization, thank the Spartans at Thermopylae and the Athenians at Salamis.

-ZM

You know that short story "Ending This Mess"? Well, it's just a scene from a novel. Granted, the scene came first, but I was also supposed to write up a more detailed version of an outline that Frostfire wrote (as notes from a conference, more on that later), so the two sorta merged into a novel. A novel I had absolutely no intention of writing, but I had that scene and I had that commission, and the damn things kept growing...
Anyway, the novel has been sitting for a couple of years now. I'm not happy with it but it was supposed to establish a bunch of "Swarm Cycle" canon, so I have to publish it. Problem is, all of my usual proofreaders have already seen it. If I have added new mistakes messing with it, they won't catch them. They already know what's supposed to be there and they won't see the typos.
So, I need some new eyes to look over "Ending This Mess" before I post it. Please note that I would need an internet email address to send a file to.

-ZM

I've been out of town for a couple of months and "Jason's Tale" has been posted right on schedule, three times a week, the whole time. LJ's automated posting system worked pretty darn good! However, one chapter got left out. I'm sure it was my fault. It is now fixed, and the rest of the story will be posted on schedule next week. Thanks to all of you for all the kind words and votes!

-ZM