[Note:  Lots of news today…and comments on that news…for both readers and writers.  Enjoy!]

#216:  Books as Christmas gifts.  I’m not adverse to using the word Christmas and gifts in the same sentence.  Sure, Black Friday and Cyber Monday show that the holidays are becoming more commercial.  What isn’t?  For me, there’s little difference between tee shirts with the faces of Santa Claus, Christ, the Buddha, or Che Guevara—as Yoda would say, “Still commercial they are.”

However, reading is an educational, mind-bending, and exhilarating experience anytime.  Because people love to read, gift the readers among your family and friends—and yourself—some books.  With eBooks, I’m talking about just a download (counts for online sales?); for trade paperbacks and hard-bounds, FedEx, UPS, and the U.S. Postal Service come into play, but you do end up with something to wrap.

Are you looking for bargains?  My suggestion is to boycott the Big Five’s high prices, even for eBooks, and support indie authors.  You’ll get more bang for your buck.  Compare Lee Child’s eBook version of A Wanted Man at $13.99 to my Angels Need Not Apply at $4.99.  I’m not pretending to be Lee, but you just know Random House has inflated that eBook price to make more money for them, not for Lee (and maybe to drive readers to the other formats).  Lee’s a good guy, makes money off the volume of sales, and deserves all the success he’s had with Jack Reacher (see below), but I won’t spend more than $10 on any eBook—not even his.  You shouldn’t either.

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X “provides more quality entertainment than any other resorts on the planet.”  “It appears to be the case….”  “Remenber: their’s almost not any time left to buy…!”  Plus misspellings, double negatives, and wrong word usage—are these and other examples taken from TV ads or those banners scrolling at the bottom of the TV screen indicating a deterioration of standard English?

If we add jive, street slang, and idiomatic mixtures (so-called Spanglish, for example), some language purists might be apoplectic.  As a writer of sci-fi thrillers, I tend to be more forgiving.  English, especially American English (if there is such a thing), is more vibrantly and dynamically alive than any other language.  And it seems to become more vibrant and dynamic as the years pass.

But I’m not here to rant about the purity of English—let the Brits worry about that (can an Eton graduate speak Cockney?).  I’m just wondering about the resurgence across our northern U.S. border of French language purists in Quebec.  Years ago—I confess that I can’t remember how many—a truce was declared.  What happened?  Did we, those blustering, bloviating, pop culture neighbors from the South, do something to trigger this?  Is this just an expression of ethnic hatred long suppressed between Canadian anglophiles and francophiles?

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#210:  Show your appreciation with a review….  I just received a glowing review of Survivors of the Chaos from David W. Menefee, Pulitzer-nominated author and reviewer for BookPleasures.com.  Indie authors know what I’m talking about when I say how much I appreciate this review.  Thanks, Dave!

Readers of indie authors, you can show your appreciation for your indie author’s hard work and dedication to entertaining you by not only buying his or her books, but by writing a small review for Amazon or elsewhere, saying what you liked about the book (for more on this, see below).  Authors live for your feedback and there’s not any better way to do it than through a review.

#211:  Finishing a trilogy….  Survivors was the start of “The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy.”  Sing a Samba Galactica continued it.  I finished it off with Come Dance a Cumbia…with Stars in Your Hand!  Consider it my Foundation trilogy, although I’m far from being Isaac Asimov reincarnated.  What’s next?

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Just before hurricane Sandy came roaring into NJ like a banshee on the loose, we went to see Ben Affleck’s Argo.  As usual, we arrived early to get good seats.  Another early arrival commented that a friend (or was it a relative?) refused to see the movie—she never watched violent movies, he said.  That started me thinking.

To paraphrase Tom Clancy, the problem with fiction is it has to seem real.  He’s talking about military thrillers, of course, but that statement is true about many fiction genres (probably not fantasy or paranormal).  It’s interesting that Argo is a movie based on true events surrounding the daring escape of six Americans from Iran during the hostage crisis.  A CIA agent, Tony Mendes, engineered the escape from the Canadian embassy.

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[Another guest post from thriller author Gina Fava.  Writers should especially pay attention.  I think she brings up some very important points on this one.  Thanks, Gina.]

Does that little voice inside your head ever use a language other than the one you speak everyday?  Ever consider dabbling in a foreign language to enhance the novel you’re writing, as in Diane Johnson’s Le Divorce?  Or creating a sense of mood with dialect, like Mark Twain did in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, or just as Dennis Lehane did in Gone, Baby Gone?

How about making up a foreign tongue, like Vulcan, Romulan, or Klingon in the Star Trek series? Thought about using slang to add a touch of humor or the right amount of grit to a story, as in Dude, Where’s My Car? or Mario Puzo’s The Godfather?

Maybe you have an urge to go full throttle and write a whole work in a dead language (one that remains in use for specific contexts like science, law, or religion, such as Latin) or an extinct or endangered language (one lacking in speakers or users, such as Aramaic) or a combination of both, ala Mel Gibson’s screenplay for The Passion of the Christ.

Playing with language to flavor your characters and plot might just help your story exude an added level of texture and an authenticity that could distinguish it from other works in your genre.  Both of my novels, The Race, as well as The Sculptor, are based on American characters who reside in Italy.  Often, these characters interact with native Italians, so a fair amount of dialogue is sprinkled with Italian language.   I use it to evoke mood, setting, humor, and/or authenticity, depending on the scene.  Similarly, one of my chapters in The Race recreates the Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster in 1986.  I enhanced character pathos and increased tension in the plot by peppering their dialogue with Russian slang.

In one of my earlier blog posts, A Thriller Audiobook That Hits You Like Bleach,  I recommend listening to the audiobook of Ken Follett’s historical thriller, Fall of Giants.   The lilt and cadence of every dialect and accent will practically transport you to Wales, Buffalo, Russia, England and Germany during the First World War.  Hurry, because the second installment in the trilogy, Winter of the World , is due out in September.

DID YOU KNOW that nearly half of the world speaks a Top Ten Language:

1. Chinese*
2. Spanish
3. English
4. Arabic*
5. Hindi
6. Bengali
7. Portuguese
8. Russian
9. Japanese
10. German

*Includes all forms of the language

UNESCO ranks the world’s languages by degree of usage between generations.  One language dies nearly every 14 days.  Nearly 2,724 languages of the roughly 7,000 languages ever spoken on Earth are now endangered.  Here are just a few:

• the Aramaic dialects that linger primarily in the Middle East
• Tuvan, spoken by about 200,000 people in Russia
• Aka, limited to less than 2,000 people in India
• Seri, spoken by a mere 700-1000 Mexican natives

For more information on the planet’s endangered languages, check out the article “Vanishing Voices” by Russ Rhymer [http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2012/07/vanishing-languages/rymer-text] in the July 2012 issue of National Geographic.

Recently, Google has initiated and funded a project to protect endangered languages.  So has Rosetta Stone, a language-learning software company.  Click on the Google or Rosetta Stone links above, and click The Endangered Languages Project link for more information on what you can do to protect global linguistic diversity.

What do you think of peppering your prose with another language?  Any suggestions or ideas?

[Note from Steve to writers and readers:  This is an important question.  If we apply the Goldilocks Principle, what is too much, too little, or just right?  This is especially important for dialog.  Comments are welcome!]

In libris libertas….

As a post mortem to the 2012 election (RIP, I say), I offer my personal list of winners and losers.  Feel free to suggest additions in your comments—a great opportunity to vent.

The big winner?  The 99%.  Yeah, I know some of you voted for Romney (otherwise the popular vote would be 99% Obama, 1% Romney), but you will still benefit.  Count your blessings.  The oligarchy lost—sort of.  They’ll have to be more clever about how they exploit the middle class now, but they’ll probably manage just fine.  The House is still in their pockets, for example, Mr. Boehner leading the charge.

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[Note: Continuing this week of respite from the elections, I wrote this light-hearted but serious piece on writing techniques.  Enjoy.]

I shook the mathematical beliefs of my thirteen-year-old niece the other afternoon.  An elementary problem in algebra required knowing that the measures of the interior angles in a triangle sum to 180 degrees.  That’s in Euclidean geometry.  I commented that there are other non-Euclidean geometries where that “rule” is not true.  In one of these geometries, parallel lines can meet.

Many of you might be yawning now, I suppose, but there’s a message about writing here.  That algebra help session with my niece started me thinking that a novel’s timeline is linear, but its plot lines can be parallel.  But plot lines are non-Euclidean—they satisfy a stranger geometry where they have to meet at least once by the end of the book, either in the climax or in the denouement.

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[As a toast to all those who were able to vote yesterday, I offer some good travel advice from guest blogger and thriller author Gina Fava to her editor.  Thank you, Gina.  My apologies again for not including your lovely pictures—I don’t include them to speed up loading on slower systems and browsers.  Readers can see them in Gina’s original post.]

Amanda’s Italian Itinerary  While sharing a bottle of Castello Banfi’s Rosso di Montalcino 2006, with my editor and friend, Amanda—more on her professional editing company later—we poured over photos from a recent trip my family and I had taken to Italy.

She told me that she and her husband had dreamed of visiting Italy someday as the ultimate anniversary gift to each other.  They even had their ideal itinerary planned, which included such cultural gems as Florence, Rome, and Venice.

I told her to scrap the plan.  (Cue the scratch of the needle on the vinyl album.)

Romantic anniversary, trip to Italy,  lovers of fine wine?  Redo.  Add some wine to this itinerary, and now you’ve got something to write home about!  A trip with such promise MUST incorporate a drive through the hills of Tuscany.

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Today is Election Day.  Everyone who can, please vote.  It’s your right.  Hopefully, all of us who are affected by Sandy’s aftermath can find an alternate polling place and also vote.

Tomorrow my blog will continue with a light-hearted guest post written by thriller author Gina Fava.

…and NY and Connecticut and…the list goes on.  The pictures of the banshee storm Sandy from space said it all:  don’t mess with Mother Nature.  One scientist with nothing better to do estimated that the storm contained the equivalent of 10,000 of the a-bombs dropped on Japan at the end of WWII.  That impersonal and frightening number can’t begin to match the scenes of damage and destruction so tragically affecting people on a very personal level.

The headline of this post was borrowed from the headline of New York’s Daily News in a special edition filled with disaster photos of the tri-state area.  Probably the worst photo, displayed under a similar headline with NJ replaced by NY, was a view of Breezy Point in Brooklyn where fire, whipped along by winds gusting at sixty plus miles per hour, destroyed over 100 homes, creating a scene reminiscent of Dresden after the allies bombed it in WWII.  The next worst pic on my list was a water tanker lifted up by storm surge and deposited on land in Staten Island, silent testimony to a hurricane’s power.

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