Mentor Monday--What's All This I Hear about Ebooks?

Ebooks are here, and if you're not aware of that fact, you'd better get your head out of the sand and start learning about them!

A good place to begin is at ereadable: ebooks made simple.

What does it all mean to you as a writer? Lots! Where before all you had to worry about was whether or not your audience could read, now you have to worry about what kind of devices your audience USES to read and how to manipulate your text and/or images to fit those devices. And then you have to figure out how to sell your ebook. Not even the big publishing houses have it all worked out, so you can't depend on them anymore! You may be on your own if you expect to make any money at all from your writing.

To get an idea of how complicated things are getting, check out this article by Anne Hill. Or visit eisforbook.com, a children's writers/illustrators' blog devoted to the topic of producing ebooks for kids.

If you're not already a member of the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators, it's probably time you joined. It's a whole new world out there and you're going to need help in navigating it! Check out this article on a recent announcement by Apple and you'll quickly realize you're going to need all the help you can get.

Finally, if you have zero experience with ebooks, I'd suggest visiting your local public library. I'd be very surprised if your local library didn't offer ebooks, either through a service such as Overdrive or 3M, or if they didn't have some preloaded ereaders available to check out, so that you can try out one before buying. It's probably time to visit your local library if you haven't been there in a while!

--Diane

One thing more: Here's a trailer for a newly released nonfiction ebook app: http://www.batsfurryfliers.com/bats/. I can definitely see the appeal! I just wonder how many families can afford an iPad for each kid?

Poetry Friday

The Snowman

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the Januay sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Wallace Stevens

Today's Poetry Friday is over at Hey, Jim Hill where you'll find more great poetry.

Hedy Lamarr: Not Just Another Pretty Face

‘On a recent evening, sitting home alone suffering and brooding about my treatment at the police station because of an incident in a department store, and being replaced by Zsa Zsa Gabor in a motion picture (imagine how that pleased the ego!) I figured out that I had made – and spent – some thirty million dollars. Yet earlier that day I had been unable to pay for a sandwich at Schwab’s drug-store.’

Thus begins the autobiography of Hedy Lamarr, Hollywood film actress and, unknown to most of the world, the woman who created the patent that would lead to cell phones, WiFi, and other wireless technology.

Unfortunately for Hedy, few people were interested in her brain power. All they cared about were her looks. As a teenager acting in Berlin, she was dubbed, ‘the most beautiful woman in Europe.’ During her reign as a Hollywood actress, she was known as ‘the most beautiful woman in the world.’ Hedy had a different take on it. "My face has been my misfortune . . . a mask I cannot remove. I must live with it. I curse it." Her words sound almost like lines from a B movie.

Hedy was born on November 9, 1913 in Vienna, in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Her real name was Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler. Her father was a banker, her mother was a pianist. Hedy studied piano and ballet, but it was her face that made her fortune. Even as a teen just starting out in film, she landed major roles, and then along came Ecstasy, a film in which she did some nude scenes and, using only her face, portrayed a woman having an orgasm so well, many people thought it was real. Hedy claimed it was simply her director ‘poking her in the bottom with a safety pin.’

That same year, at age 19, she married a 32 year old arms manufacturer, Friedrich Mandl, but marriage didn’t turn out the way she imagined. Friedrich kept her a virtual prisoner locked up in his castle. He put an end to her acting career, and bought up every copy of Ecstasy he could, to prevent others from seeing it. Hedy had little contact with the outside world. Her social life was curtailed to the lavish parties Friedrich threw, where she played the charming hostess to the likes of Hitler and Mussolini, and to being dragged to his business meetings where the talk was all about military technology.

Unknown to the men at those meetings, Hedy understood everything they talked about. While they may have imagined her to be nothing more than the pretty young thing Friedrich was obsessed with, she was sitting there listening and learning. Hedy was a high school dropout, but she hadn’t left school because it was too difficult. She had a natural talent for math and science and had always been a tinkerer. She left school to become production assistant to Max Reinhardt, a famous German director. It was quite an opportunity, especially for a teenager, although one has to wonder at Max’s motives. It was he who dubbed her the most beautiful woman in Europe.

Needless to say, Hedy wasn’t happy in her marriage. After five years of being squashed under Friedrich’s pressing thumb, she knew she had to get away. She disguised herself as a maid and slipped out of the castle. She made her way to Paris and got a divorce, then headed to London where she met Louis B. Mayer. He signed her up and changed her name, and her life as a Hollywood actress began.

In the summer of 1940, Hedy met her neighbor, George Antheil, a concert pianist turned film composer, who had been experimenting with the automated control of musical instruments. He was known for his Ballet Mecanique, a musical score in which multiple player pianos and xylophones were all synchronized to play at the same time. As they chatted, the conversation turned to the war and weapons, which Hedy knew a lot about, thanks to her controlling ex-husband, and before she knew it, they were talking radio controlled torpedoes, jamming, and frequency hopping.

Hedy went home and her and George’s conversation went with her. She couldn’t get it out of her head. After thinking about it for some time, she returned to George and told him about this idea she had about protecting radio controlled torpedoes. As it stood, all the enemy had to do to make a torpedo ineffectual was to jam the radio signal that operated it. And with only one signal being used, it was easy to find. But if multiple radio frequencies were used, the enemy would have a harder time finding the right frequency, which would make jamming much more difficult.

Together, they worked on Hedy’s idea and came up with a piano roll that changed between 88 different frequencies (the number of keys on a piano). They submitted their idea to the patent office in June, 1941 and received a patent for it (US patent 2,292,387) in August, 1942. They presented their idea to the Navy, but it was shot down. The Navy felt ‘it was too bulky and unreliable to use with a torpedo,’ even though Antheil told them it could be miniaturized to fit inside a watch.

"In our patent Hedy and I attempted to better elucidate our mechanism by explaining that certain parts of it worked like the fundamental mechanism of a player piano. Here, undoubtedly, we made our mistake. The reverend and brass-headed gentlemen in Washington who examined our invention read no further than the words "player piano."

"My god," I can see them saying, "We shall put a player piano in a torpedo."

Twenty two years later, after the patent had expired, the Navy used the idea during the Cuban Missile Crisis. In 1998, Wi-Lan Inc., an Ottowa wireless technology developer, ‘acquired a 49% claim to the patent from Lamarr (Antheil had died) for an undisclosed amount of stock.’ They didn’t have to give her anything. Her patent had expired. But they chose to do the ethical thing. Hedy and Antheil’s frequency hopping was an early form of spread spectrum communication technology, which brought us cell phones and WiFi.

After filing her patent, Hedy tried to join the National Inventors Council but was told she could do more by selling war bonds. They didn’t take her seriously because she was not only a woman, but a beautiful woman, and if a woman had any brains at all, they would have to be in the head of someone far less attractive. So Hedy went and sold war bonds, bringing in $7,000,000 at a single event. It’s said she sold kisses at $50,000 a smack.

Hedy continued on in her acting career and, in nine years, made eighteen movies. She married five times and had two children, and was twice arrested for shoplifting, once in 1966, after her career had fizzled, and again when she was 78 years old. It seems this multi-talented woman could not manage her own finances.

After her autobiography came out, (which may have been written because she needed the money. It came out a year after her first shoplifting incident) she sued her publisher, claiming her ghost writer had invented several anecdotes, including one that claimed she’d slept with a man in a brothel during her escape from Friedrich. She lost the case. On another occasion, she threatened to sue the producers of Blazing Saddles because Harvey Korman’s character, Hedley Lamarr , was constantly referred to as Hedy. They settled out of court. And in the mid ‘90's, she sued Corel, who had used a Corel-drawn image of her on their packaging. They, too, settled out of court.

In 1998, she was awarded the Electronic Frontier Foundation Award in recognition of her patent, to which she replied, "It’s about time," and in 2003, Boeing ran recruitment ads featuring her as a woman of science. They did not mention her acting career at all.

Hedy had gained instant fame at the age of 19 for being beautiful. She would be 84 before the world acknowledged her intelligence. She lived only two years after being recognized for her contribution to spread spectrum communication technology, and died of natural causes in her Florida home on January 19th, 2000. She was 86 years old.

Narrowing Your Focus in Nonfiction

One of the quickest ways to get overwhelmed when writing nonfiction is to try to cover a subject from top to bottom, especially when your word count is only 500 words or less. Let’s face it, you can’t include everything there is to know about pigs in a children’s magazine article or even a book. The subject is just too broad. In fact, most subjects are. And while you can certainly tackle a broad subject, keep in mind that the broader the focus, the less room you have to spend on any one idea. The result is generally either a big, fat book - the kind you don’t see very often in children’s publishing - or one that is merely a list of facts and general information that reads like an encyclopedia entry.

So if pigs are what you want to write about, consider what you already know. Well, they snort, have curly tails and make mighty fine bacon. While bacon is always a tasty topic, we probably don’t want to talk to kids about butchering pigs, and the other two choices are just meh. It’s time to do some research.

As you pore through everything you can find out about pigs, you perhaps learn they are intelligent animals, that they’re used in medical research, and they have a talent for sniffing out truffles. Consider the information you’ve gathered and choose a topic that interests you. If you decide on truffle hunting pigs, that’s your focus. Everything you write should relate to truffles and the pigs who sniff them out. No matter how much cool stuff you come across, if it isn’t about truffle hunting pigs, or can’t be slanted toward truffle hunting pigs, it doesn’t belong in the article. Save the info and put it aside for now.

If your choice was pigs in medical research, you may have to narrow your focus again. Find out what kind of research is done with pigs and choose one area. Maybe you’re interested in experiments on aging or cancer. Maybe it’s on the unethical use of pigs in experimentation. Again, pick the area that interests you most. If that area is still too broad, like cancer research, you may have to narrow your focus once more to a particular kind of cancer. And if you find that something extraordinary came out of one particular experiment, you may want to narrow your focus yet again to just that one experiment.

A narrower focus will give you a more compelling, reader-friendly story every time. It allows the writer to concentrate on just one aspect of a topic instead of five or seven or ten. It allows you to give a topic some depth. Consider The History of Horse Racing vs Seabiscuit, or How Medical Cures are Found vs Lorenzo’s Oil.

The narrower focus also allows readers to come away from the piece with an understanding of what truffles are and how pigs sniff them out, or how this one particular experiment saved millions of lives, whereas in a broader article, the reader may see just that one line - pigs are sometimes used to sniff out truffles, or experiments on pigs have saved many lives. If they want more information, they have to look elsewhere.

Another advantage of the narrow focus is that it can do much more for your writing career than writing broad. Let’s say you write that big fat book, All About Pigs. How long did it take you to research? How long did it take you to organize all that research? How long did it take to write that big fat book and sell it? And in the end, what do you have? One pay check and a dead topic. Now you have to go research something else, and by the time you finish that, the editor you worked with on the first book has moved on, or has no interest in your next topic.

Compare that to a narrowly focused book. Let’s say you write The Truffle Hunting Pig and the research, organization, and writing time takes just as long as the fat book. In the end, you have a book that’s easier to sell, and once you sell it, you can immediately pitch your editor - still there, still interested in pigs, and still remembering who you are - if she’d be interested in another pig book, this one on how a special pig saved millions of lives.

Another book, another paycheck.

And remember all that cool information you had but couldn’t use in the truffle book? It’s all fodder for future pig books. As long as you keep that narrow focus, you can write about pigs as long as you want to. You’ll end up with a nice backlist of books, (hopefully earning you some nice residual income,) and you’ll have carved out a niche for yourself by becoming the woman who writes about pigs, or strange moments in history, or volcanoes, or Hispanic musicians, or whatever it is that you like to write about. You become, in effect, an expert.

So if you’re considering writing nonfiction (and you should, because it’s easier to break into print in nonfiction than it is in fiction) forget about the big picture for awhile. Limit your perspective. Be specific. And think small.

Poetry Friday: The Chaos

A delight for those of us who love words, and anyone who has ever struggled with English spelling and pronunciation! This brilliant poem* was originally written by a Dutch teacher and amateur linguist, Gerard Nolst Trenité, as a part of his book Drop your foreign accent. The book went through eleven editions; the poem appeared as an appendix to the fourth edition and then continued to grow and change –you can easily imagine how new verses must have presented themselves to him once he’d gotten started on the project. There are apparently a number of regional variations as well and I suspect others may have contributed their own bits of inspiration to Trenité's original.

I’ll include just a couple of stanzas here to give you a taste of it.

Dearest creature in creation
Studying English pronunciation,
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse.

I will keep you, Susy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy;
Tearin eye, your dress you'll tear;
Queer,fair seer, hear my prayer.

Pray, console your loving poet,
Make my coat look new, dear, sew it!
Just compare heart, hear and heard,
Diesand diet, lord and word.

I hadn’t heard of this poem until someone started sharing iton Facebook a couple of weeks ago. In case you missed it there, here’s a link to the whole poem and detailed notes about its origins and the development of this particular version.

Libravox, bless them, offers multiple versions of the poem, a downloadable file of the entire book, and several audio files so you can enjoy different readers’ approaches to the poem. Great fun.

*Purists will argue that this is not actually a poem, as it is devoid of any kind of metaphor or other imagery, and that a rhyme, no matter how clever, does not a poem make. Which is of course true, so The Chaos is perhaps better termed a brilliant exercise of doggerel. But then there is an argument about whether doggerel, done intentionally, is not a form of poetry?

Poetry Friday is being hosted this week at Wild Rose Reader.