Kerry Allen

Good evening, and welcome to the First Ever Annual Lampie Awards, where we (by which I mean I) pay tribute to excellence in books read (if not necessarily published) during 2007. The field this year can be described in only one way:

When they were good, they were very, very good, and when they were bad, they were too bloody awful for words.

I have never not finished so many books as in 2007. I’ve been unable to determine if they were really that bad or if I have simply lost the patience to stick with a story in hopes the author pulls it out of a nosedive, but I hit my typical annual allotment of wallbangers by the beginning of March, and it only snowballed from there. Even widely lauded books found their way onto my Never Again list, resulting in a certain loss of faith in those doing the lauding.

(You want me to crack and name names with the bad ones, don’t you? I can feel it. The Greatest Disappointment. The Most Overrated. The Great Big Book of Cliche. The Biggest Monetary Ripoff. The I Hope the Hero and Heroine Die Because They Disgust Me Book. The Suckiest Book in the History of Written Language. You want them all. Well, TOO BAD. I have drawn a line in the bitchy sand, and it is here!)

At the other end of the spectrum, the good books were phenomenal. Today we (by which I mean I again) honor those books in all genres that stood head and shoulders and sometimes entire torso and a good bit of ass above the crowd.

See the rest of “2007 Lampie Awards”

If you hated the way it looked… sorry, that hasn’t changed much. However, on the two computers I’ve viewed it from, which vary radically in speed and quality, it loads much more smoothly (in IE, anyway). (Yay, auto-optimization!)

Most of the improvement was in ease of building, prompting the following unsolicited endorsement: Web Studio kicks ass. I didn’t have to use a single bit of code in the whole site, including formatting the text (much of which was copied and pasted from Word, formatting intact) and even *gasp* stays where I put it on the page! If you need or want a web site, can’t afford to have a professional do it for you, don’t know squat about HTML or CSS, but have content and can arrange elements on a page in a pleasing manner, you’re qualified to use Web Studio. You even get a free 30-day trial to play with it.

So, if you have nothing better to do sometime, pop over to my Domain of Delusion and look for broken links and general fugliness. There’s a link at the top of every page that will take you to the “whip it into shape” blog entry if youse has complaints.

Edited to Add: Actually, looking at it on my work computer, the text does NOT stay where I put it, shrinking to teeniness and leaving huge, gaping holes underneath. Mother pus bucket.

My (extremely noisy) FedEx dude just dropped off my Golden Heart judging packet. I was so excited. I felt all powerful and junk.

And then I realized, at this very moment, somebody else is holding my crappy have-since-been-revised-and-are-much-better-I-swear first two chapters and feeling all powerful and junk.

Major buzz killer, and no chocolate in the house with which to self-medicate.

A while ago I mentioned not being in the mood to read a book in which the heroine was sexually assaulted and beaten within an inch of her life within the first chapter.

It has since come to my attention that character was not, in fact, the heroine, but her mother.

It was an honest mistake, considering the book is written in 1st person POV, and that person is usually the protagonist.

I don’t have the aversion some people seem to have for 1st person, but multiple-person 1st person? Oy.

I thought the use of present tense in the book was a little jarring, but it wasn’t enough to deter me from reading further. The POV thing on top of it, on the other hand, has served as reader repellent for me. Knowing I’m going to have to head hop in 1st person has totally put me off.

Like the one James Patterson novel I read, in which POV switched from 3rd person to 1st person for one character for no discernible reason other than to demonstrate the author’s supposed cleverness, I find toying with POV and tense distracting. Instead of telling a compelling story, the book turns into an opportunity for the author to say, ”Hey, look at my craft! See what I did there? It sets me apart.”

Sure does. Sets you apart in that stack I’m never going to finish reading. Good job.

Dean Koontz did the switch-to-1st-person-for-one-character thing in One Door Away from Heaven, but it worked because the character was a 10-year-old boy on the run, and the intimacy and immediacy of 1st person conveyed perfectly a child’s fear and coping mechanisms. It served the story. He pulled it off so seamlessly, I didn’t even notice the shift in style until I was almost finished with the book.

I want the author to disappear when I’m reading. I can count on one hand the number of times recognizing craft on a first read has been a good thing. Bump me out of the story to show off what a brilliant revolutionary stylist you are, and you’ve just lost me forever.

But I’m just a trailer park/Wal-Mart kinda reader—you know, one of those hicks who indiscriminately buys a shitload of books regardless of what more tasteful and scholarly folk think of them—so what do I know?

Yes, Virginia, I have been removing sites from the blogroll again.

I have had enough of the hostility toward books, toward authors, toward publishers, and most especially toward other readers who don’t share one’s tastes or aesthetic sensibilities or, god forbid, buy their books at an unacceptable location (WTF?!).

It’s been deteriorating for a while, and it’s no longer fun or interesting or informative. It’s just a place to gather and bitch like a bunch of high school girls.

I didn’t like those girls 20 years ago, and my tolerance has since decreased. The difference is, now I’m not required by law to stay in the same room.

You Are Donner

The most loveable and sweet reindeer, you’re also a total dork! Why You’re Naughty: You keep (accidentally) tripping the other reindeer while flying. Why You’re Nice: You’re always smiling, even if you’ve fallen flat on your horns.

Which of Santa’s Reindeer Are You?

I don’t know how sweet and lovable I am, but I am such a dork, I may even be two dorks.

The tripping? Not an accident. Bwahahahaha!

Now, to change gears completely, Mightygodking deserves some seriously heavy petting, at least, after his dismantlement of Mr. You Bitches Drove Nice Guys Like Me to Extinction (Because You Didn’t Screw Us When We Pretended to Be Civilized Human Beings for Two Minutes That One Time). “Yeah” to every point he makes.

I’ve been compiling my new submission list, gathering all the details I can find into one document so I don’t have to be flitting all over the web looking up whether Agent A, who accepts both snail and e queries, really prefers one or the other, and all that tedious stuff that is so much less fun than writing.

Agent Z was on the “Possible, Needs More Research” list and looked viable… until I got to what he expects from his clients.

Must be willing to change every word in your manuscript if I say so. Um… no. I’m open to editorial suggestions and will implement any I feel improve the product, but at the end of the day, it’s my story. If you hate it so much you want to change every word, why would you even offer to represent it?

I expect my clients to produce four to six books a year. Holy crap. I couldn’t do that even if I didn’t have a day job, a kid and a dog and a house to take care of, and a life apart from BICHOK. Also, I gotta say, unless you’re Nora Roberts or writing exclusively at abbreviated length (category or novellas), I have to question the quality of a story that goes from conception to delivery in two or even three months. I will never believe it wouldn’t benefit from an additional six months of gestation. I realize more product = more money for everybody, but there’s an element of artistry in writing that’s going to suffer from mass production, no matter how good you are.

Must have a flexible schedule so edits can be returned immediately. Dude, now you want me at your beck and call 24/7?

.

This guy wants an awful lot of control over his clients, who are exclusively romance writers and therefore predominantly female. Ringing any bells? That’s right, he’s the embodiment of the patriarchal domination establishment oppressing women through the innocuous guise of romance novels!

Needless to say, due to our disparate views of what constitutes the ideal (or even minimally tolerable) author-agent relationship, he didn’t make it to the “I Grant You the Opportunity to Participate in the Steel Cage Match to Determine Which of You Lucky Agents Wins the Privilege of Representing Me” list. There is no “Crap, None of the Good Agents Want Me, Time to Beg the Second-Rate Ones” list (because I’m all over “if you can see it, you can be it” in the new year), and even if there was, this guy wouldn’t be on it.

He’ll always have a place of honor on the “Men Who Gave Me the Creeps” list, though.