Glenda Larke

If you want to be a writer, read this first.

It has just been pointed out to me that Harriet the Prolific is being gunned down big time over on the Amazon.com site. [see here]

It seems a group of disparate people have got together to disparage and shatter the “HK” myth (I kept reading that as Hong Kong which was a bit disconcerting.) They are posting their opinions on the comments section of the latest reviews done by the redoutable Harriet. She did, after all, post 44 reviews for March 11th which does seem, um, a little on the prolific side. And that’s not apparently unusual for her. Gives a new definition to speed reading, doesn’t it? As one of the commentators points out, it would take her a whole day just to pen the reviews – and that’s without reading the books.

Outsourcing (perhaps HK really does mean Hong Kong?) by publishers trying to boost sales seems to be the explanation put forward.

What does disconcert me a bit is that the commentators are extraordinarily vitriolic in their comments about the thousands of books “HK” is supposedly reviewing – they are all trash. I am not sure how they come to that amazing conclusion (unless they can do a Harriet and read tens of books a day). Perhaps it is merely the process of being read by Harriet that is sufficient to condemn a book as worthy only of being consigned to a third world loo?

I guess there are just too many supposedly literary types out there to whom the word “genre” implies “evilly bad”, and in this case it means science fiction, fantasy, vampires, thrillers, romances, chick lit, detective tales, erotica, police procedurals, media tie-ins, historical novels, family sagas, mysteries, comic novels – in fact everything from “An Irish Country Doctor” to “Speed Dating”. Harriet, after all, reads them all…

Quite obviously, there is no single Harriet Klausner doing all this. Which raises the question: who’s paying? Would any publisher bother? Why? Does a Harriet Klausner review carry such weight that it would boost sales? Are they kidding? (The average author reaction to any Amazon review, let alone Harriet’s, is that they make very little difference one way or another.)

There is one thing the commentators have got right, though. This shouldn’t happen.

This kind of “reviewing” is dishonest, it devalues all reader reviews and makes a mockery of the whole process. Every genuine reader reviewer out there should be up in arms – it insults them. The whole thing is unworthy of Amazon or anyone else involved.

{My theory, btw, is that there was once a real Harriet Klausner…}

Ok, I have spent four days on this darn synopsis, (actually for a quartet rather than a trilogy). Which is ridiculous. I can write 5,000 words on a good day, and it has taken me four days to write a summary of just over 2500 words? I am now trimming it down…aargh. This has got to be harder than writing 25,000 words.

Here’s a few hints for any other poor sod who has to do this.

Firstly, if you are writing a synopsis, you have probably already got the interest of an agent/publisher. So you don’t have to worry too much about a startling grab-me hook. You have to do two things instead: make the whole story sound interesting and show the publisher/agent that you know where you are going with it. (Your ability to write good English is a given, right?)

Secondly, do NOT think that you are going to hold back the ending because “I want the editor to be knocked endwise by the twist when s/he reads the book”. A synopsis is just that: it tells the person reading it the story, in summary, and that includes the ending.

Thirdly, the problem peculiar to fantasy is that none of the fantastical bits are going to make too much sense in summary. “But the Redduner left his zigger cage on the pede…” may be a crucial incident in the tale, but it is going to mean absolutely nothing to anyone out of context. Worse, it all sounds a bit stupid. So how to get around this? In the actual book there’s a slow unfolding of how the magic works and what it does; in a synopsis you have to explain very briefly, and NOT show.

So what I do is start the synopsis with a few paragraphs under a subtitle of “The World” or “The Land” or something similar, where I describe briefly what makes this world unique and how its magic works. I end this section with a bit on the trilogy’s themes (nothing too heavy handed though. I’m a storyteller first.) And I hope to make this section really interesting because I suspect it will do more to sell the books than the truncated version of the story that follows – although that will now make sense, at least.

Fourthly, I deal with each book separately. I turf out all the minor characters and try to sketch in the bare outlines of the story, enough to be coherent, not enough to muddle. You can’t do much to show your skill with characterization, but I feel it pays to put a bit in about a couple of the most important characters. Here’s how I describe the villain of the piece: …a cold-eyed pede rider named Shanim, known for his unquestioning loyalty to Devin and his indifference to suffering, either his own or anyone else’s.

Anyway, I can tell you one good thing that came out of this exercise. I know exactly how Book 4 is going to end now. I always knew what I wanted to achieve by the end – that is, I knew the state of the world and the position of the characters at the end of the quartet – but I couldn’t quite get a handle on the climactic ending that was going to get me there, [what Russell Kirkpatrick calls “a typical Larke climax” of cataclysmic instability a la “Gilfeather”, “The Tainted”, “Havenstar” and “Song of the Shiver Barrens”].

Now I have it, and it’s a beaut.

I hate writing synopsis, but they sure do help to get your thinking straight. I am on top of the world tonight – hey, this quartet is gonna be good.

Photo: Sebatik Island, Sabah.

I stood at the foot of the lighthouse and looked out across the Straits of Malacca. One can see Indonesia on a fine day, someone said. Not that day: in the distance the horizon blurred into sea haze, and hence to sky.

Far below me, a steep tree-clad slope tumbled into water and a coral reef. Every so often a turtle would surface for air and then drop away into murky depths.

We were waiting. And waiting. Bored with the sea watch, most of us looked at other birds in the surrounding remnant forest – resident sea-eagles, scarlet minivets, tiny falconets, dollarbirds doing their aerial dance that earned them their other name: rollers.

And then someone said those magic words: ‘There’s one!”

It took me a while to see it – a speck against the water far below. Flapping, flapping, flapping. Growing larger by the minute. And then another behind it, and another. A line of birds approaching like the straggling vanguard of an army worn out by battle. And we were looking down on them, not up.

And battling they have been, trying to power their bodies across water, when they are built for grace, for gliding on the thermals and the rising air of a land mass.

The first bird is panting, its beak open in the heat. Then he stops the laborious beating of his wings and the uplift of warmed air from the cape catches him gently and lifts him. He tilts, and banks over us in lazy circles. Can I see relief in that glinting eye as he passes me? What does he think to see us there, watching him with our binoculars and telescopes, recording his passing with a pencil stroke in our notebooks, or a click of our counters?

He is not home yet; he has just come from Indonesia and is bound for Japan or northern China, or Russia maybe. His journey is 10,000 kilometres long and he has another couple of months to go, back to the place where he was born. He might be shot at, trapped, blown off course, drowned in the sea. Or he might nest and raise young and be back this way again in October.

My eyes fill with tears. He is magnificent, somehow noble in his thoughtless instinctive dedication to return to his birth place. He is symbolic of all that is right with the world, and symbol of all that could go wrong.

It was my first raptor watch, twenty-five years ago.

This year I won’t be there. And I am saddened.
If you live in Peninsular Malaysia or Singapore, then you should be in Melaka this weekend, at Tanjung Tuan, at the edge of the beach in the Ilham Resort grounds. You should be there to watch this. Even if conditions are poor for arriving raptors – and that does happen – there are a ton of things for you to see with your whole family, including grandma who can sit under the trees (and see the raptors too when they pass overhead). There are competitions for kids, and talks, and telescopes to look through, guided walks to go on, something for everyone and most of it is totally free or available for a ringgit or two. If you aren’t there, what the hell’s the matter with you?

For more information, look here: www.mns.org.my

All photos supplied by the generosity of Malaysian Nature Society members.

Criminals in Baghdad have just blown up the book market. They killed a lot of books as well as people.

Some people fear knowledge. They know it sets people free. They know it enables us to make up our own minds, instead of swallowing their hate and bigotry unquestioned.

A few brainless librarians in the USA ban kids’ books that contain the word “scrotum”;
Nazis burned books;
Communists banned just about anything that looked interesting (in the hope that brains would die of terminal boredom?);
Right-wing Christian nuts stop their kids from reading about wizards;
The Malaysian government censors ban anything that looks iffy to their literary-challenged minds.

In Bagdad they blow up books. The only difference is the matter of degree. Loss of stimulation that prompts the ability to think for oneself on the one hand, loss of life as well as the books on the other. It is all tragic. It is all a step backwards.

Some people cannot see that a closed mind has no value, and certainly no virtue. How can there be virtue if you have never seen an alternative? Never been allowed to think for yourself?

Savoir c’est pourvoir

Before and after pix pinched from the Malay Mail newspaper via Bibliobibuli