BonaLibro - Latest Comments

Re: Chapter One

Mark Beyer — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 06:25:25 -0000

Thanks, BonaLibro. I appreciate your POV. Yes, that middle-of-the-book sag is infuriating. I've always worked on the notion where I keep asking myself "What is this story about?" (thematically) and thus train my focus to weed out extra scenes, dialogue, etc. Good luck.

Re: Comments Please.

Mark Beyer — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 06:21:32 -0000

Yes, the internal monologue is finely wrought, and with the alliterative word combination, gives us even more of his character. Nice work. BTW, re your "without highly professional editing" comment: I find there are very few of these types left in the world; most editors have an idea of your story and therefore want to impose "their" idea onto your story. The age of Maxwell Perkins died when Max breathed his last breathe.

Re: Chapter One

Bonalibro — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 11:20:53 -0000

I totally agree with you about criticism. I don't want other people telling me how to write my book either. I just want to know what works for people and what doesn't. I'll figure out how to make it work.

That's why I don't offer writerly critiques. I offer my experience as a reader. Telling you where I am stopped, where I am lost or confused, where I need to know what you know, and where I feel I can be trusted to imagine things myself.That she is an artist looking for a new form of self expression is what I need to know, right from the start. If you found a subtle way to put it in the first sentence, that would have a magnetic pull.

I harbor the view that the reader likes to be engaged, but not controlled. One way to do that is to let the reader fill in the insignificant details and picture the characters as she sees them.

As for my own, I intend to send it out after I finally figure out what to do with the sagging middle of it. There is lots of plot at the end. But until I get my characters to their destination, it is all talk and no action. Just a lot of character development.

Re: Comments Please.

Bonalibro — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 09:52:46 -0000

Mark

I really appreciate your comments. I think highly of your writing, and I know what it is to work alone overseas, and to try to self-publish without highly professional editing. I have a small writer's group but attendance is spotty, and I don't get feedback more than once a month.

My character has different personas, and different voices in each. The narrator persona, the CB persona, the real self that he becomes with the girl you meet in chapter two. I try to keep them under control. This is an internal monologue in which he's castigating himself for recommending to the girl that she read his dishonest book.

Re: Comments Please.

Mark Beyer — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 08:42:33 -0000

A good paragraph, but out of context it's just talking — or a rant. I read your prologue & 1st Ch, so now with that bit of context, I'll say that it doesn't sound like something the main character would say (not, at least, given the way he spoke on the CB). On the other hand, if this is the overall narrator speaking (and thinking for him), it sounds like that voice-of-reason (in this story's case, farcically so) that has taken hold of a pant cuff like a mad dog or angry granny.

Just as well, you've assumed that your reader comes to the story with a greater amount of intelligence than the average shmoo. I like that.

Re: Chapter One

Mark Beyer — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 08:15:42 -0000

I like your beginning, BonaLibro. You pull me into the scene with who & what & where; and your dialogue makes sense. Are you publishing the entire book on your website? I'm sure you want to get paid for your sweat and tears.

A further note to my reply to your comments re What Beauty (and this connects to what you've got going with your farce/satire tale here): the amount of detail incumbent to one's narrative has also to connect to characters. In my first book, the character owned a bookshop and was an armchair intellectual; in What Beauty I present a big-city dwelling artist looking for a new theme/method. Both of these characters have a background that requires a particular kind of speech, as well as a focused view of the world. For the artists, detail is everything. For the bookseller, internalized thought and memory is essential. My point is that we can start reading a story and accept what the author gives us with a bit of trust that what he's doing makes sense (for the story and the character), or we can say "Oh, no, this is not how I would write it/see the world/use the language/like the politics." ... or etc &etc infinitus.

While they have their own portion of validity, that's the reader's problem but not the writer's. Tolstoy was perhaps the first expert at using language to give pace to a scene; Joyce perfected that pacing, and would give detail when necessary and broadbrush a scene for its essentials. Nevertheless, any writer worth the ink has to be able to ground us in place, write powerful descriptive narrative, and make characters speak pitch-perfect dialogue (that isn't cliche) to earn a place in the annuls of writing.

Re: Pandering Political Correctness

Bonalibro — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 21:27:14 -0000

Hi Mark,

Thanks for coming by.

I don't disagree with you about Mailer and Updike. I read The Naked and the Dead as a teenager and it certainly deals, above all else, with the male consciousness. Suburban realism isn't my thing, so aside from the good parts of Couples, that I read as a teenager, the one book of Updike's I've finished is Brazil, which I did not hold in high esteem.

My experience is that men are under assault from two angles. One is economic. Being squeezed and disempowered by mechanization and globalization. The other is a kind of hypocritical feminism. The demands of women for a place in the male hierarchy, accompanied by a sense of entitlement to marry their social equals or even worse, their social betters. It's a zero sum game, in which they're eating their cake and having it too. Such women often chose to remain unmarried, and that is a good thing. The obnoxious Charles Murray just wrote a book on that subject. For the struggling male, dealing with such women is a nightmare. I have known men who married up, and mostly they were pathetic, effete and unrealized creatures, so I'm not whining that I can't marry up. I am already married, to a ball-busting social inferior, and that is bad enough.

I have also seen it suggested that, back in the 60s, the Rockefeller Foundation funded and encouraged the propagation of feminism to draw women into the workplace as a way of enlarging the talent pool at lower aggregate cost. It certainly had that effect. In fact, it has been demonstrated that families are worse off today, with two incomes, than they were in the 1960s, with one.

For writers to give women a wink and a pass, and say essentially, favor me because, unlike those other guys, I have a feminist consciousness, is intellectually dishonest. I would prefer to show my loser characters struggling to make their way in the world AND standing up to that canting sort of feminism.

Re: Pandering Political Correctness

Mark Beyer — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 14:26:09 -0000

"Men" have been under fire in America since the 1980s ... yet America is still a man's world and women, if they really want control, will need to take it away. Men aren't going to give it to women. On the other hand, politicians have decided they don't need men or women anymore. But there is one bone I have to pick with you: "... men need to write honestly about what it feels like to be a man." Actually, I think Mailer and Updike did that, and did it well vis-a-vis men of their time. Franzen I think does a good job of that; he's actually pretty observant. The fact is, any writer must create characters (male & female) who work in the mold of the story. Since there are an infinite number of male & female "types" available, what needs to be made believable is that "this male" made "this decision." It really matters little if some female & male readers comment that they don't know anyone like that character. If a person says anything of that sort, my guess is he or she hasn't traveled much beyond the confines of their neighborhood, and certainly not across the four corners of America.

Re: The New York Times Wouldn’t Take My Comment (for twelve hours).

Richard Sutton — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 10:52:36 -0000

Here! Here! and Now! Now!

Re: Charlie Rose – Rep. Barney Frank

Tim Chambers — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 17:36:26 -0000

Hiya Richard,

Happy New Year! Good to hear from ya. Thanks for getting in touch. How's your book doing? Will you be entering the ABNA? I'm still developing mine and will be going for it again this year.

Re: Charlie Rose – Rep. Barney Frank

Richard Sutton — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 11:18:46 -0000

Tim -- well said. It's us or them.

Re: The New York Times Wouldn’t Take My Comment (for twelve hours).

Bonalibro — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 08:10:15 -0000

They finally did take it. The nicer version is here.

Much as I agree with you regarding the Republican candidates, the base is not as stupid as you think if it hasn't been gulled by this field. I remember campaigning in union halls with some of the Democrats I worked for, back in my consulting days. The Dems had just as hard a time appealing to the rank and file. Mostly, the members felt that they were being talked down to, and they didn't like it, which largely explains why Fox news is able to appeal to people with its anti-intellectual elite message.

What working people want to hear are solutions to the nation's problems that not only make sense to them and take them into account, but sound like they come from people who have a genuine commitment to them. Unfortunately, today's Democrats, by and large, being from the 1% themselves, can't demonstrate that commitment any better than their rivals.

Now, with the advent of McCain/Levin, it would seem that both parties have either lost their minds or simply shown their true stripes. As a recent addition to the various bi-partisan War on Terror bills, that were insane enough to begin with, one presumes it responds to the Occupy movement, and is intended to terrorize the 99% into quietly accepting their reduced status in our Plutocratic society. If those who represent a political threat to the wealthy are terminated as terrorists, then who are we?

When the Executive on its own can decide who is an enemy of the state, it becomes the enemy of the nation.

Re: The New York Times Wouldn’t Take My Comment (for twelve hours).

Bonalibro — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 16:21:52 -0000

I am aware that the executive claims the right in pursuing the War on Terror, but assassination was made illegal by an act of Congress years ago. Now we have a bipartisan defense bill that specifically authorizes political assassination by the executive branch, and against our own citizens. Is that not a momentous change?

Re: The New York Times Wouldn’t Take My Comment (for twelve hours).

Dr. Dennis Loo — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 10:30:45 -0000

Hi Tim:

Agree with your expose of the Democrats. Obama's assassination orders, however, were issued before the Occupy Movement so the latter did not trigger the former. That's one of the reasons I argue in my book that neoliberalism brings with it a certain perverse and odious logic and that both ruling parties in this country (and elsewhere in the world, including places where they really have social democratic parties) have adopted public order policies.