From: mdhangton@gmail.com
On Friday, January 30, 2015 at 2:18:29 PM UTC-5, A. Tina Hall wrote:
> wrote:
> > A. Tina Hall used his keyboard to write :
> >> William Vetter wrote:
>
> >>> Some time ago, I read one of those books...
> >>
> >> Maybe it'd be better you didn't. ;P
> >>
> >> You could get so cramped up with the supposed wisdom in those books,
> >> you could not ever get to write anything.
> >>
> > I usually have one around. I read them while I sit on the crapper.
> > No worries.
>
> Hehe.
>
> I would think some of those books would be better used as low-quality
> toilet paper (if you only have an outhouse, no water toilet; I wouldn't
> want the paper to clog the pipe).
>
> >>> this one was about openings. It's thesis was the belief that it is
> >>> possible to write an opening so strong, that editors, literary
> >>> agents, readers, publishing executives are compelled to read on.
> >>
> >> Did they provide proof, or was that just their wishful thinking? :)
>
> > I have read a lot of them, and they blur together. It may have been
> > _Hooked_, by Les Eggerton.
>
> I'm not going anywhere near that. :)
>
> Thing is, do you blindly swallow what they say, or do you expect them to
> build up some credibility and expect them to back up what they say?
>
I'm sorry, I just noticed that you replied. I've been having problems with
Verizon, no service at home for about 4 weeks.
I hope he's gonna say something that seems reasonable. There were cameo
2-paragraph inserted quotes from some publishing editors...a couple were SF
line names I recognized. One of them said she looks for gender, age, position
in society of POV
character in first paragraph. That seemed to make sense. I take it seriously
when it seems credible.
I read a book by a business consultant a long time ago. He said that business
seminar guys only push one idea, and that was a sales aspect. You could tell
he was talking about himself (his idea was to analyze all interactions in the
office as people's
hindbrains battling primitively with other person's hindbrains). So when I
see one of these books that hammers away at one notion, it makes me feel like
author is selling himself.
> >>> One of the examples mentioned the assassination of JFK in the first
> >>> sentence. Author claimed that this made it so interesting that
> >>> people MUST read it.
> >>
> >> To me that'd signal "oh, real world, not what I want to read".
>
> > OK, let us say the first sentence mentioned elves. Why shouldn't
> > you read LoTR instead?
>
> I dropped LotR on page 70 (or so), bored. No character in sight that I
> wanted to read about, and the writing style was awkward.
It is what it is, but it was kinda the first of what it was.
You know, I tried to read _The Life and Times of Tristam Shandy, A Gentleman_,
once, and I didn't know what it was supposed to be, and I said, "This is page
fifty, and this author is still talking about the circumstances of the POV
character's conception!
" so I stopped there.
>
> I only started _that_ book because someone told me about it and praised
> it much. I'd read the appendix first, which was interesting.
>
> If there's elves, I'd still want to know what, why, when, who, before
> I'm interested. Elves alone would't grab me.
>
> >>> What I thought was that, "There are a lot of books about JFK. Why
> >>> should I read this one?"
> >>
> >> That's another reaction that proves the author wrong. Why believe
> >> anything else they claimed?
>
> > I've had a different relationship with my teachers than most. When
> > you become a world expert in your specialty, then there are very few
> > people who know much relative to you. You don't rely on them for
> > truth, you absorb the technical language they use (which they often
> > half-understand), then go to the library. You expect venality, not
> > truth.
>
> Eh, no, I expect truth, claimes backed up, and if they are caught at an
> obvious falsehood, all credibility is gone.
>
> Plus, you're not a world expert in the speciality of writing.
That's true, I'm not. I shall tell you a story to illustrate what I was
getting at.
Once upon a time, I was involved with a scientist. I was his junior. Now,
like a lot of scientists, he had an introductory paragraph about the
importance of the research he was involved in, that described its applications
in the field of semiconductor
electronics. It was a list of types of semiconductor devices that the
semiconducting materials his people studied would hopefully be used to
construct. He would paste this introductory paragraph into many professional
documents: internal reports,
conference proceedings, grant proposals, journal articles.... And he would
repeat it verbally when he spoke publicly and when he talked to individuals.
He often said it to me, and I'd be impressed when he rattled off the names of
devices like "
thyristor" as if he were completely familiar with them, so that I assumed that
he understood all those solid state electronics diagrams of devices with more
than one PN junction where the electrons and hole diffused around in
inscrutable ways while the
graphs of their electric fields were shown on the same page; whereas, I was a
cretin who only knew what a thyristor did in a circuit.
A thyristor is a class of high current or high voltage device, the most common
of which are Silicon-Controlled Rectifier and TRIAC (the AC version of an
SCR). Three wires come out of them as in a transistor; two would perhaps pass
the current from a
120V wall outlet, and the third wire (the gate) would accept a pulse of some
low voltage from maybe a 5V temperature control circuit to turn on the
current, let it pass between the other two wires, maybe to go through the
heating coils of a furnace and
make them glow red. So I knew what thyristors were, and had constructed
circuits with them.
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* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
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