Authors Electric

  It's a terrible thing to be skinny these days, at least if you're writing thin books. Bloated or musclebound books are the rage when the minimum word count required by publishers and gatekeepers is 70-80K. Never mind that many published novels would have been far better if cut in half. On the beach of the publishing business today, you need to bulk up to keep bullies from kicking sand in your face. Have no fear. Doc Bloato's here with eight great tricks to save the day. Set aside your shame and play the same game played by many others. 1) Add unnecessary speaker tags--he said/she said--to every line of dialog, as done by the late Robert B Parker in his last ten years. This will also increase your page count exponentially.  2 Calculate the number of words you'll need to meet the minimum word count. Then force-fed them shamelessly, page by page by page. For example, if you're 10,000 words shy, at 250  words per page, you can add 40 words to each. Add an extra line o...

                                      POETRY FILM: APOPTOSIS, or CELL SUICIDE Sometimes we have to lose bits of us. It’s called Apoptosis: some of our cells have to self-destruct, instead of living on and multiplying by splitting in two. They do this for our benefit. My animated text poem in the video above undergoes apoptosis to tell that story. An example; the foetal hand is a paddle – many of the cells between the finger bones kill themselves, to free our fingers to gesture, point and grasp things. Things like books. 'I don't think I lost enough cells to grasp this book.'  Writing, in any genre, is as much about taking words out as putting words in. Poetry is about losing as many words as possible without losing any meaning, so that the remaining words also contain homeopathic amounts of the ones that went, concentrated and rich like a reduced sauce. Plays and novels, e...