Warning: Some Violence and Much Strong Language.HE WROTE: Collaborating Part II and Reading Guide
The interesting thing about the word Moot: most people use it the exact wrong way. A moot point is a point that is open to argument and discussion, yet many people think it means the subject is closed to discussion. Now, of course, a Moot point means a point of land where Moot has built her nest.
I really don't remember writing Agnes stomping her foot and that's not a big deal. What's interesting is the comment about Track Changes. We used to do that-- in DLD we would go two or three or even four exchanges with track changes when sending the Master back and forth. We no longer do that. We trust each other implicitly in the writing that it's not important to track changes.
Jenny's right in her analogy: she keeps moving the road when I'm busy at work hacking down the trees where I thought we had agreed the road would be. Because she wants the plot to fit the characters and I want the characters to fit the plot. The nice part is, as I remind her, is I can make pretty much any plot work and I accept that characters are more important than plot.
We had an intersting email fight yesterday-- one we've had many times before. When I start discussing her female characters Jenny gets mad because I tend to describe them in terms of the men in their lives, not in terms of themselves. But I also feel the way she wrote male characters is the same thing: they are projections from the opposite gender POV.
We just did a Reading Guide for DON'T LOOK DOWN, our Romantic Adventure novel, written from a She Wrote, He Wrote perspective (there three talking points in one sentence, Doreen would be so happy). One of the ideas Doreen gave us was to try to get bookstores or even something like eHarmony to form a Singles Book Club and use DLD as the first book for them to discuss since it has the male-female POVs realistically represented. Some of the questions in the guide are pretty interesting. Such as feelings about Wilder taking one for the team; why LaFarve is obsessed with a stripper who treats him like crap; why is Lucy mad at Wilder on a certain page; etc. etc. What's intersting about these questions was that these are questions Jenny and I asked each other when writing the book because we really didn't understand the other gender's POV in places.
So we we will have the reading guide up in PDF format on the web site shortly (we are trying to actually write a book while doing all this). If any of you know a person working at eHarmony or some such site, or work in a book store and want to start a single's book club we're working on it and let us know. (I know men don't really read, not most of them, but you see it would be like lady's night at the book store: if there are women, men will come. They might even read. And you, over there, no smutty comments which just occurred to you.)
19 Comments:
Darnit, and I had the bestest smutty comment that I was going to share too!
If there are women, men will come. You said it all, Bobmeister.
;-)
This might not be the right place to say this - but I was at a bookstore yesterday evening, and saw a book named "Don't Look Down" in the romance section, and I was so stunned that I picked it up and saw that it came out in January 2006...but it's not your book!! It even has a woman's pair of shoes on a tightrope on the cover!! Is that allowed????
I'm so confused...
Jenny and Bob won't answer, so I will...yes, it is allowed. Titles are not copyrighted. Depending upon the title, especially in the romance genre, you might find a dozen books over the years with the same title. Usually they aren't very specific...like no one is going to put out another book called "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone." But, titles like Don't Look Down aren't very distinctive, so are reused.
It was probably just a complete fluke that two books were published so close together with the same title. OBviously publishers don't consult each other about titles. :-)
Shannon
I'm so doing the single's book group! My library has a small reading group, and they're always looking for a fresh angle to get more people involved. Thanks!
Becky
Who signed up for Blogger, just so she'd have a name on her posts, and then promptly forgot both her user name and password.
I see... it just seemed a bit sketchy. Thanks for the clarification. I'm very much looking forward to all y'all's (since that's the plural) book coming out :)
I just went and looked up the Other Don't Look Down on Amazon. I am not being remotely partisan when I say that Jenny and Bob's Don't Look Down has a waaay nicer cover. (I'm not! What is up with those fonts? Didn't they want to decide on serif vs. non-serif? Why is the N so warped? Also, what is up with her ankles?)
I suppose there's a zeitgeist for book cover designers just like everyone else, and if you have a book called Don't Look Down then a pair of feet up at the top makes sense. But yeah. It does seem sketchy.
I'll be interested in the reading guide. (Did anyone else see the story on the Boston used bookstore that's doing literary speed dating? It's like regular speed dating only you bring at least three of your favourite books so you have something to talk about. Idea of genius, I tell you.)
Track Changes can be handy but they definitely get cumbersome after a while, and for a project like yours I think they would get cumbersome very quickly. Fortunately, there's always the Sent Items folder in your email where you can look up previous versions. ;) And speaking as someone who sometimes has to bite her tongue instead of screaming "That section is in there because YOU WROTE IT, you amnesiac!" I do envy your spats.
I completely agree!!! I have to admit that I only picked it up because I was convinced that I had entered some Bizarro universe in which it had the title and the feet, but none of the witty dialogue. (That, and I was waiting for the nice man to bring me my book from the storage room.)
I think font abuse is completely overlooked in this country. There should be a committee.
Given that men won't ask for directions- and have been known to have a sense of poor timing- I guess the questions isn't will men come if women are in the bookstore- but will they come too early or too late?
Doreen will be even happier if you add romantic adventure to the paragraph under He Wrote She Wrote at the top of this blog. May as well reinforce that brand everywhere.
There is a promotion consultant who maintains extensive lists of romance readers groups, including the key contacts' info. She doesn't charge much to give you the list. I can't remember her email addy off the top of my head, but if you email me, I'll look it up for you.
Huh. I'm a lawyer, and we -- along with judges -- definitely use "moot" to mean something that is NOT subject to discussion -- I think you'll find it in the Roe v. Wade case (or somewhere in that line of cases), where the court talks about a party's right to sue, when by the time the case makes its way to the Supremes, she's not gonna be pregnant any longer, no matter what the law on abortion is, so the issue, for that particular once-pregnant woman, is moot (as in: nothing the court can do about it), but likely to arise again, with this plaintiff or some other plaintiff in similar circumstances, so the court will go ahead and hear the case, despite the moot issue and lack of standing to sue.
Which is way more than you probably wanted to know about legal jargon. The basic dictionaries define "moot" the way Bob does, but if you look at a legal dictionary (there's a Merriam-webster law dictionary on-line), they define it in the way that people commonly use it, which is the way lawyers use it.
Of course, there's always moot court, which goes back to the official definition Bob gave.
Yeah, lawyers can argue either side of case.
"We had an interesting email fight"
I used to get tripped up trying to find a solution to male/female problems until I realized that the process of finding a solution is what's important, not the actual finding of a solution. As long as two people are willing to discuss, compromise, negotiate, and make some effort at understanding then they will be ok. The French call it "Vive la difference". I call it "The Dance". As long as two people struggle with whose foot goes where, things keep moving--sometimes awkwardly, sometimes amusingly. But if the dancing stops, trouble begins. It reminds of that Irish song we used to sing in Catholic school, "The Lord of the Dance". It doesn't matter if you master the dance. It just matters that you dance.
I've always used moot as per the dictionay definition.
I also have a couple of singles groups interested in the DLD book club. It sounds like fun and different from several angles.
Sheryl
Cherry Magic
who can't remember her password
"it has the male-female POVs realistically represented"
What do you mean by 'realistically'? Given that it's fiction, and you're making things up and inventing personalities which aren't your own, what is it that makes the POVs 'realistic'? Unless there's only one way that men think and only one way that women think, but clearly that's not the case.
OK, I'm probably over-analysing again.
Bob, dictionary.com does not agree with you. Well, it sort of does, but it also says:
1. Law. Without legal significance, through having been previously decided or settled.
2. Of no practical importance; irrelevant.
Basically this word both means to discuss and that you can't discuss the subject anymore.
And you two named a gator after it.
Evan Morris, The Word Detective, has the last word on the subject:
Perhaps with your ability to dredge up past and common usage of words you can unconfuse my confusion about moot. -- Howard O. Barikmo, via the Internet.
Perhaps I can, although just reading your question gave me a rather remarkable headache. It's not your fault, of course -- "moot" is an inherently confusing word. The confusion seems to stem from the "legal" sense of the word gradually superseding the original meaning of "moot."
Let's begin at the beginning. "Moot" comes from the Old English word "mot," meaning "meeting," also found in "witenagemot" ("meeting of wise men"), the name of the Anglo-Saxon parliament. Since meetings of any kind are no fun without a good argument, "moot" as an adjective came to mean "open to debate" or "undecided" by the 16th century. This is the original sense of the word, and was applied to actions at law as well -- a case in court was known as a "moot."
What happened then was that law students began to practice their skills by re-arguing real cases in practice courts -- what are today still called "moot courts" in law schools. Since the cases the students argued were, for the most part, already decided in the real world, such sessions and the results therein were "moot" -- for the sake of argument only, having no real significance. This "no real significance" sense of moot has gradually overtaken the original sense, and today "moot" is generally used as a synonym for "settled" or "irrelevant."
Hi. I'm also a lawyer but based in the UK and I agree with gin re moot point. English lawyers use it in exactly that sense. I actually specialise in intellectual property law but I'll spare you an analysis of copyright points that could be taken on the title (particularly as I can only talk about them from a UK perspective and therefore they would be moot) except to say that as the other book was published first, if there were any rights in the title the other guys would have them.
And, Bob, I should like to say as one who is very definitely Over Here - it takes one to know one, sweetie. I wasn't even thinking smut, not one bit. No, I was thinking of that film about baseball - you know, the one in the cornfield with the men sliding in the dirt, in tight white uniforms ...
"a case in court was known as a "moot."
Hmm. I think we can make an entirely different, but somehow connected, correlation. Moot is an alligator. Some briefcases, possibly even those carried by lawyers into court, are made out of alligator hides.
Therefore, a case in court could be known as Moot.
Mary Stella, I can only say: "EEEEEEEEEEEK!!!!"
Mary Stella, you sound like you belong in Calahan's Bar!
Bob, sweetie, the BEST arguments and discussions ever are on the moot points -that is, the irrelevant ones. Because then you both can relax about it!
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