Sharp Words

All statistics correct to the time of posting this – further hits and comments on December 31st not included.

Posts made: 170 (including this one)

Most popular posts:

1. A love poem for St Valentine’s Day (Feb 14th) – 1009 – most of these hits came from StumbleUpon although quite a few searches pick it up too
2. Review: The Book Thief by Markus Zusak (May 15th) – 878 – most of these hits came from searches
3. Word of the Day (06/08/08) – 600 – most of these hits came from StumbleUpon, I suspect – it was an odd post to have stumbled (the word of the day being feuilleton), but there’s no accounting for taste

Comments posted: 678 (not including any on this post)
Spam comments: nearly 15,000

Top commenters:

1. Ken Armstrong – 74
2. Susan – 69
3. A. & Fiendish – both with 23

Most commented posts:

1. Aaargh, the horror… (July 25th) – 17 – the hideousness of a hairdresser’s salon name
2. Thoughts about reviewing books (July 6th) – 16
3. I wrote this poem: Childhood Colours (May 24th) – 14

Books read: 200 + 15 re-reads
120 (60%) were first-time reads; 87 (43.5%) were borrowed from the library or friends, 13 (6.5%) BookMooched, 19 (9.5%) bought and 7 (3.5%) were free review copies.

Book reviews written: 17

Favourite new book: The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway

Technical Writing posts made: 18

Poems posted: 10

Guest posts: 5

My own favourite posts:

1. 4×4 inspirations for writing (April 3rd)
2. I wrote this poem: Holes in the World (April 14th)
3. Do dreams influence your writing? (June 8th)

Top 10 search terms used to find this blog:

• sharp words (sharp word and other words for sharp are both in the top 10)
• lorna freeman (shame I’ve never actually written anything about her novels except mentioning them in passing)
• the book thief (there are 3 other variations on this in the top 10)
• misread words
• 100 books to read

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8 out of 10

This is a novel I felt a bit odd about reading, because it’s written by someone I have actually met – and I mean on a personal level, not the sort of ‘meeting’ that I’ve managed when getting Neil Gaiman to sign books, for example. No, T A Moore and I hung out at NaNoWriMo meetings in Belfast a few years ago (in fact, she was instrumental in getting us a location that year), and I was both hideously jealous and insanely pleased when I found out this year that she’d actually been published. Plus, she knows I’m doing this review, which always adds extra spice, sort of, to reading a novel.

Anyway, The Even is her first published novel, and though it’s pretty short, it could never be called sweet. It’s a tale of mystery and treachery and timeless feuds between gods and demons and fantastic creatures, set in the eponymous city of the Even. This is a place with very dark undercurrents indeed, ruled (more or less) by the demon Yekum. He has a countless number of offspring, all cursed never to touch the ground.

The protagonist is Faceless Lenith, an Etruscan death goddess who got bored of hanging around in the world of the dead. (Really. She has no face, just blank skin. It’s creepy.) She’s willing to visit her old home though, to pay off a (very large) gambling debt by ‘rescuing’ one of the Yekumi who was condemned as a traitor and stripped of his name and his wings.

The identity of who has hired Lenith is a mystery, and she is initially more interested in getting her debt paid off than finding out who wants the Yekumi rescued. However, after Lenith has overcome various obstacles to find the Yekumi and bring him back to the Even, her troubles are definitely not over as she finds herself embroiled in a plot that could destroy the city.

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9 out of 10

Marisha Pessl’s debut novel, published in 2006, is the intriguing story of high school student Blue, and of the events surrounding her discovery of her teacher’s apparent suicide. The blurb on the cover gave nods to Donna Tartt’s A Secret History and Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides, and although I’m always fairly skeptical of this kind of praise in cover-blurbs, I found myself able to recognise the similarities – and to see the way in which this novel surpasses both in story and complexity.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics initially seems the story of a high-school loner – Blue Van Meer, marked out by her intelligence and the fact that she has spent most of her life on the move. Following the death of Blue’s butterfly-collecting mother in a car accident when Blue was in kindergarten, her father Gareth – a professor of political science – has moved them relentlessly around the United States, each semester spent teaching at a different university. For Blue’s final year in high school, however, they take root in North Carolina, and Blue starts (for the umpteenth time) at a new school, St Gallway.

They are welcomed to the town by one of the teachers at Blue’s school, Hannah Schneider (a name that Blue feels fits the beautiful and enigmatic woman not at all). Blue is drawn by her into a clique of students, each with their own quirks and ambitions, and the way Blue slowly becomes part of the group is very reminiscent of A Secret History. Tragedy strikes in the spring of Blue’s senior year though, when Hannah is found dead. And as Blue tries to find out more about Hannah’s death, her own life slowly unravels in completely unexpected ways as she discovers secrets about her own family.

I suspect Marisha Pessl’s writing style isn’t to everyone’s tastes, but I really enjoyed the way she gave Blue a very distinctive voice. By turns pedantic, whimsical, literary, imaginative and matter-of-fact, Blue tells her story from the vantage point of a year later, but cleverly in such a way that the story’s main twists aren’t given away in the slightest (as can often happen with this style of writing). I can imagine a lot of people getting annoyed with the way Blue gives author and publishing references for books mentioned, but I found it very much in keeping with her character – as was the way ‘visual aids’ (line drawings) are included throughout the text.

Blue and her writer use lots of metaphors and similes and lush descriptions, and employ a lot of nouns as verbs (and possibly vice versa), and again, this style isn’t for everyone. But combined with a very intriguing story that just kept developing in complexity and mystery, it really worked for me.

There are lots of things in this novel to keep the reader guessing – not least the title, which isn’t an obvious one. Nor are the chapter headings of famous literary works, and figuring out how they relate to the content of each chapter is a definite challenge. In some ways, Marisha Pessl could be called over-ambitious with the style and characterisation in this novel. But I really enjoyed it, and I look forward to reading it again with foreknowledge of its twists and turns.

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As discussed in previous posts, technical documents typically go through several draft phases. A first draft is often incomplete, and it can take a few more drafts and review cycles before a document is ready to go out to its intended reader (and can be classed as a ‘deliverable’).

But how can you stop well-meaning support agents and sales people getting hold of a draft and passing it on to the customer? How can you stop unfinished documents being published to your website with glaring errors and ‘TO DO’ markers?

Well, you can’t always prevent your drafts getting out into the wider world. But you can minimise the damage.

1. Use a watermark or header/footer to mark your documents as DRAFT. Having that stamped on every page makes it very clear that the document is not complete.
2. Enforce source control and don’t let people have access to unfinished documents if there is no reason for them to have! Of course, this isn’t always possible; and if there’s no central control (you!) to make sure that everything that goes out is fully complete and wholly accurate, then that just makes preventing disasters twice as hard.
3. So… Encourage disclaimers – if you don’t have control over what goes out publicly, then at least make sure that any colleagues who may send documents out know to do so with a disclaimer that the document isn’t finished.
   Have a disclaimer added to the front page of any draft documents too, as belt and braces!

If draft documents are regularly given out to customers (with or without your say-so), then it might be worth having an ‘early adopter’ scheme. Create a ’special’ draft (perhaps when your document is 90% complete or just one or two reviews away from being signed off) which can be given to customers by support and sales staff. Call it a beta release of the document, if you like, in line with software naming!
One advantage of this method is that you instantly get an extra set of reviewers – and importantly, they are the type of people who the document is aimed at, which means that you get exactly the right sort of readability review that many tech writers can only dream of…

PS: Thanks to Andrew for the topic suggestion. Other suggestions for topics in this series are very welcome! I’m up for covering general issues like this, or for writing more specific how-to articles. Or anything related to technical writing, really!

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If you have any questions or comments about this article, or any suggestions for future posts, please comment on this post or email me via my contact form.
Technical Writing Tuesdays: index of posts

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Melissa Donovan at Writing Forward featured this meme quite a long while ago in blogging terms. And like so much other material, I’ve been saving it till I have some spare time.

What was the last book you bought?
Apart from a few for Christmas presents that I can’t mention (well, OK, they include Maeve Binchy’s Heart and Soul for my Mum – and she knows she’s getting it), I bought the first 3 Walker Papers books by C. E. Murphy for a friend’s birthday – and have been getting to read them myself. (Ahem.)
The last books I actually bought for myself were second-hand copies of Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy; read my review.

Name a book you have read MORE than once
Have you got all day? I own several hundred books, almost all of which I have read more than once.
Particular favourites that get pulled off the shelves at least every other year are Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels, Lindsey Davis’s Falco novels, and everything by Sheri S Tepper.

Has a book ever fundamentally changed the way you see life? If yes, what was it?
If I was being flippant, I could say that the first book to change my life was Forever by Judy Blume, as communally read at the back of my maths clothes when I was 12. It certainly changed my outlook on certain things!
I don’t know if I could pick one book though. There are many that have challenged the way I think; most were in my teens, naturally enough, but I’d like to hope that others can and will still sometimes have that effect.

How do you choose a book – e.g. by cover design and summary, recommendations or reviews
All of the above. Recommendations and reviews are important; if I’m loitering in a bookshop or the library, then a title is actually the first thing I go for if the author is unfamiliar; then I’ll go by the cover summary. Design doesn’t sway me so much.

Do you prefer Fiction or Non-Fiction?
Fiction for pleasure, non-fiction for research.

What’s more important in a novel – beautiful writing or a gripping plot?
If it has a gripping plot, I can forgive a certain amount of ugly writing; I do like beautiful writing (and that’s a very subjective thing), but even if it’s the most beautiful writing ever, I do like to have at least some plot.

Most loved/memorable character (character/book)
Don’t laugh, but it’s probably George from Enid Blyton’s Famous Five books. She was the first character I can remember wanting to be – the tomboy, not soppy Anne who always did the washing-up.

Which book or books can be found on your nightstand at the moment?
I don’t have books /on/ the nightstand, they’re on the floor. But aside from anything else, this questions presupposes that
a) I maybe read more than one book at a time (very rarely)
b) I put books away after I’ve read them (I tend to have a blitz clear-up once a month or so)
So the books lying by my bed are the ones that I’ve read in the past month (or two), not the one I’m currently reading; that one tends to be toted round the house (and to work if I’m getting the bus) so that I can read a few pages whenever I’m sat down or otherwise unoccupied for a moment or two.
Oddly enough, I am reading two books at the moment:
- a re-read of Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl, which I want to review and is due back in the library in a few days
- The Companions by Sheri S Tepper (as per her mention above)

What was the last book you’ve read, and when was it?
The last book I finished was Thunderbird Falls by C. E. Murphy (also as mentioned previously); that was last Wednesday evening. Took me two evenings to read – it would have been one, but I had too much else to do.

Have you ever given up on a book half way in?
Just a few, as I tend to only pick up things that interest me – and an awful lot of things interest me. Notably, I gave up on Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist and Patrick Suskind’s Perfume, both of which bored me after a few chapters.

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Let’s face it, we’ve all seen apostrophes abused in horrible ways. (And no, Susan, I’m not referring to the time you stole one.)

But this sign in my local chippie (aimed at the schoolkids who swarm there at lunchtimes) set my mind wandering:

HAND’S OFF WINDOW’S PLEASE

Which of these might be a valid interpretation?

• the off window of hand is please (if it weren’t for the last word being please instead of pleasing, that sentence might almost make sense)
• hand is off the please which belongs to window

Anyone got any other suggestions? (I didn’t manage to figure out any more before my chips were ready.)

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