Book Review: The Treasure of Israel

Copyright © 2011, Steven E. Houchin. All rights reserved.

Where do I begin with S. J. Munson's novel, The Treasure of Israel? From the first pages, the words sloppy, amateurish came to mind. The formatting is jarring, almost as if the author's rough manuscript was dumped into a book-espresso machine and vomited out as-is. Blank lines separate paragraphs. Scene breaks are marked (or is it marred?) by multiple blank lines and gaggles of asterisks.  The use of dashes is seriously inconsistent (some long, some short). Was no editing done by the publisher, Revival Nation Publishing of Ontario? Well, considering their web site is defunct, it's hard to tell the quality of their products. One profile of them indicates they dedicate profits to Christian ministry work -- a laudable goal, but no excuse for a sloppy end product. Maybe it is strictly vanity publishing.

To say the novel's characters are thin is an insult to all thin characters ever created. To quote Admiral Nimitz (Henry Fonda) from the movie Midway when discussing Objective A-F: "Thin? Damn near invisible!"  The main character is Michael Grammaticus, not to be confused with his father from the opening chapter, Michael Grammaticus. The storyline has a poor man's Da Vinci Code feel to it, where a secret left behind by the deceased Michael Sr. propels Michael Jr. into danger and intrigue following clues among Rome's ancient churches. And we have, of course, the obligatory accidental female sidekick babe who latches on for the ride. The dialog among the characters usually consists of pointless arguments and dribbling banter that pretends to be clever but fails miserably.

The only interesting part for me were the flashbacks that detailed the history behind the treasures of the ancient temple of Israel. If those portions are true, then it represents a significant body of research.  But, who knows how much is just made up?

Dive into a good Clive Cussler novel instead.  The Treasure of Israel is definitly a book to skip.

Scare Quotes

Copyright © 2010, Steven E. Houchin
(Originally written October 31, 2010)

It's Halloween, so I figured this topic was damned appropriate: Scare Quotes.

What is a Scare Quote? Here is the definition from Wikipedia:

Scare quotes are quotation marks placed around a single word or phrase to indicate that the word or phrase does not signify its literal or conventional meaning. In contrast to the nominal typographic purpose of quotation marks, the enclosed word(s) are not necessarily quoted from another source.

In other words, the phrase enclosed in quotes is not dialog and is not a quotation of someone else's words. Instead, the phrase is quoted to indicate that its meaning is not to be taken literally by the reader. The intention of the writer is to indicate sarcasm, skepticism, derision, irony, or doubt over accuracy.

Scare quotes usually show the attitude of the writer, or of the point-of-view character, about a certain subject.
Some examples:

• She demonstrated her "knowledge" on the subject by citing Oprah.
• The driver turned on a hip-hop station and pounded his hands against the steering wheel in time to the "music".
• A reporter began to recite his "objective" account of the incident.
• Our Great Imperious Leader signed an order giving the military full authority to engage in "population control" of undesirables.

When writing scare quotes, you use the same quotation marks that occur throughout your manuscript when writing dialog or including literal, quoted material. That is, if your dialog uses single quotes ('He's dead, Jim.'), then scare quotes use the same. If double quotes ("Take that, sucker."), then use doubles. Single quotes tend to be British formatting, doubles for American. Of course, when inside dialog, the opposite quote mark is used ("Oh, your 'music' is really great.").

An aspect of scare quotes that I consider controversial is this: does sentence-ending punctuation belong inside a scare quote as it does in dialog? Consider these examples:

Dialog: "Take that, sucker."
Scare quote: He hated Eddie's "music".
Versus: He hated Eddie's "music."

In the case of dialog, the ending period is clearly part of the dialog, and thus belongs inside the quotes. For the scare quote, the ending period is not part of the sarcasm, but simply terminates the narrator's sentence. Strict grammarians insist that, for American English, the punctuation must reside inside the quotes. To me, it just plain looks wrong; the punctuation is not part of the quoted phrase. And, one can find all over the place where authors do place the punctuation outside the quotes. So, it seems to me that this has now entered common usage.

One last thing. Some assert that writers shouldn't use scare quotes at all. The quotes can be replaced by phrases such as so-called, supposed, purported, self-styled, or alleged.

References:

Wikipedia, Scare quotes
Guide to Punctuation, University of Sussex (UK English), Scare Quotes
The Chronicle of Higher Education,What's 'Scary' About Scare Quotes
The Victorian Web,Punctuation Matters and Matters of Punctuation
Writer's Relief , Odds and Ends: Scare Quotes, Exclamation Points, Almost, and Plural Compounds

Manuscript Formatting Tips

Copyright © 2009, Steven E. Houchin

Writers often encounter frustrating manuscript editing and formatting problems when using an editor such as MS Word. Sometimes I'll see the problems in their manuscript, or they come to me (a software engineer in my other life) and ask, “How the heck do I ...?” Below, I list some of those issues and a solution. I use Office 2000, so the directions apply to that. But newer versions have analogous features.

Adding Headers and Page NumbersWhenever you pass your manuscript (or portions of it) to someone else to read, you should have title headers and page numbers on every page. In MS Word, this is done with the “Header and Footer” feature.

Headers place text at the top of each page. Footers place text at the bottom of each page. In MS Word, they are created or modified by selecting “Header and Footer” under the View menu, which pops up a little toolbar. Usually, you will want to put your name and book title at the upper left. For my novel Double Fire, I have: Houchin/DOUBLE FIRE

The page number is usually placed in the upper right, but some put it on the right in the Footer. [There is a button in the toolbar to switch between Header and Footer.] To put the page number on the right, press the Tab key in the Header until the cursor reaches the right-hand border, then press the “#” button in the toolbar. That will cause all your pages to be auto-numbered. When you’re done, press the toolbar’s Close button.

However, you’ll want your manuscript to have a title page, but won’t want a header or a page number on it. So, how do you accomplish that?

Go to your title page in the manuscript. Then, open the “Header and Footer” toolbar again, and press the little button that looks like an open book. The Page Setup screen opens. Check the “Different first page” box, then press OK. If you had any title page headers, they vanish! If you don’t have headers yet, you can now insert them on page 2.

But, a problem remains: the page after the title page is numbered 2. You’ll want it to be page 1. To fix this, select the Insert menu, then open “Page Numbers…”. On the Page Numbers screen, choose the Position and Alignment for your numbers, and clear the “Show number on first page” box. Next, press “Format…”, select the “Start At:” option and type in 0 (zero) as your first page number. Finish by pressing OK. When you add your page numbers in the Header (or Footer), the page after the title will be number 1.

Automatic Paragraph Indentation
Editors expect to see the first line of each paragraph in your manuscript indented. I’ve noticed that many writers do this by simply typing a few spaces. However, MS Word provides for automatic indentation, which should provide consistent looking paragraphs.

To enable this feature, open Word’s Format menu, then select Paragraph. Under its “Indents and Spacing” tab, look at the settings under “Indentation”. Select the “First line” value under the “Special” drop-list box. If you don’t like the default 1/2 inch indentation this provides, you can enter a different value in the “By” box.

The “Left” and “Right” settings will indent the whole paragraph from the left or right margins. This might be useful if you’re inserting a quotation or poem within a story.

Note that these settings apply only to the currently selected paragraphs (and any new one added immediately after). Unfortunately, to fix your manuscript, you must remove the spaces you manually inserted, highlight all paragraphs you wish to change, open the Paragraph menu, select the “First line” value, then click OK.

Paragraph Spacing
Have you run into the situation where blank lines appear in your manuscript between paragraphs? There they are, but you never intended to put them in; and they won’t go away.

Well, here’s the problem. Open Word’s Format menu, then select Paragraph. Under its “Indents and Spacing” tab, look at the settings under “Spacing”. The “Before” and “After” values specify how much space to add before/after the paragraph. Zero means no space between. To fix your manuscript, you must highlight the space between all incorrect paragraphs, set these “Before” and “After” values to zero, then click OK. You must do this for each paragraph that is wrong.

Unwanted Horizontal Lines
Have you ever discovered that unwanted horizontal lines have magically appeared in your manuscript? Word may create these lines automatically in response to certain things you type, such as ‘***’. It assumes you really wanted to insert a horizontal line, so it does.

First, you need to eliminate the lines that already pollute your manuscript. To do this, highlight a line of text before and after the horizontal line, then under the “Format” menu, select “Borders and Shading...”. In the pop-up window, select the “None” box and click OK. The line should go away. If you intended to insert a scene break here, replace the now-removed solid line with a blank line, then type the break characters WITHOUT PRESSING THE “ENTER” KEY AFTERWARD. You’ll need to do this for each unwanted solid line you find.

To turn off this automatic line-insertion nonsense, open the “Tools” menu and select “AutoCorrect...”. In the pop-up window, choose the “AutoFormat As You Type” tab, then uncheck the “Borders” box under “Apply as you Type”. Then click OK. You’ll have to do this for every doc file you have. After this, typing asterisks for a scene break should not mess up.