A Labyrinthine Read

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IMG_0204“Prometheus, thief of light, giver of light, bound by the gods, must have been a book.”–MZD

Title of this blog post might better be, “What Happens When You Follow the Reading Suggestions of a 17-year old Boy?”  Short answer: “A lot.” And not just any 17-year-old, one of Those Boys. Smart and intense and eager to become an Intellectual. We fell into a long conversation about reading at a cocktail party (he was with his parents), and I made some suggestions, and he hazarded one back.

Now I’ve read his book. I’m tempted to say, “or it read me,” not in the sense that the book bore any relationship to my life, inner or otherwise, but in being so outside my life experience in both form and content, it filled out a place I didn’t know was vacant.

The book is House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski, copyright 2000, but for many years before that, pieces of it had a samizdat-like distribution, were the subject of whispered Internet rumors, and finally attained a cult following. I bought the full-color edition, in which the word “house” appears in blue. (It’s not to be confused with John Guare’s 1966 play, House of Blue Leaves, which I have seen but, alas, do not remember.  Considering the multiple games the author plays, he might have had Guare’s title lurking around a corner of his maze-like mind.)

The book is the story of a house—one that is measurably bigger on the inside than the outside. An exterior wall contains a closet that stretches many feet into cold darkness (and eventually descends deeper than the diameter of the earth), but the closet cannot be detected from outside the house. The effects of the house on the family that lives there and the people who attempt (futilely) to understand the phenomenon is one story.

The young man who finds a trunkful of notes about the house, especially the films made of the explorations of it, and the histories of its inhabitants (and so much more) tells his own story in a series of rambly footnotes. Trying to cobble together the narrative of the house—that is, to create the book you are holding—apparently drives him mad.

There are photos, art objects, quotes, letters from the compiler’s institutionalized mother, an enormous index, and, throughout, academic-sounding footnotes from researchers into the house’s arcana.

Called, by turns, a horror story (the house), a love story (its residents), and a satire on academic criticism (the footnotes), it is an effortful read.  Danielewski received much praise upon its publication (4 stars from Amazon and Goodreads; 4.5 from B&N). Intriguing and mesmerizing in its content and bizarre—but perfectly apt—typographical presentation, smitten New York Times reviewer Robert Kelly, said, “I love the difficult, since it makes the easy seem finally possible.”

I’m not the first person to notice some at-least-superficial similarities between this book and last year’s Night Film, by Marisha Pessl. Both books give readers a collection of parts from which they can almost make their own construction. Perhaps it isn’t a coincidence that both deal with works of film, and in their construction variously bend time and use jump-cuts, split-screen, and the scene-setting of a movie.

You already knew all about this one, right? I’m just late to the party??

Nebraska

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Bad work karma has kept me away from this website, and I miss reaching out to my invisible friends.Just had to write to tell you, urge you, implore you to see Alexander Payne’s movie Nebraska (trailer here), with Bruce Dern and Will Forte. Dern is the aging dad who thinks he’s won a million dollars in a bogus sweepstakes and won’t be talked out of it.

The script spot-on captures the relations between parents and children and old married couples. Heartwarming, without being sappy. Moments of hilarity when we recognize ourselves. Reviewers who say Payne doesn’t like Nebraskans (he is one, after all) miss the whole point. People like the characters in the movie can be found everywhere, which is what gives the film its appeal.

Excellent performances from the large cast of the old man’s relatives and long-ago friends whose “congratulations!” come with a predatory gleam in the eye. (Rated 91 on the Tomatometer.)

Christopher Wallenberg interviewed Dern for the Boston Globe, and the actor—a top contender for an Academy Award Best Actor nomination and Best Actor winner at Cannes—says what he tried to do was find “real moments.” And find them he did. You can never be sure how much his character really hears or knows. More than he lets on, you may suspect. His son has the insight to look past the apocryphal sweepstakes win to see that what his father really wants is “something to live for.”

Forte plays a supporting role in both the film and the story, attuned to the possibilities of an impossible quest. Familiar to Saturday Night Live audiences, Forte nails this difficult role, making not only his character feel real, but also, by the self-effacing negative space he creates, enabling his cranky dad to become a fully realized, sympathetic person, too.  

Interesting that the film is shot in black and white, in Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, and Nebraska. The scenes of that lovely country—plus one long shot of Mt. Rushmore—“OK, we’ve seen it, let’s go,” says the cantankerous old coot—lose nothing in the cinematographer’s soft greys and charcoals. I once worked with a brilliant photographer who only shot in black and white. When I asked why, she said, “My black and white looks like color.” So does Nebraska’s! See these inspired photos.

Wars and Conquests

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IMG_0073The fertile territory within the Balkan States and the Great Plain of Hungary have been attractive targets for invasion and conquest for millennia.

First recorded: the Romans (who built an early road along the Danube), then the Magyars in 896. Their leader Arpad is considered the great founder of Hungary and he and the leaders of the other six founding tribes are commemorated in Budapest’s Millennium Monument—erected for the country’s 1000th birthday. Sturdy guys, these. Love the faces!

The influence of the Romans is still felt in the Balkans more than 2000 years later. The Romanian language is one of the romance languages—most akin to Italian—though it is more easily understood in its written rather than spoken form to people who know those languages. The Hungarian parliament, which wanted to emphasize its links to the Holy Roman Empire, used Latin as its official language until the 1840s.

IMG_0091In the 13th century, Eastern Europe was overrun by the Mongols—the Golden Horde—who swept westward from Central Asia almost as far Vienna. (This genetic infusion may explain the extra root on one of my wisdom teeth, which my endodontist says occurs most often among Asian people.) I see an echo of this influence in the costumes of the men in the horsemanship demonstration pictured above, which took place near Kalocsa, Hungary. As a few men in the distance herded sheep, the vision of ancient warriors thundering across the plain was vivid.

Starting in the 16th century, Hungary came under the influence of the Austrian Habsburgs, becoming part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. On the losing side of World War I, Hungary was stripped of more than seventy percent of its territory—including Transylvania, which went to Romania, and northern areas that went to Slovakia. The Transylvanian village Fiatfalva (now Filias) and northern town Dobsina (at the edge of the Slovak Paradise National Park) were, as best I can reconstruct, the birthplaces of my paternal grandfather and grandmother, respectively.

Fall 2013 - Danube Trip 065Other countries in the region—Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, Croatia—were subjected to repeated assaults by the Ottoman Turks, and many hilltop forts and fortifications remain that take advantage of natural rock formations—like Belogradchik in Bulgaria, pictured here. Built by the Romans and added to by the Bulgarians, the Byzantines, and the Turks, it covers many acres.

Fall 2013 - Danube Trip 023In World War II came the Nazi occupation, promptly followed by the Soviets, whose heavy hand is everywhere evident. Shortly after their withdrawal almost 25 years ago, came the Yugoslav civil war. National Geographic (I think) published a version of this exact scene of hope and rebirth, which I photographed in heavily damaged Vukovar, Croatia.

Politics Along the Danube

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Budapest and Kalocsa, Hungary.

Vukovar and Osijek, Croatia.

Belgrade, Serbia.

Vidin and Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria.

Bucharest, and Transylvania, Romania.

These are the reasons this blog and website have been on vacation!

There’s much to say about visiting these capitals and towns of Central and Eastern Europe. The first is, if you can, go!

The major cities are an odd mix of beautiful restored Baroque late-1800s architecture and grim Soviet construction. In many places, the endless ranks of dismal concrete apartment blocks are gradually being restored and, with new windows and a coat of paint to cover the grey, acquiring a sturdy cheerfulness.

The economies of all five countries suffered with the withdrawal of Soviet support for industry—leaving many abandoned factory buildings too expensive to pull down. The war in the former Yugoslavia and the sluggish economy worldwide dug an even deeper economic hole, which they are struggling to climb out of.

The politics are complicated and always have been. Borders and rulers have changed many times. Hungary now has a right-wing government and growing anti-Semitism. On the ride from the airport, the cab had to wait for demonstrators from the radical nationalist and neo-Nazi Jobbik party, and the driver muttered, “Shame.”

Both Croations and Serbs acknowledge their war was more complicated than commonly understood, though the underlying issues were of course interpreted somewhat differently in the two countries. One thing (of many) I hadn’t understood before is that the Muslims in the former Yugoslavia were not necessarily people who at some point had immigrated there from other countries, but were mostly Slavic people who during the many centuries of Ottoman rule changed their religion. Thus, that aspect of the war wasn’t a conflict between ethnic “Yugoslavs” and a foreign population they had never accepted, but an inter-familial conflict more akin to our own Civil War.  Always the bitterest.

Before he and his wife were executed on Christmas Day, 1989, Nicolae Ceausescu built, as we heard dozens of times, “the largest government building in the world, after the Pentagon,” in Romania’s capital, Bucharest. The vast and mostly empty reception rooms, intended to show the increasingly unhinged ruler’s power and prestige, are a monument to ego. While many Romanians are trying to make the best of this white elephant—“The Palace of the People” Ceausescu called it—visitors can only wonder whether the massive funds spent on the project might have been put to much more productive use.

When I figure out how to upload my photos to this new computer, I’ll have a more picturesque report.

What Lies Beneath

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Last week I wrote about the interview with Charles Baxter and his thoughts on story endings. I recognized his name at once as the author of a wonderful book—and if you are a writer of any kind whatsoever, you should phone your local independent book store immediately and order it—The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot. It’s part of the Graywolf Press “The Art of . . .” series, which Baxter edits.

Baxter calls subtext “the realm of what haunts the imagination: the implied, the half-visible, and the unspoken.” It takes a great deal of “surface bric-a-brac,” Baxter says, to indicate what is not being explicitly shown. Perhaps it’s counterintuitive, but hyperdetailing provides the revelation, not the invocation of great abstractions. He describes how this can be accomplished—infinitely easier to read about than to achieve, I assure you—in the book’s six essays. Readers, too, will find a lot to think about. In my case, in the “what all have I been missing?!” category.

The first essay is about staging—where people are “in the set.” Like actors on stage, a lot is revealed by who is sitting close to whom, who is listening, who reaches out a protective hand, who looks away. Body language. When characters speak, we may learn as much from how a line is delivered as from the words themselves. Literary fiction pays attention to all this and provides the reader a rich human experience; what I think of as “airport novels” don’t bother, and people who write four novels a year can’t.

Another essay talks about the unheard. People in real life often simply do not hear information that is threatening or stress-inducing. Or they don’t pay attention to others’ conversation because they are listening to their own interior dialog. Such non- or semi-listening may cause a character’s response to seem off point. It never is. It’s just a different point. And sometimes a character may want to steer the conversation elsewhere. And for a reason.

I have a post-it on my computer that reads “No Tennis Matches!” Writing dialog isn’t just about lobbing the conversational ball back and forth. Realistic conversation has digressions, slips of the tongue, interruptions, unexpected associations.

Here’s a conversation from Witness,* in which the two speakers—Matchmaker Marisa and Reluctant Genie—deliberately pursue separate agendas. Like two sides playing tug-of-war, each becomes increasingly insistent on controlling the contest. Genie’s final comment suggests she was listening all along. (Wally is her editor.)

“Leo should be here any minute.” Marisa gave Genie a sideways glance, accompanied by a sly smile.

“Tell me about this restaurant Riccardo is taking you to.”

“It’s a shame the two of you cannot join us.” Marisa came and sat on the low white-leather sofa across from her friend.

“It opened recently, he said. Read any reviews?”

“Leo is a very special man.” Marisa studied her manicure. “Riccardo says he’s been lonely.”

“If you like the place, take notes, and I’ll add it to my article.” Genie’s laugh was pitched a few notes higher than usual. The door buzzer sounded. “And here he is, with news of the world.”

Other essays in this engaging collection describe how to bring subtext to the surface, moving into the metaphorical, using facial expressions to show what’s going on inside, and “creating a scene,” in which he says, “In fiction we want to have characters create scenes that in real life we would typically avoid.” Every time I read Baxter’s book (at least three times now) I see new ways his insights could deepen my own writing and reading experience. Highly recommended!

*Witness is my unpublished suspense novel out looking for an agent.

This is “The End” . . .

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The Doors drone in the background of my mind as I write this, my foolish friend. I’ve spent a lot of time lately thinking about the beginning of novels and stories. Certainly a strong beginning is essential when you’re trying to hook an agent or a publisher—and maybe, someday, a reader!—and reel them into your narrative. So those, I’ve been practicing.

Perhaps just as important from the reader point of view—prospective agents and publishers will never know about this—is a powerful ending. Sometimes I read a book and think the author was just too exhausted by the end to give it much thought, but a book that peters out doesn’t seem worth the reader’s effort to get there. Recently, I read an interview of author and teacher Charles Baxter that touched on the topic of endings.

The interviewer had had trouble placing a story that ended with a fatal car crash that killed the protagonists. Finally, he listened to advice to change it, and it was immediately published. Baxter explained that you can’t have an accident like that at the end of a story, because it doesn’t look accidental. “It looks as if the author put it there.” And all the text preceding it, which led the reader to be interested in—even care about—the characters now appears to be simply manipulation. At the beginning of a story, an accident looks like an accident; at the end, the reader thinks, “the damn author set up this accident so that he could get away from the typewriter and get a cup of coffee,” Baxter said.

He also said he thought people would have the same reaction if the device was used in a movie, and I thought of Robert Altman’s A Wedding (user comments run the gamut)—thankfully saved by the fact that the bridal couple, though the stars of “their day,” were just two in a well-populated Altmanesque cast. Late-in-the-game manipulation prompted a few objections to Ian McEwan’s otherwise acclaimed novel Atonement.

A sentence from The Guardian’s review of that book applies well in this context: “Who can grant atonement to the novelist, whose God-like capacity to create and rework the world means that there is no higher authority to whom appeal can be made?” Create, rework, and destroy, too, for that matter. What Baxter might say is that the writer should work in a way that makes appeal unnecessary. And, in the case of Atonement, the fault lines are mapped with such geological precision that the cataclysm does not feel random, like a car crash, but perhaps more like a huckster’s bait-and-switch.

Critics today consider The Great Gatsby one of the finest books of the 20th Century. The power of its bittersweet ending is one reason why:

Gatsby believed in the green light (at the end of Daisy’s dock), the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning—

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Where Words Come From

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Where do words come from? The dictionary’s entries arrive in their alphabetical slots through a lengthy process of vetting. Rules of acceptance require that they be fairly well accepted, at least in some significant population subset (rocket scientists or software engineers, for example), that they don’t squat precisely on the meaning territory of an existing word, that they be pronounceable, and so on. Which may explain what doomed Prince’s preferred name, above. Meanwhile, on the frontiers of language use—how you and I talk and write—whole arrays of new and often context-specific words crop up.

Since its inception, Wired has included a Jargon Watch feature for decoding the digiworld. Some of the entries are new words, and some are new uses of existing words. In this month’s issue is a new phrase laden with grim possibilities—“wi vi.” In case you aren’t yet familiar with wi vi, it’s wall-penetrating vision based on Wi-Fi signals, which “could be miniaturized into a handheld device for police and rescue workers.” Superman may be kvelling, but for the rest of us, where are those lead-lined bomb shelters when we need them?

In a disturbing story also in this month’s Wired, “Public Enemies: Social Media Is Fueling Gang Wars in Chicago,” Ben Austen describes how Chicago’s youth gangs are using social media to call each other out. Insults and threats flow, couched in a very specific street slang, and people die. These teens’ YouTube videos, tweets, and Facebook posts are full of violence-related words like “drilling” (shooting someone—hey, didn’t mobsters use that one? I hear a Jimmy Cagney echo); “cobra” (a .357 Magnum); and “30-poppa” (a handgun with a 30-round clip).

Only time will tell how many of these usages will become language fixtures, but it’s easy to think of words from the past with similar paternities and all now resident in dictionary.com: “hit,” “vig,” “bit,” “byte.” “Cyberspace” itself. Writers use new words with trepidation—will they be understood twenty, ten, two years hence?

According to Orin Hargraves in his October Visual Thesaurus column, that process of lexicon expansion is difficult to document: “Even today in the Internet age, tracing the origins of linguistic innovation is a sleuth’s game.” Parallels with evolutionary biology abound. Just as our genes enable the transmission of biological information, and mutations produce life forms with new and unexpected features, words transmit cultural information, and their changes enable understanding of new cultural phenomena. If they don’t fit well into the vernacular environment, they die.

You can play games having to do with word development at Wordovators, a project involving scientists from Northwestern University and the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. The project is inspired by analogies between biodiversity and language diversity, and is attempting to figure out why new words become acceptable. Meanwhile, says Hargraves, “Those who think of a dictionary as an authoritative book are ever decreasing in number; more who will know it mainly as a helpful but not necessarily authoritative Internet-based service are born every minute.” This shift changes the dynamics of word-acceptance just as new crops of words continue to sprout.

A Writer’s Ear

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Just finished Reading Elizabeth George’s A Traitor to Memory, one of her Inspector Lynley mysteries. (722 pages, by the way, which makes it practically a saga by today’s standards.) What struck me most in the writing was the dialog, which moved front-and-center upon introduction of a secondary character, a young California woman. Until she spoke, I had fallen unawares into George’s U.K. speech rhythms and word choices—except for the odd “boot,” “nappy,” and the like. The contrast started me noticing how “British” everyone else’s speech was.

It isn’t just how Libby Neale speaks, it’s what she chooses to speak about that makes her so distinctively American. If something is on her mind, she says it. By contrast, the British characters are painfully reserved, which serves them well, because many of them are lying, anyway. Here are Libby and the main character, violin virtuoso Gideon Davies:

“What’s up then? You don’t look so great. Aren’t you cold? What’re you doing out here without a sweater?

Looking for answers, I thought.

She said, “Hey! Anyone home? I’m, like, talking to you here.”

I said, “I needed a walk.”

She said, “You saw the shrink today, didn’t you?”

And here’s how the Gideon’s violin teacher asks about the psychiatric visit, starting with a comment from Gideon:

“You were told to get me out of the house today.”

He didn’t deny it. “[Your father] thinks you’re dwelling too much on the past and avoiding the present.”

“What do you think?”

“I trust Dr. Rose. At least I trust Dr. Rose the father. As to Dr. Rose the daughter, I assume she’s discussing the case with him . . . He’s had decades of experience with the sort of thing you’re going through, and that’s going to count for something with her.”

“What sort of thing do you think I’m going through?”

“I know what she’s called it. The amnesia bit.”

“Dad told you?”

“He would do, wouldn’t he? I’m as much involved with your career as anyone.”

At the pace these two waltz around the subject, no wonder it took 722 pages to complete the story!

After the breath of fresh Pacific Coast air that Libby brought to the conversation, I began noticing what a great job George does with dialog for all her characters, and not just the familiar contrast between Inspector Lynley (8th Earl of Asherton) and his working-class partner, Constable Barbara Havers. This story contains an East German refugee who has perfected her English accent, but not quite mastered word order, lower-class accents of two young toughs from the council flats, and a younger woman who speaks differently and more directly than her older lover of the same social class. None of them devolves into caricature.

Going further, the characters’ actions often reflect the same turn of mind that their words do. Libby goes off half-cocked, intuition leads her astray, and her last impulsive act detonates the book’s conclusion. Careful language is appropriate to the characters taking time to get their stories straight. The precise German is putting her romantic ducks in a row.

The slang in this book, published in 2001, will become dated as the years pass, but remains fresh twelve years on. Meanwhile, it feels like we’re reading about real-live, unique individuals, with their own unique energy behind them, energy that leads to the actions only they would take. For a writer, inspirational, really.

The Long and the Short of It

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Iconic scene from “The Third Man,” based on Graham Greene’s novella.

When I used to hand out writing assignments to people, a question they always asked was “how long should it be?” I’m afraid my initial response wouldn’t be terribly helpful,  and I’d say something like, “If it’s War and Peace, keep going; if it’s boring, a page is too much.”  But then I’d end end with “Oh, about 15 pages, double-spaced. That’s all we have room for.”

In fiction, really, there are no similar space constraints; instead, “the dictates of the marketplace” set the limits. Literary magazines tell you what short story length they will accept. For novels, traditional publishers generally have a 90,000-100,000-word limit on what they will consider from an untried writer. Stephen King and Neal Stephenson and Thomas Pynchon can do as they please.

What I thought of as the final draft of my first novel came in at 135,000 words. I hadn’t given the total number a single thought. It was what it was. Fortunately, my good friend Sandra Beckwith (book publicist extraordinaire) caught me up short and directed me to several good websites (See The Swivet, or All Write – Fiction Advice) addressing the question of length. Before querying the first agent, I took electronic scalpel (also known as the delete key) in hand and cut characters, scenes, and dialog so that it now is a more svelte 99,000. Painful, but necessary, and I’m ever-grateful to Sandy for stopping me from embarrassing myself. In writing my second novel, I avoided some of the traps that led me into overwriting and finished the first draft at a slim-and-trim 70,000 words, which gives plenty of breathing room to enrich the story as needed during the revision stage.

For a while now, observers of the publishing scene have commented on the rising popularity of the novella—more than a short story in complexity and character development, less than a novel in plot twists and digressions. While novels today typically run 90-110,000 words, or about 300+ printed pages, acceptable lengths for novellas vary widely, anywhere from a long short story (10,000 words) to a short novel (70,000 words).

The popularity of these shorter forms is attributed to readers’ shrinking attention span; publishers’ reluctance to invest in producing an expensive book that isn’t a guaranteed best-seller; and reading habits, with Kindle, Nook, and even smartphones lending themselves to presenting shorter works.  “Readers aren’t as aware of page count in the electronic realm as they are in a paper book,” says author Jeff Noon in a recent Forbes story by Suw Charman-Anderson. Kindle Singles are an example, and their inventory includes short fiction by best-selling writers.

Novellas also are less demanding on the authors who write them.  A novel “is a huge emotional investment, and it can be risky to put all your creative eggs in one basket if things go wrong,” Charman-Anderson says, yet novellas let authors practice plotting and character development and develop their voice. And they provide the joy of actually finishing something. For self-publishers, they are a boon.

Let’s face it: some plots and some ideas just don’t lend themselves to longer formats. Cut the flab and you have a more compelling read. Some of the most focused and powerful English-language storytelling has been via the novella, and an illustration of their strength is how easily they have lent themselves to dramatization and our continued attention, starting with the grandmum of them all:

  • The Mousetrap – Agatha Christie – 1952. She didn’t want publication to take away from the popularity of the theatrical version, so stipulated the novella couldn’t be published in the U.K. as long as the play was running. Currently, The Mousetrap is booking at London’s  St. Martin’s Theatre (60th Anniversary trailer) until January 2015, “so the novella still hasn’t been published in the UK,” according to  Listverse’s fascinating review: “20 Brilliant Novellas You Should Read.”
  • The Third Man – Graham Greene – 1949 – written as preparation for the movie screenplay, a British film noir classic
  • Breakfast at Tiffany’s – Truman Capote – 1958, the movie becoming more famous than the book and giving us “Moon River”
  • Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson – 1886 – more than 120 film versions; about the recent musical, the less said the better
  • The Time Machine – H.G. Wells – 1895 – feature film and television versions; inspiration for innumerable stories on this theme
  • Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck – 1927 – which Listverse anthropocentrically titles Of Men and Mice, has had numerous stage, film, and television versions
  • A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens – 1843 – staple of the holiday season in both film and stage versions.

So, how long should your book be?

The Author of Tomorrow

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Except for the Stephen Kings of the world, authors these days are expected to take a big hand (and perhaps the only hand) in the multiple activities of book promotion, even when the book has a commercial publisher. But that isn’t the end of it. Deciding to write a book presents the author with numerous chances for do-it-yourself consternation.

Start with the title. Author Scott Martelle (whose excellent Detroit: A Biography I read last year) thought he had the perfect title for his new book describing the search for the body of Revolutionary War naval fighter John Paul Jones. What he’d dreamed up was Jones’s Bones: The Search for an American Hero. But in a recent post, Martelle describes his publisher’s growing unease when people who didn’t know what the book was about couldn’t guess the subject. This led to fears that search engines wouldn’t recognize it, either, and as Martelle says, “if Amazon’s title search engine can’t find it, let alone Google, the book may as well not exist.” Thus began the search for a new title, one he doesn’t like as well, but which supports the notion of actually selling a few books.

Martelle’s book also went through some cover re-designs to try to prompt the John Paul Jones connection. No dice. (J.P. looks a little bemused by all this, no?) At least Martelle had his publisher’s help with that. Authors who publish independently have to work out cover designs for themselves. Some hire a good designer and benefit greatly from it. Some go the DIY route, with predictable results. Some of their creations are at this website, whose tagline is, “Just because you CAN design your own book cover doesn’t mean you SHOULD.” (For how it can be done right, see the AIGA’s 50 2012 award-winners.)

Don’t forget the interior design choices that await self-publishers like booby-traps in the swamp. Fonts, type size, page layouts, etc. Stuff you never notice when it’s done right. Did you ever pick up a book in a bookstore, probably a rather thick one, and see the type is reeely tiny? Put that baby down again. Or buy it, and schedule an appointment with your optometrist. Or you might grab a rather thin book, with generously sized type and lots of leading (space between lines). Hmmm. Not much book for my bucks.

Now a fresh opportunity to answer that eternal question “what can go wrong?” appears in the form of software that “for the first time lets anyone add a synchronized soundtrack to digital text.” Music, ambient audio, sound effects.

O.K., our hero is walking in the woods? Birds chirping. It’s evening in the U.K.? Obligatory fox barking (if you watch British mysteries, you’ll get it). Caught in traffic? Honks and screeches. Maybe a faint tire hiss. The phone rings? Infinite possibilities.  You get it.

Booktrack, which is offering this incipient catastrophe and major time-sink has developed a library of more than 20,000 audio files to make the author’s job “easier.” Now did I want a heavy knock or a more tentative one, or something more like a rap. Rap, rap, rap. Two raps might be better. Really, I kind of liked that first one . . . .

Booktrack already offers books on iTunes that have been audio-enhanced by Sound Professionals. Reviews are good, and sales of early titles have been brisk. A lot of readers like this experience. They say they get more out of the book and remember it better. But when I go back to re-read a paragraph, does the serial killer re-ring the doorbell? What if I go out for lunch, does it keep ringing? What if I stop reading to bite a hangnail, does it ring too soon? Obviously, I should try out one of these books before exposing my skepticism.

The developers’ optimism is scary. “For the first time, any writer can now add a synchronized movie-like soundtrack to their story . . .” I’m surprised to learn there isn’t any talent, or skill, or expertise involved in movie soundtrack development, just like for book cover design, just like for promotion, just like . . .