October | 2014 | Bad Menagerie

A Halloween Delight: Mr. Katz is a Zombie

Oct 31 2014

Friend of the blog, M.C. Lesh has a new book out! Mr. Katz is a Zombie, the first in the Goethalsburg Ghost Squad series, starring J.D. & the Horn boys.

This delightful middle-grade romp explores what happens when a boy who can talk to ghosts ends up on the wrong side of an unpredictable spell book and a best friend looking for trouble.

Catastrophe looms in North Goethalsburg!

When twelve-year-old J.D. is tricked into taking possession of a book of spells, his best friend turns their teacher into a zombie. The zombification of Mr. Katz creates general chaos and a not-so-terrific time for near-genius J.D.

Teamed with his best friend Rodney, twin troublemakers, and an obnoxious ghost, J.D. must figure out how to change Mr. Katz back from one of the undead before he:

1. Escapes the janitor’s closet;
2. Eats their brains;
and
3. Wears J.D.’s spleen as a hat.

Can four boys armed with a slingshot, two boxes of jelly donuts, and a handy zombie guide battle their mindless teacher and live to tell?

Probably not.

You’ll have to read to find out.

Buy on Amazon UK – Buy on Amazon US

Halloween sale — today get the Kindle version for only 99 cents!

Welcome to Bad Menagerie, M.C. Lesh! Come answer ALL OUR QUESTIONS.

How did you originally come up with the idea for this story? Were you inspired to write the book following your own experiences with zombies?

M.C. Lesh: Good question! I wish I could say it’s from personal experience, but I haven’t encountered any zombies in real life. That I know of. I had a math teacher in high school who was like a zombie though.

And the book came about as a family endeavor — can you tell us a little bit about that?

My creative/life partner, The Talented Mr. Bear aka Steve, is an art director who’s been involved in graphic design and publishing since his college days working on the school magazine where his highlight moment was meeting Cesar Chavez. He created the cover as well as the book’s layout and typesetting. Mr. Katz is a Zombie is our second book collaboration.

My son has a history of turning in all of his school papers with cartoons in the margins. In the past, he’s created memorable characters such as Cat Frog, and also Zombie Seeds! (Not a character so much as a concept.) He contributed the illustrations, and a couple of them make me laugh every time I see them. He’s also the one who urged me on with this project. So the three of us put our talents together, and I think it worked! (If it doesn’t work, I blame him. Kids are handy for that.)

What’s your favorite thing about Mr. Katz is a Zombie?

I’m a sucker for baked goods, so maybe the jelly donuts? And/or Rodney and his massive head of hair. Rodney is kind of my spirit animal.

Did you ever have any ‘uh oh’ moments while writing, like maybe not being sure how J.D. was going to get out of a situation?

Only a lot!

Are you a pantser or plotter?

I’m a pantser. I usually know how I’m going to start and how I’m going to end. It’s the middle parts I’m not so sure about.

Favorite thing about being a writer? Suckiest thing?

Favorite? Creating characters, mostly entertaining myself, and hoping that the things I find funny will work for the reader.

Suckiest? Putting your piece of work out into the world and hearing nothing but crickets chirping in the background.

Self-Publishing a children’s book is more challenging than, say, a romance. Are teachers and librarians a useful resource for spreading the word among your target audience?

Yes! Teachers, librarians, and parents are usually in charge of what kids end up reading. (Except in my house growing up where my parents left me alone to read whatever I wanted.) I’ve had a couple of people tell me they’re donating paperbacks of Mr. Katz to their local school library as well as a children’s hospital library. This makes me bounce in my chair a little. (And now my dog is looking at me with her head tilted.) I’m hoping to eventually do some school/library visits down the road. That would be so cool! I’m getting excited just thinking about it.

You took the step of creating a Twitter account for JD. Are you enjoying interacting as your character?

Tweeting as J.D. helps me to keep myself entertained during this whole process, and J.D. has some amazing Twitter friends. (You know who you are.) I haven’t been as active lately, but I hope to remedy that situation soon.

What is J.D.’s worst fear in the world? What’s yours?

At this point, I’d say J.D.’s worst fear in the world is getting stuck in a closet with Mary-Alice for an extended period of time.

My worst fear? Oh, gosh. So many. Flying, roller coasters, global pandemic, my son not finishing his college applications.

What was the scariest thing that happened to you at JD’s age?

The time I walked in on my sister and her boyfriend. And I’ll stop right there.

What will J.D. be doing this Halloween?

Trick-or-treating with Rodney, getting ALL of the candy, then going on a stakeout with his ghostbusting parents at an abandoned insane asylum. Kind of a typical weekend, actually.

What’s your favorite Halloween candy?

Heath bars, Almond Joys, Twix bars, Kit Kat bars, and Mars bars — because I can’t possibly choose just one. (Please don’t make me!)

Best advice if we run into any zombies this Halloween?

Walk away. Just walk away. They’re zombies, and they move at, like, .05 miles per hour.

We understand the next Goethalsburg Squad book is coming soon. Can you tell us about it?

Oh, boy, can I? In Martin Barton Might Be A Werewolf, J.D. is retained — doesn’t that sound fancy? — by ten year old Miguel Vega to investigate after Miguel hears howling outside his window. J.D. is soon plunged into a world of fangs, fur, gold chains, and disco. Book 2 of my Goethalsburg Ghost Squad series will be ready to unleash on the world in the Spring of 2015.

Thank you, Bad Menagerie, for hosting me! I hope you get only good things in your trick-or-treat bags and no rolled pennies or those horrible little strawberry candies left over from last Christmas’s Swiss Colony basket.

Thank YOU for joining us here today! You can keep up with JD’s adventures on twitter @JDHornBoys, and find M.C. Lesh online at Storyrhyme.com.

Buy Mr Katz is a Zombie on Amazon UK – Buy Mr Katz is a Zombie on Amazon US

Remember, there’s a Halloween sale now — 99 cent ebook! HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

My Typical Day On Set

Oct 30 2014

“Lazy sleeping barnstar” by LadyofHats – Own work. Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Wait.

RUNRUNRUN WORK NOW

Wait.

NEEDYOUWORKNOW — false alarm. Go back to waiting.

Wait.

Read friend’s book. Do some calculus proofs. Brainstorm names for next writing project.

Wait.

Read some short stories. Be glad I have a Kindle.

Surf the web. Read email. Write this blog post. Watch my phone battery dwindle.

Check in. Wait.

Chat with coworkers. Write some scenes in longhand on the back of the day’s sides.

Wait.

NOW NOW NOW EVERYTHING NOW BURNING DAYLIGHT

Wrap.

How I Met Mr. Cow

Oct 27 2014

After graduating from college, I decided to pursue a Masters degree. I applied to eleven schools, and was accepted to one. The school that accepted me was celebrated throughout the world for being all that and a bag of chips, so, full of wide-eyed excitement, I packed up my bags and left. I’d lived in three different countries prior to moving there, so I foolishly thought I’d settle in just fine.

Post4a Read More

Italicizing Non-English Words in English-Language Fiction

Oct 23 2014

“Cyrillic JA”. Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons – https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cyrillic_JA.png#mediaviewer/File:Cyrillic_JA.png

I’m a bit late in posting this, but:

There was a really fascinating conversation going on a while ago about whether writers should italicize non-English words in English-language fiction. Daniel José Older made a very funny and incisive argument against it, and Kameron Hurley added more excellent thoughts (link to Hurley’s blog; has Older’s video as well — watch it and come back; it’s well worth it).

I love what Older said about non-English words just being part of the flow. There are a few Cantonese and Swatowese words I grew up with that are just part of my vocabulary, and it would feel downright bizarre to italicize them in writing. What I call my grandparents, for instance, or the names of certain foods or places, or, for that matter, my name. There’s no othering in either my inflection nor my cognition when I use these words in conversation; it would never even occur to me to italicize them even though I’m not fluent in the languages:

“I picked up some dumplings and bao today.”

“When I was at Amah and Ayeh’s apartment . . .”

“My sister grew up calling me Jeh-Je.”

And when I’m talking to people who have some Mandarin knowledge, we go even further with our mixing. Here’s some goofiness from a thread on Absolute Write (quoted with permission):

“Yaaayy totes hen gaoxing!”

“Putputt, there’s another recipe for ya. Durian, intestine, and stinky tofu-stuffed jiaozi with dough made out of cornflakes.”

“*hides under the fanzhuo* Ni keyi haz them. Wo hai pa.”

“Screw han zi! Ask Little Ming, not too long ago I mistakenly said “I poured from Indonesia”. Hate han zi.”

“Bu tai hao. Very bu tai hao.”

And these were written communications, in mixed company (Mandarin-speaking AND non-Mandarin speaking AND partially-Mandarin speaking), and nobody was italicizing. But still, everyone got which words were Chinese — I think! — and when I think about italicizing, I cringe. “Yaaayy totes hen gaoxing!” or “screw han zi!” looks bizarre and reads with entirely the wrong cadence.

So, YEAH. I agree with Older and Hurley!

. . . most of the time.

Because the natural next step was to think, wait, I have a few non-English sentences in my novels and I’ve italicized them. Why did I do it? Should I remove it? Should I stop doing it?

And I struggled for a few minutes, because I couldn’t figure out why italicizing those words in my books felt right, when in the above examples it would feel so, so, so wrong. But after a while I realized: they’re not words my main character understands. She’s not meant to understand them; on some meta-level they’re being transcribed phonetically into the narrative. I also want to signal to the readers that they’re not meant to understand them either, necessarily; even from context — part of what I’m trying to do with italics is signaling to the audience that their eyes can gloss over it a bit.

Here are the passages:

“That’s stupid,” I muttered, but without any vitriol, and without any real belief behind the words. “You should be able to axiomitize everything. How else can you know right from wrong?”

Rio was smiling again. “If you’re asking me personally, you know how. Sumasampalataya ako sa iyong tsarera.”

“What does that mean?” He didn’t answer me, but I knew already.

is from book one, and:

“Not the time for pleasantries,” I snapped over my shoulder as I went back over to Checker and his laptop. “Get to work or get out.”

“No es tan antipática como parece,” Arthur said to Pilar, with a sideways glance at me. “Te lo prometo.”

He was definitely mocking me. Ass. “Fuck you,” I said. “I assume.”

is in book two (unless it hits the cutting room floor).

I keep looking at the passages. Changing the italics to plain text. Changing it back. Reading them over. And I think that if I don’t italicize them, it makes the reader stumble a bit, doesn’t signal clearly enough that these words are about to be a chunk of text they don’t recognize and aren’t necessarily meant to, especially as there’s no fluent switching from those characters elsewhere in the text.

But what about characters who do mix languages fluently? Does that make a difference? Does it make sense then to non-italicize, even if my POV character doesn’t speak those languages, if, regardless of her fluency, the speaking characters are dropping in those words as part of the normal flow of conversation and expecting her to get what they mean? Does it make a difference that, in both cases above, the characters speaking are saying something in front of her that they deliberately don’t want her to understand?

I think it might.

I’ve realized I also had a few sprinkled-in words that come from non-English languages, in which everyone was assumed to understand the meaning, and I’ve already gone through and de-italicized those. (It’s fascinating for me that I italicized them without thinking in the first place!) But in these cases where I really am trying to offset the text as not understandable, the choice doesn’t feel quite as clear.

After a lot of mulling, I think I think that in the above cases the italics work to offset the words as something foreign — foreign to the POV character, that is. Another thing I loved about Older’s video was his stress at the end about how language is about communication and understanding, and in that vein, I think I think that italics can be used — or not used — in a judicious manner to change the readers’ perceptions of a non-English language’s appearance in the narrative.

But I’m not sure. And there’s the whole question of othering to consider, and how italicizing non-English languages can contribute to that. So I’m very much interested in hearing other people’s thoughts on this, and I might still change my mind. It’s definitely something I’m going to put a lot more thought into from now on!

(And now I deliberately want to go and write a short story that mixes languages, as I’ve been thinking about it so much lately. For more great thinkiness on mixing non-English into English language fiction, try John Chu’s utterly fantastic essay in The Book Smugglers, and then go read his excellent Hugo-winning short story “The Water That Falls From Nowhere.”)

Fiercely Awesome Women: Triệu Thị Trinh

Oct 22 2014

Inspired by Rejected Princesses, I’ve decided to draw a few strips about lesser known women who owned it in their time. (In case you guys have never heard of Rejected Princesses, it is amazing. Do check it out.) For the first post in this new series, I present to you . . . Triệu Thị Trinh.

Sometime around the year 220 AD, when the Chinese army occupied Vietnam, they had the bad luck of encountering Triệu Thị Trinh, aka Lady Triệu. She was said to be 9-ft tall, with breasts 3-ft long (I have no idea why the breasts were mentioned, but the texts I found seem to think that’s important, so there you go, that’s how long her breasts supposedly were). Anyway, the Chinese were trying to “civilize” the native people, and she was having none of it.

Make It Stop. Inspiration Overload

Oct 20 2014

One of the most common questions I’m asked when I describe the novel I’m writing is, “How the heck did you come up with the idea?”

Chuck Wendig recently included a version of this question in a post on his brilliant Terrible Minds website Ten Things To Never Say To a Writer. His reply? “The real question is, how do we make them stop?” (He’s far more eloquent and picturesque than I am, so after you’re done here, go read his post. )

It made me both laugh and sob a little.

There’s no question I’ve forgotten ten times as many story nuggets as I’ve used. A hundred times as many. And when people ask me that question, it almost always takes me a little aback. “How do you not find stories every day?” I want to ask.

Many (if not most) writers are inundated with ideas. We scribble in notebooks and on the torn-off flaps of the envelopes our bills come in. We find half-legible sentences in weird places all the time. Under a layer of coupons, receipts and limp celery leaves in the recyclable grocery bag, on moldy-edged napkins in the cooler last used at the Sasquatch Music Festival—two years ago. Sometimes we snap pictures of unusual incidents of fog in the woods or a rusty bike leaning against a street sign or we try, try to sear into our memories all the details of a woman waging a losing battle between her skirt and a gust of wind.

Inspiration comes from everywhere, and frankly, it’s annoying.

So many ideas want to be stories. We’d like to make use of them all, but there are only so many waking hours, and the truth is, most of the inspirations don’t make for good stories. They’re scenes, or settings, or character studies, elements essential for every story, but not stories themselves. If a writer tries to capture all of her ideas and make stories out of them, she’ll accomplish nothing. I’ve been down this road, spent weeks, months trying to make a story out of something that was nothing more than a great scene.

The maturity of knowing what makes a capital-S Story and what doesn’t, of being able to recognize early on what has full potential, is one of the hallmarks of a writer in control of his craft, in my opinion. Not that one shouldn’t explore story ideas, or that the notebooks filled with half-formed plots or the partially-written novels are wasted effort. Every job, every craft requires its learning stages. Only, when a writer gets to the place where he or she can look at an idea, an inspiration, and judge its capacity to become a full-fledged story, she has achieved a certain level of professionalism. The ability to look at one’s own ideas with a measure of objectivity.

As writers, we have to cull through all of those inspirations flooding in every day, be choosy.

That oh-so-famous quote in writers’ circles: Kill your darlings.

It’s attributed to many famous inksters but the first evidence of its use is by Arthur Quiller-Couch, a not-so-famous lecturer on writing craft. Generally, the advice is thrown around for scenes or sentences, bits of your story you should edit out. But it also applies to ideas. No matter how badly I want to write a novella about the couple “having intimate relations while the woman was getting a chest tattoo,” I can’t. Because that, my friends, will not a story make.

So I’m tucking away the scrap of the Crate and Barrel catalog on which I scribbled that bit.

For now.

Honestly, that one’s just too good not to use someday.

Image attribution: Belarusian industrial design duo Solovyovdesign's Brain-shaped lightbulb

Famous Authors and Their Legacies

Oct 17 2014

Last but not least . . .

Are Readers Satisfiers or Optimizers? Should Writers Be Satisfiers or Optimizers?

Oct 16 2014

By Tom Morris (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons

I was talking with a friend the other day about the two loose groupings of consumers: satisfiers and optimizers. Satisfiers buy the first thing that meets some level of predetermined standards, and then they go on their merry way. Optimizers need to compare and contrast until they are sure they are getting the best product relative to the rest of the market, and then they purchase.

Me, I’m an optimizer in far more product categories than I’d like to be, and I’m trying to be less of one. I think I’d save a lot of time and not be any less happy if I made purchases more quickly and with a minimum of research. But that’s neither here nor there.

Point is, my friend’s and my conversation veered toward advertising for products. He explained that a lot of times companies will look at (1) whether their consumers are likely to be satisfiers or optimizers, and (2) where they are in the market relative to everyone else. For instance, far more people are optimizers when it comes to large purchasers like cars. So car commercials are far more likely to compare themselves to other brands and try to convince you that they are the best model.

On the other hand, for daily sundries that tend toward consumers using a satisfier model, companies are more likely to try to breed brand loyalty and get people to try them, find they’re “good enough,” and stick with them.

I started thinking about all this in reference to book production.

You see, considering I’m an optimizer as a consumer, it just makes sense to me to be an optimizer as a producer. I can’t imagine putting out a book that was any less than the best I could possibly make it.^[1]

This is probably the way I’ll continue writing books, because I’m a Type-A perfectionist and I’ll want to claw out my brain if I publish at a lower quality standard. But I’m really not sure it’s the optimal way of writing books in general.

Because: let’s say that after the second draft or so my books ended up at, say, 97 percent of what I could make them, and it took months to cover those extra three percentage points. If I said, “screw it” and released at 97 percent, those months could be spent writing the next book — the next book, which I could then release a lot faster, when it was at 97 percent.

And how would this affect my sales? I’d probably make more money due to the quicker release schedule and the fact that enough of my readers are satisfiers (with a standards threshold at a level that wouldn’t cut out my 97-percent-of-what-I-could-make-it writing) for my slight quality drop not to matter in whether they buy the book. (Since most readers aren’t going to buy just one book, it probably makes sense for readers to act as satisfiers when book-buying anyway.)

Personally, I’ve sometimes been annoyed when authors I otherwise enjoy have put out their next book and I read it and I feel that it’s good, but not as good as it could be. I get ticked off as a reader. But the thing is, they’re probably doing the smart thing! They’re probably maximizing their own sales.

And the revelation to me here was that I’m betting those authors are acting as satisfiers with regard to their own work: they wrote a book they consider “good enough” to release, and according to the market, they’re right. They then went on to write their next book. It’s smart. It’s savvy.

Damn, I should consider doing it, too.

Alas, all this is mostly out of interest’s sake, because I’m not sure I’m psychologically capable of doing it with my writing, even though part of me would really like to. But you know, maybe there are other things I can approach with a satisfier mentality from the producer side — things like book promotion, blog posts, tweets, for instance. Maybe there are things I can say are “good enough” rather than trying to make them the “best,” and thus free up plenty of revision time for . . . well, writing and editing that next book! Because will my “best” be able to lead to optimizers choosing me anyway? Will my production optimization really make such a difference that it would lead to me being the top of the market for consumer optimization to choose?

Probably not. Probably my “good enough” and my “best” will just meet slightly different thresholds for satisfiers, and optimizers will more likely pass me by anyway, because come on, “best in the market” is a ridiculous goal to have. So acting as an optimizer as a producer is still only meeting the demand of satisfier consumers, only my approach is as if my audience is optimizers, meaning I waste ridiculous amounts of time trying to at least optimize within my own psyche before putting things out into the world. Instead, I should be attempting to reach a certain bar and hook everyone who will read according to that standard. I should approach my work as a satisfier myself and put it out there when it’s “good enough.”

I’m still going to make my books the best I can make them, because, particularly with my self-published work, I’m the author and the publisher and I CAN and I’m stubborn that way. But I think I’m going to start trying a lot harder to approach other areas of my life with a “good enough” mentality!

We’ll see how that goes.

Footnotes (↵ returns to text)

I haven’t actually heard anyone talk about being a satisfier/optimizer as a producer before — i.e., releasing a product that reaches some standard of quality versus releasing a product that is the best one can make it. It’s possible that by using the terms this way I’m being completely confusing to anyone who actually knows anything about marketing! I also want to note that the way I’m using the words, optimizing as a producer does not mean the product is going to be the optimal product for consumers. Being an optimizer as a producer does, however, match the psychology of being an optimizer as a consumer — at least, so it seems to me — as, if you’re not willing to buy anything other than the best the market offers, you’re less likely to be willing to release anything that’s not the best you can make it. tl;dr of this footnote: I’m not in marketing and may not actually know what I’m talking about at all; but I’m musing because I find it interesting!↵

A Typical Day at the Office

Oct 15 2014

A Summary of THE EQUALIZER

Oct 14 2014

Image Credit: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0455944/

WARNING: This post contains SPOILERS about the the movie The Equalizer

I was super excited to see The Equalizer, not just because of all the hype surrounding it, but also Denzel Washington. But I came out really disappointed. And angry. I thought of doing a rant, but you know what they say about a picture and a thousand words. So here it is: The Cow’s Summary of . . .

Archive - October 2014

A Halloween Delight: Mr. Katz is a Zombie

Like this:

My Typical Day On Set

Like this:

How I Met Mr. Cow

Like this:

Italicizing Non-English Words in English-Language Fiction

Like this:

Fiercely Awesome Women: Triệu Thị Trinh

Like this:

Make It Stop. Inspiration Overload

Like this:

Famous Authors and Their Legacies

Like this:

Are Readers Satisfiers or Optimizers? Should Writers Be Satisfiers or Optimizers?

Like this:

A Typical Day at the Office

Like this:

A Summary of THE EQUALIZER

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Archive - October 2014

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