A long time ago (at least in internet time) I did a post on homonym or homophone errors titled Watt Due Ewe Mien. We all know the most common errors and hopefully look for them when we’re proofing our own work. Most of us have words and phrases in our vocabulary we use less often than the heavy hitters like their, there, and they’re that we know (or think we know) how to say, but have trouble getting them right in our writing. (Or should that be write in our righting?) My own personal bugaboo is sale and sell. You’ve probably identified some of your own. Or maybe you haven’t. What I’m going to cover here are semi-common words and phrases I see wrong more often than I’d expect and a bit of discussion about each. I’ve seen all of these make it past the author’s self-editing and whatever editors, proofreaders, and beta readers assisted them to land smack dab in the middle of a book. Multiple times. Hopefully this will help you avoid these same mistakes. In each I’ll list the wrong usage first, the correct one last. Continue reading “Your Knot Write”
Author: Big Al
Big Al (who insists he only has one name, like Cher, Sting, and Madonna) spends his days writing computer programs that are full of typos, homonym errors, and incorrect verb usage.
During his evenings, he writes reviews of indie books for BigAl’s Books and Pals and has recently taken over The IndieView, a website founded by indie author Simon Royle as a resource for indie authors, indie reviewers, and those who read either.
Just Click No for DRM
My understanding is that when an author publishes a book on Amazon that there is a box, pre-checked for your convenience, to elect putting DRM or Digital Rights Management on your book. I’ve also heard that once you say yes, you’re stuck with your choice. I’m going to argue that the best choice is to unclick that box. But first, the case for sticking with the default.
Copying an MP3, ebook, or other digit content is normally a trivial exercise. You do it every time you send your latest opus to an editor as an email attachment, copy your final manuscript to an external hard drive for backup, or drag a copy of your work-in-progress to a jump drive so you can polish it a bit at work. (We’ll pretend that last part is just while you’re on break or lunch.) In essence, DRM is a scheme that is supposed to prevent someone from copying digital content or that prevents it from being used on a device other than those authorized. For example, if someone purchased your book and gave a copy to a friend, DRM should in theory prevent the friend from being able to read the book on their Kindle.
When presented with the choice of DRM most uninitiated authors are going to go with the default (that must be the best choice, right?) or investigate to see what DRM is, and end up at the same place. Why would you want to make it easy for people to pirate copies of your book? Think of all the money you’ll miss out on from any lost sales. It seems like a logical choice. It probably isn’t. Continue reading “Just Click No for DRM”
Backing Up Your Digital Media
One of my first jobs that didn’t require asking, “would you like fries with that?” was as a computer operator for a bank. I know, you kids say “everyone operates a computer, what does that even mean?” This was in ancient times (roughly eleventy-bazillion years ago) when to actually touch a computer you had to clear two (sometimes three) levels of security to get into a large air conditioned room where only very special people were allowed. (I’m ignoring the fact that most of these VSPs knew how to ask if you’d like fries twenty different ways.)
I dealt with a lot of data backups in that job where losing everything would cost someone a lot more money than I had. I figured out a few rules about backups and what was really needed if you truly care about not losing your data. Continue reading “Backing Up Your Digital Media”
Words are Words
I claim not to be a writer, but while thinking about what I wanted to say in this post realized that I’ve been stringing words together for mass consumption by the public since 2001. The vast majority of those words have been reviews of one kind or another. That first gig was reviewing music for a website that specialized in what is now called Americana. (For those not familiar with this term imagine a Venn diagram that includes many subgenres of country, bluegrass, a sliver of folk music, “roots” rock, and everything in the cracks between.)
Just like some book genres are more character based while others are more plot based, different musical genres focus more on the musical parts of a song while with others, the lyrics matter most. Americana is squarely in the focus on the words camp. The top reviewers at the site I was associated with paid a lot of attention to lyrics, often looking for the same things your Literature teacher pointed at while studying the classics. Is there symbolism, a subtext, or a “moral to the story”? Is a point being made that isn’t obvious or possibly even at odds with the surface message. (Think Springsteen’s Born in the USA for that last one.) Continue reading “Words are Words”