Ichthyoelectroanalgesia!

A few weeks ago a fellow writer invited me to tag along to a talk at Oxford University Press about the Oxford English Dictionary, the most complete English dictionary in the world. One of the editors told us about how they put the dictionary together and all the work that goes into it. They have hundreds of readers around the world who scour through newspapers, magazines, and books looking for new words or new uses for old ones. An interesting detail was that the editors reject the majority of words people send in because they are too new, too rare, too regional, or just plain misused.

I gave them a word that probably will get rejected. Ichthyoelectroanalgesia! If you know your Classical languages, you know this means using an electric fish as a pain reliever. I came across the word in an archaeology article about old Roman and Parthian medical recipes, including one that involved pressing an area of your body that's giving you trouble against an electric fish. Apparently the low charge will relieve the pain. No, I haven't tried it.

This word stuck with me for a couple of years until I got swept up in the zine movement of the mid Nineties. Actually it started way before that, so I was hitting the second wave. Anyway, I produced my own zine dedicated to travel and archaeology and called it, you guessed it, Ichthyoelectroanalgesia. I only did four issues before I went on to other things, but I had a distribution of about two hundred and met lots of interesting people through the mail, including some I still correspond with.

I Googled my beloved word and found that two archives have copies of my zine. I've passed into zine history! One is for science fiction fanzines, which is strange since mine wasn't an sf zine, but I did trade with some sf fanzines so maybe that's where they got it from.

I'm also very proud I got to stump an editor at the OED with a word. :-)

Missouri history book wins award

Earlier this year I blogged about an interesting new book on Missouri history, Mystery of the Irish Wilderness, by Leland and Crystal Payton of Lens and Pen Press. This is a fascinating account of an Irish Catholic community founded in the Ozarks that mysteriously disappeared during the Civil War. It's solidly researched and filled with the beautiful photos for which the Pyatons have become well known in Missouri.

Well, their hard work has finally paid off, and they've won a gold medal at the 2009 Independent Publisher Book Awards for Best Regional Non-Fiction.

Congratulations Leland and Crystal. You deserved it!

New Writing Blog

I have teamed up with eight other writers to start Charge of the Write Brigade, a blog dedicated to the genres of fantasy, science fiction, and horror. It promises to be quite a useful blog. I hope to learn a lot myself, since I'm one of the least published writers on it! The first post, by yours truly, went online today.

London Book Fair Attracts Global Publishing Community

As I mentioned in my last post and my other blog, I recently attended the London Book Fair. This year's theme was India, and the Indian companies had a large section in the middle of the exhibition area. Not only were there lots of publishers, but there was also a concerted effort by Indian printers to become a rival to China for affordable printing services. The Indians put on some good cultural events like interviews with prominent authors such as Vikram Seth, and a troupe of Indian dancers would pop out of nowhere at random moments to do their thing. I just wish they gave away free curry like some publishers gave away free beer!

Lesser-known countries were there too. Iceland had a big booth with some beautiful books. Azerbaijan had a booth promoting both its publishing and its tourism. Dubai was promoting an upcoming children's book fair. And despite being in the "United Kingdom", Scotland and Wales had booths of their own!

Two other booths caught my eye. One was for the Muslim Writers Awards, taking place May 27 in London. The shortlisted titles were on display and included a lot of interesting work by Muslim women. I also liked the booth for the African Books Collective, which distributes African books to overseas markets. They had a huge range of titles from all over the continent, but sadly none from The Gambia. I guess I'll have to wait until I get there to find out more about that country's writers.

The London Book Fair: Sodom Or Shangra-La?

I spent most of this week at the London Book Fair, a massive meeting of agents, publishers, and printers from around the world. It was a truly international fair. Englishmen gave sales pitches in Mandarin, Arabs chatted in Norwegian, and the freebies included everything from Saudi dates to Icelandic postcards. Books can really bring the world together. Or is it money that brings the world together? Whatever.

I must say some aspects of the fair bothered me. Business suits were far more in evidence than tweed jackets, and I didn't see anyone reading anything other than a contract until lunchtime of my second day. Then I saw a woman actually reading a book! Surrounded by this feverish buying and selling of writing talent, I felt like pulling a Christ-in-the-temple move and throwing the moneylenders out, shouting "Get thee to a library!"

Mixed literary metaphors aside, the fair gave me a quick education in the sheer immensity of the publishing world. It also gave me a new appreciation for the business end of the process. If it wasn't for these folks, my books wouldn't be for sale anywhere, and wouldn't be available in several different countries. I had an enjoyable and productive time, as you can read in my other blog, and I'll be posting more about the fair in this blog and that one.

Next time: trying to scam a free press trip without knowing Russian.

Outlaw Tales of Missouri Is Published!

This week TwoDot Press, a subsidiary of Globe Pequot Press, released my latest book, Outlaw Tales of Missouri. The last in what I call my "Missouri trilogy" of state history books, it covers the famous and not-so-famous characters that gave Missouri the nickname of "The Outlaw State".

I've dredged the files of the State Historical Society of Missouri to find forgotten stories and little-known facts, like the tale of the Yocum brothers, who made their own silver currency in the Ozarks that was valued more than money issued by the federal government. I've also looked at familiar tales from new angles. No book on Missouri outlaws would be complete without a chapter on the James brothers, but rather than focus on Jesse, I concentrate on his older brother Frank, who got into outlawry earlier and got out sooner. Unlike Jesse, he managed to die a peaceful death.

It's a fun read, if I do say so myself, and fans of Missouri history and the Wild West will find a lot here they like. Civil War buffs will like it too, since there are chapters on the notorious William Quantrill and a lesser-known rogue who went under the alias "Harry Truman" but who was definitely NOT related to the president from Missouri!

The book is available here. My other Missouri history books include Missouri: An Illustrated History and It Happened in Missouri.

First Battlefield Of A Black American Regiment Preserved

The Missouri Department of Natural Resources has recently aquired the site of the Battle of Island Mound and plans to preserve it as a state park. About fifty miles south of Kansas City, it was here on 29 October 1862 that the First Kansas Colored Volunteers defeated a large Confederate guerrilla force in what was the first engagement of an American black regiment.

The First Kansas had been organized by Jim Lane, a radical abolitionist senator from Kansas. The regiment was, in fact, illegal, as Abraham Lincoln had expressly forbidden him from arming blacks. Senator Lane was convinced that the only way the North would win the fight on the frontier was if it armed the black population. The First Kansas was made up of runaway slaves from Missouri and Arkansas, free blacks from Kansas, and mixed black/Indian volunteers from the Indian Territory.

The Department of Natural Resoucres plans to have the site fully open to the public in time for the Civil War Sesquicentennial in 2011.

I wrote about this battle for an issue of Missouri Life magazine several years ago and am currently pitching a book proposal on the regiment, so this comes as great news to me. Another researcher, Chris Tabor, has made an excellent website on the battle. He has also written a short monograph on the topic titled The Skirmish at Island Mound, now sadly out of print.

Interesting New Book On Missouri History

I've written three books on Missouri history and I'm still amazed at how many interesting stories there are still to be told about this state's fascinating past. One of them is the tale of a dedicated Irish priest who set up a colony for Irish immigrants in the rough hill country of the Ozarks. Mystery of the Irish Wilderness by Leland and Crystal Payton is the latest release from Lens & Pen Press. The Paytons are well known for their beautiful photographs of the Ozark region, and like their earlier books this volume is filled with them. The text is interesting too, telling of Father John Joseph Hogan's efforts to develop and serve two different colonies in widely separated regions of Missouri, one in the northern prairie, and the other in the Ozarks near the southern edge of the state. The first colony prospered, but the other disappeared during the chaos of the Civil War.


The Paytons meticulously reconstruct what could have happened to the colonists, and found that at least some seemed to have returned to the region after the fighting stopped. Most, however, moved away to parts unknown, so an enduring air of mystery still surrounds Hogan's Ozark colony. To complete the story, the book covers Hogan's rise to become the first bishop of Kansas City and St. Joseph's, and the successful fight by twentieth century preservationists to get the "Irish Wilderness" declared National Forest.

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in Missouri, Irish-American, or Catholic history. I also enjoyed the Paytons' book See the Ozarks, also from Lens & Pen Press, about the development and reinvention of the rural region into a major holiday center. It's full of images of vintage postcards, a hobby of mine, so it was an easy sell for me!

Madrid Guidebook Project

I've just signed up with Pulse Guides to write online updates for their new Madrid guidebook. Pulse Guides has a series called Night & Day for people who only have a few days in a city and want to get the best experience in a short time. Talented travel writer Lara Cummings wrote the book, but I'll be responsible for quarterly updates and expansions, a monthly letter on the website, and contributions to the Pulse Guides' newsletter. You can read my monthly letter, about Madrid's autumn art season, here.

I have a good feeling about this company. Too many guidebook publishers are still working off an old business model, thinking that simply coming out with a new edition every two or three years is enough to drive sales. Not when everyone checks the Internet for travel information! By publishing new information about every city every month, and putting a major expansion to each title online every quarter, Pulse Guides is going to leave traditional guidebooks in the dust. It's not the only guidebook to post online updates, but it's amazing how few others there are.

Getting Plagiarized

In my last post, I talked about plagiarism at the White House press office, and wondered if I've ever been plagiarized. Well, not two hours after posting that entry I found out that I have! Some idiot on LiveJournal cut and pasted the entire July issue of Newbie Writers onto his blog. I have a series of articles in that newsletter based on some of my entries on the Midlist Writer blog.

What an idiot. Just because something is freely available on the internet doesn't mean you can copy it. The newsletter isn't even on the webpage, but only available through a free subscription, so he's obviously a subscriber. Not only did he violate the copyright of the newsletter editor, but he violated my copyright and that of all the other contributors. Well, a certain "newbie writer" needs to educate himself before he gets sued. Both the editor and I have filed abuse reports to LiveJournal.

Interestingly enough, I can't provide you a link to Idiot's post because that would be aiding and abetting a breach of copyright, and therefore would open me up to getting sued too. Plus I wouldn't want to subject you to his insipid prose and atrocious poem about erectile dysfunction. No, I'm not making that last bit up. I really, truly wish I was, but I'm not.

Book Review: A Journey into Michelangelo's Rome

For travelers who like art, there's a new series out from Roaring Forties Press called ArtPlace, which looks at popular destinations through the eyes of their greatest artists. A couple of days ago on my other blog, Midlist Writer, I interviewed Angela K. Nickerson about how she landed a job writing A Journey into Michelangelo's Rome. Today I'm reviewing the book itself.

First off, the book is beautiful. There are high-quality color photos on every page, many being the talented work of Nickerson herself, and the layout is clean, well-presented, and friendly to the eye. The whole project shows the typical love of the book you get from the small press. There are also readable maps showing all the major sites where you can see Michelangelo's art in Florence and Rome.

The text is well-written, lively without being pat, informative without being burdensome, and at 163 pages, it's easily readable on the plane as you head to Italy. It is not a comprehensive guide to Rome, but rather a supplementary book for a visitor who already has a guidebook but would like to know more.

There were a couple of rocky bits in the first chapter, where Nickerson is talking about the world into which Michelangelo was born. Christopher Columbus did not land on the coast of North America, but on various Caribbean islands and the coasts of South and Central America. The Portuguese, not Spain, conquered Brazil. But once she gets to her main topic Nickerson hits her stride. She leads us through the master's early work in Florence, to his first commissions in Rome. She's especially good at putting him in the political and religious context of the time, where popes and powerful merchants tried to prove their worth through patronizing art. Sidebars fill us in on such things as Renaissance manners, some of Michelangelo's sonnets, and the Bella Figura of the Italian woman.

Even avid history readers will discover something new here. I had no idea the ruinous cost of expanding St. Peters was a major cause in the selling of indulgences (forgiveness for sins), which in turn was an important impetus for the Reformation.

In all, A Journey into Michelangelo's Rome is a worthy addition to your luggage.

Cover shot courtesy of Roaring Forties Press. Other images courtesy Angela K. Nickerson.

Grizzled Old Traveler Interviewed on Written Road (again!)

This week Abha Malpani asked a group of travel writers how important blogging was to their career. She was kind enough to ask my opinion even though I´ve only been at this less than two months. Click here to see our answers.

Yet More on the Lonely Planet Pseudo-Scandal

Can you tell my blood's up? While a certain Lonely Planet author has been getting a well-deserved thrashing on this blog and a few hundred others, I have to say that this whole thing does point out a few serious problems in the guidebook industry, things publishers should really look at if they want to improve their reputations and quality of their product. To wit:

1. Insufficient advances. The more you pay your writers, the longer they can stay in the destination and the more they can learn about it. Duh.

2. Insufficient fact checking. Most guidebooks aren't fact checked by the publisher, opening them up to lazy authors fudging facts or making things up.

3. Tight Deadlines. This can lead to writers cutting corners, yet no matter how tight a deadline the writer has, the book will still take months to come out, reducing its accuracy.

4. Rigid templates. The editors, the vast majority of whom aren't travelers themselves, sit in a boardroom and come up with a template they think will work great, and cram every guidebook into this template, whether it fits or not. This is contributing to the current implosion of the Moon Handbooks series.

5. Insufficient Marketing. Many publishers think that as long as they have a good distributor and get on a lot of bookstore shelves that they don't have to market their books. See number 4 above for what can happen.

Actually, all of these problems can be projected to a greater or lesser extent on all fields of publishing. While publishing makes tens of billions of dollars a year in the U.S. alone, it's very hard on individual authors and titles. Most titles sink, and many authors quit the game, or get embittered and bite the hand that fed them, like a certain Lonely Planet author.

But nobody is going to listen to me, are they?