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 . . .

Rich Reading

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Book-Lovers’ Warning: Book Drum is a website where you may end up spending a lot of time. U.K.-based Book Drum’s slogan is “Beyond the Page” and that’s exactly where it takes you for the 176 books it includes far. Each volunteer-produced book profile includes multiple sources of enriching content:

  • Bookmarks: page-by-page commentary and illustration of the text
  • Summary: objective synopsis of the book
  • Setting: description and illustration of the main places or themes of the book
  • Glossary: foreign, invented and tricky words deciphered
  • Author: biographical information, interview videos, links and photos
  • Review: subjective analysis and evaluation of the book
  • Map: a world map pinned with descriptions of places significant in the book

The wide variety of books they’ve profiled—which feel like they’ve been taken apart and put together again—include many favorites, past and present. Classics from Dickens and Hardy and Austen up to and including Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. With Book Drum’s help, I may finally get past page 50 of Gravity’s Rainbow.

I took Book Drum for a test spin using one of my favorite books, Tess of the D’Urbervilles. I reviewed maps of Thomas Hardy’s Wessex. I read descriptions of the “life and times . . .” The bookmarks were fascinating—like the notes in a cleverly annotated classic, but with pictures! I know this book well, but I’d missed so much. I want to read it again, with Book Drum humming in the background. The volunteer contributor of content for Tess is novelist herself and freelance writer, as are many of the Book Drum contributors, while some are academics, recent graduate school spawn, and the like.

Book Drum sums up the diversity of its content in this way: “Whether it’s video of the Rockettes in The Catcher in the Rye, the Italian opera tracks that accompany Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, the historical context and maps of The Odyssey, stunning South American photography for In Patagonia, or video of Kabul kite fighting for Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, we take readers beyond the page to enjoy interactive content alongside their favourite books.”

Book Drum also has begun publishing for e-readers, with two titles so far, Heart of Darkness and The Turn of the Screw. This link takes you to the Amazon page for the latter, where you can See Inside. It’s the same principle as the website, but feels pushy. I might get used to it, but my initial reaction is I’d rather seek out the enriched content than be distracted by its intrusive presence. Similarly, I usually read the notes of a traditionally annotated book a chapter at a time, rather than constantly break the tenuous thread of my thought.

The site uses the Wiki approach, so anyone can contribute. Last spring, the Book Drum editors sent out a call for content for a profile of A Tale of Two Cities. Now I find this out! I wrote something very similar a few years ago when I was trying to convince Audible.com to offer companion .pdfs to some of its books, like those with lots of characters or foreign-named ones (think Russians!). It’s hard to keep track of the players without a program. I proposed one-line chapter summaries for people whose listening gets interrupted for a few days or weeks– “Where was I?,” a glossary to cover old-fashioned terms, foreign phrases, and special uses–also harder to follow when you just hear, rather than see, them. I even included a link to the raucous song the citoyens danced to in the blood-soaked Paris streets. So Book Drum has found a happy reader with me!

Thanks to writing buddy David Ludlum for sharing this resource.

Experiments

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The fall 2013 issue of Glimmer Train includes an interview with short story writer and novelist Peter LaSalle, based at the U of Texas, Austin.   LaSalle talks about his new book, Mariposa’s Song—the story of a 20-year-old Honduran immigrant girl working in a rough Austin nightclub. The story itself unwinds like a song, one very long song, in one very very long sentence.

Experimental fiction has always had its devotees and its detractors. One reader’s bold innovation is another’s annoying gimmick. The ultimate test, of course, is, does it work? Ten, twenty years on, when the glare of newness no longer blinds us, do people still read it? You’ll think of examples of successful experiments immediately (and will have forgotten the others, perhaps):

  • Benjy’s stream-of-consciousness story in Faulkner’s The Sound and The Fury
  • The discovery of magical realism in Gabriel García Márquez’s 100 Years of Solitude
  • David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, which starts six stories across time in forward chronology, one through six, then finishes them, six through one, ending up where they began
  • A Visit from the Good Squad, by Jennifer Egan, creative in so many ways,  including a chapter written as a PowerPoint presentation.

The staying-power of the last two is as yet unproved Cloud Atlas was much-praised upon publication, won several awards, was short-listed for the Booker Prize and made into a difficult movie; A Visit from the Goon Squad won a Pulitzer and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and is being turned into a tv series. [!]

Succesfu experiments–and even some of the marginally successful ones present readers with new tools for discovery, new ways to understand the author’s fictional world and the characters in it.

A 17-year-old boy recommended Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000) to me. You could see in his eyes the delight of the new and, he hoped, iconoclastic. The book is presented variously in typewriter script across the page, in regular type in columns up, down, around and diagonally across the page, as poems, photos, letters, straight text, and it contains a 42-page index containing a great many entries for “more” and not so many for “less.” When Danielewski wants the reader to speed up the pace, there is a single word on the page. A lot of impenetrable analysis has been done on this book; I’m inclined to think the author was having fun. He just has a complicated brain. And he succeeded in something Faulkner was unable to do. He convinced his publisher to publish some words and sections in color.

Similarly, Night Film by Marisha Pessl is currently receiving much publicity. It’s a suspense novel that includes scraps of movie script, newspaper clippings, photos, website screenshots, police reports. Most intriguing, it’s available as an audio book, for which, though I love audio, this book seems particularly ill-suited.

Books in their digitized forms open up new possibilities for integrating bits of film, photos, audio, alternative paths, puzzles. They have the potential to burst open like a piñata. Authors already are creating vines and mini-movies as promotion for their books; integrating them is the obvious next step that some already are taking. I’m reading the New York Times’s non-fiction The Jockey on line. Audio, video, straight text. I would say “can’t put it down,” but I’m not holding it, I’m watching it unfold before me.

I don’t know about Mariposa’s Song, though. One long sentence. Other new forms, jangled and multimedia as they may be, are perhaps a better fit with our modern attention span.

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Anticipation

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Starting to think seriously about my next vacation—only a few weeks away now—prompted by yet another flight detail change from United. The trip will start in Budapest, then float south along the Danube to Bucharest. On the journey, the boat will slip easily through the Iron Gate, the gorge separating Romania and the Carpathian Mountains on the north from Serbia and the Balkan mountain foothills on the south. Dams constructed over a 20-year period, ending in 1984, have turned what used to be a wild stretch of river into something more like a lake.

But the Iron Gates of my imagination, the ones I hope to see in my mind’s eye, are as they are described in Alan Furst’s thrillers. In his books, set in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s, the Iron Gates were a perilous passage for desperate people—spies, refugees, terrorists, anyone caught up in the tightening net of loyalties and politics of a looming World War II:

“He would have to cross the Russian lines, would have to go through the white water at the Iron Gate, where the Duna [Danube] came crashing down onto the Wallachian plain to form the border between Romania and Bulgaria.” – Night Soldiers

“Europe was lost behind them—after the Iron Gate they were in a different land, a different time, running along the great plain that reached to the edge of the Black Sea.” – Night Soldiers

A few days in Budapest, an infamous spy town, is another something to look forward to:

“On 10 March 1930, the night train from Budapest pulled into the Gare du Nord a little after four in the morning. . . . In the station at Vienna, a brick had been thrown at the window of a first-class compartment, leaving a frosted star in the glass. And later that day there’d been difficulties at the frontiers for some of the passengers, so in the end the train was late getting into Paris.”—Kingdom of Shadows

“Difficulties at the frontiers”—we can imagine exactly what those difficulties were—“for some of the passengers”—and exactly who those terrified passengers were. Laced with foreboding, those lines open Furst’s thriller Kingdom of Shadows.

Other than a literary interest in things Budapestian, I have a family history interest as well. Legend has it that my grandmother (who died when I was a toddler) was a pastry chef in Budapest before immigrating to the United States. The disappointing kernel of the story is that none of her six daughters learned the art. She came from the generation that wanted to put the Old Country behind it. Truthfully, she had to have been quite young—twenty?—when she came over, so “chef” may be a bit of an exaggeration, but it’s a pleasant thought and one that will require eating as much pastry as possible in homage.

Another feature of this trip is a three-day add-on excursion into Transylvania—ancestral home of my grandfather, who came from a tiny village annexed to the marginally larger village of Székelykeresztúr (“Holy Cross” in Hungarian) in 1926. Google maps gives the larger town no more than 12 streets. My grandfather’s home was about eight miles from the medieval walled town of Sighisoara, birthplace of Count Dracula. I have Transylvania roots, for sure.

So, of course I enjoyed reading The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova, about a woman researching her family’s history who traverses that part of the world and at every step finds connections to Our Vlad.  “Genuinely terrifying,” said the Boston Globe.

Lots to look forward to, and I have my reading for the trip all lined up:

I’ve provided links to amazon.com, in case you want more info about any of these books, but of course would encourage you to make any purchases at your local independent bookstore!

Listen Up!

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So many friends tell me they don’t have time to read any more that I’m surprised more of them haven’t taken up audio books. While it’s true the old-fashioned klunky tapes or CD’s were a bit of a pain—and expensive, too—I’ve listened well over a hundred audio books on an MP3 player and now an iPod. One book a month is my Audible.com subscription plan, and that’s about what I can “read,” Audibly.

Apparently lots of people read in the car, and that’s OK for longer trips, but short trips around town with a lot of stops wouldn’t work for me. I like at least a half-hour, uninterrupted. Longer, if possible. So I read while mowing the lawn (electric mower), weeding the garden, making dinner, anything that doesn’t require my full concentration. My mind picks what to focus most on–another reason listening and driving might not be the best idea. Listening while cooking goes a long way to explain some of the meals around here.

On the Reading . . . section of this website you can scroll down to mini-reviews of the 10 books I’ve listened to so far this year. Thrillers are good. If you don’t catch every word, it isn’t a tragedy, and the excitement of getting to the next chapter keeps you on task. If you stop mowing and go do something else, like return emails, you might actually have to turn the book off.

I’ve also listened to some classics I knew I’d never read: Crime and Punishment (endless); The Brothers Karamazov (the mind wanders); Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (the first audio book I ever listened to—scary). These experiences suggest a book like Dr. Zhivago with a lot of long foreign names (two to three per character, at that) would not be a good choice.

What’s most impressive is the quality of the narrations. They add immeasurably. Sometimes when I recommend a book, I mention that I listened to it, and can’t be sure whether it would be quite as wonderful an experience if read. The humor comes through better, for one thing. Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk is a perfect example.

In the marketplace, audiobooks are on the rise. Producers released more than 13,000 titles (some classics, some new) in 2012, compared to only 4,600 three years earlier. Libraries are getting on the bandwagon, too. Patrons of the member libraries of Digital Library NJ and eLibraryNewJersey, for example, can borrow audio books just like regular books. They expire after a set number of days, and the collection is large. And free. Libraries all over the country are doing this.

I buy my audiobooks and own them “forever.” Some I’ve listened to multiple times. Amazon-owned Audible.com (my supplier) has the greatest market penetration and is adding nearly 1,000 titles a month to its already deep collection. The technology options are expanding, but I’m dubious about some of them. You can read a while on your Kindle (when you have time to sit) and pick up where you left off with the book’s audio version (when you don’t). This sounds confusing to me. I would be hearing one set of voices in my head and suddenly they’re all different. You can have the e-version read to you as you read—which would be super-annoying, since most people who have read this far can read faster than the book would be narrated. It would be like taking a walk with someone who moves at half your pace. And, new audiobook creation tools akin to the self-publishing  tools for print are designed to help authors affordably create their own audiobooks. Let’s hope the tools turn them into stellar actors at the same time! The early days of desktop publishing provide a cautionary example.

No time to read? Listen up!

Higherbrow Reads

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Enough lately on these pages about the best thrillers of the year and Amazon’s uninspired list of fall pre-orders. Let’s chat about a more literary endeavor—the announcement of the longlist of books nominated for the 2013 Man Booker Prize. This prestigious 45-year-old prize is awarded to the “year’s best” English-language novel coming out of Britain and the Commonwealth. Culled from some 151 candidates, the 13-novel longlist will be reduced to a shortlist of six to be announced in early September. On this first list are authors from Britain, Zimbabwe, New Zealand, Canada, Malaysia, and Ireland.

Says Robert Macfarlane, chair of the five-member judging panel, “This is surely the most diverse longlist in Man Booker history: wonderfully various in terms of geography, form, length and subject.  These 13 outstanding novels range from the traditional to the experimental, from the first century AD to the present day, from 100 pages to 1,000 and from Shanghai to Hendon.” And, for the first time, one entry (Richard House’s four-part political thriller The Kills) was first published digitally. The author, who is also an artist and film-maker, provides an enhanced edition with video that can be accessed at http://www.thekills.co.uk. (Anything featuring the rooftops of Istanbul captures my immediate interest!)

The nominees (with links to mini-bios) are:

What? You haven’t read them all? No surprise there, since five of the books (McLeod, Harris, Mendelson, Catton, and Lahiri) were still unpublished as of the longlist announcement, though their publication dates have been quickly moved forward. That all these late-appearing but apparently worthy books are by women is interesting, but perhaps only coincidence, since eight of the authors are women.

While the Booker is one of the world’s top literary prizes—or, perhaps, because it is—over the years the judges and awardees have come in for their share of sniping. Occasionally, critics have thought a choice unworthy or made because a chief competitor was politically awkward. Among the 15 Booker winners I’ve read were a few I didn’t much like, but on the whole they are a strong group. You could do worse.

Here are the ones I’ve admired most (OK, I didn’t actually read The English Patient, but I saw the movie three times) and highly recommend:

  • Michael Ondaatje – The English Patient (1992)
  • Arundhati Roy – The God of Small Things (1997)
  • Ian McEwan – Amsterdam (1998)(audio)
  • Peter Carey – True History of the Kelly Gang (2001)(audio)
  • Yann Martel – Life of Pi (2002)
  • Aravind Adinga – The White Tiger (2008)(audio – absolutely brilliant!)
  • Hilary Mantel – Wolf Hall (2009)
  • Hilary Mantel – Bring Up the Bodies (2012)

Enjoy!

What’s That I Hear Now

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Ringing in my ears? I’ve heard that sound before . . .

It’s the sound of studio musicians and, for so many of them, all we ever do is hear them. We don’t see (much of) them or know much about them, because they labor in near-anonymity. Still, one hopes the days are gone when Phil Spector would release a song recorded by one of his most talented backup singers and slap the name of a better-known group on the label.

Jo Lawry, Judith Hill, and Lisa Fischer

Yes, I finally saw 20 Feet from Stardom yesterday, and it was pure pleasure (trailer). Full house at the theater, too—rare for a documentary. Mick Jagger looking every day of  his 70 years. Springsteen. Sting. White guys talking about how important these uncelebrated black women were to their music and their success. Hmm. And now I know why “Gimme Shelter” was such an unforgettable moment during the Rolling Stones concert in Central Park. Lisa Fischer. Hit that link to the tune and fall in love.

Oh, and does Darlene Love bear Spector any malice for subverting and derailing her singing career for decades? “Where he is, right now? I’ve got closure,” she said in the July 1 New Yorker. Where he is right now, of course, is prison. And her career is back in gear, touring this summer, though in general, backup singers have had a rocky road traveling solo. Their sublime sound together almost makes you wish they wouldn’t try.

Music industry rapaciousness and the exploitation of artists who just want to sing (or play) their music may be an old story, but it makes for good movies. Another is Standing in the Shadows of Motown (2002) about the almost-invisible Funk Brothers, Berry Gordy’s house band of super-musicians. The Rotten Tomatoes summary calls them, “unsung heroes”—tongue-in-cheek, presumably, since that’s exactly what they were not. Singing to their music created the Motown canon.

Then there’s The Wrecking Crew, one of the most prolific studio bands of all time. The list of the songs they played is amazing—everything from the Mission Impossible theme to Frank Sinatra’s “Strangers in the Night” to The Mamas and the Papas’ “California Dreamin’” to the Righteous Brothers’ “Unchained Melody.” Wow. They created a lot of the riffs that immediately identify classics by the Beach Boys, Tijuana Brass, Sam Cooke . . .

Distribution of a 2008 documentary about their work (trailer) has been held up for years because the music industry (big surprise!) wanted millions in fees (later reduced, but still hefty) for the snippets of songs used in the film. The controversy has received solid coverage, and the producers have tried to raise the money to pay off the companies, but the DVD is still not out. (You can Donate Here.) Beware of Amazon’s “The Wrecking Crew DVD” link. It will show you the book the docu is based on and some other stuff, but the item with the black cover you think might be the DVD is not, say two angry reviewers!

Labor in obscurity no more, o talented people!

What a Thrill!

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On Main Street in OtR.The International Thriller Writers announced the 2013 Thriller Award Winners last Saturday. More books to add to the my “best of” reading and listening lists (and falling farther and farther behind!).

Best Hardcover Novel – Spilled Blood by Brian Freeman – two Minnesota towns in an epic battle, and there’s only the daughters paying the price . . . one with her life!
She got out of her car and stood like the last girl on earth in the center of the old main street. She studied her stricken Mustang, which was covered with a film of dust. The flabby rubber on the left rear tire looked like melted ice cream. On either side of her, the remains of a half-dozen decaying buildings loomed behind boarded-up doors and No Trespassing signs. The buildings were interspersed with weedy, overgrown lots, like missing teeth in a rotting smile.

Best Paperback Original – Lake Country by Sean Doolittle – a Minnesota architect falls asleep driving, and there’s only the daughters paying the price . . . one with her life!
He opened his door and got out. It was a clean night, scrubbed fresh by the rain. The cloud cover had pulled apart in spots overhead, showing starry black patches here and there, and the moon looked like a puddle of silver on the water.

Best First Novel – The 500 by Matthew Quirk – for a moment I thought the contest winners might have created a Midwestern juggernaut, but The 500 isn’t set in Indianapolis, it’s in the nation’s capital, and the 500 are “the elite men and women who really run Washington—and the world.” Oh-kaaaay. Sounds powerful.

Best e-Book Original Novel – Blind Faith by C. J. Lyons – this book (not her first) debuted at #2 on the NYT bestsellers list, and her own story—from pediatric Emergency Room doc to best-selling author is a good read, too. In the novel, a woman has watched the killer of her husband and son die by lethal injection, but she seeks closure, so returns to their remote Adirondack mountain home and . . . C.J.’s tagline is “thrillers with heart.”

Nominated in the “Best First Novel” category was the much-better-than-average The Expats, by Chris Pavone, which is among a number of thrillers I’ve read and listened to so far this year. You’ll find brief reviews of all of them in Reading . . .

What We Know

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@ Death Valley, July 2012

My writers’ group—eight to twelve of us who get together every month to provide critiques, commiseration, celebration, and snacks—tried a storytelling exercise this week. (This was after a brief mental warm-up: describing an eighth dwarf for Snow White. “Sleazy” cheated at poker and was always trying to get Snow White alone.) Our main challenge for the evening was to briefly describe “the strangest thing that has ever happened to us or the oddest thing we have ever seen.”

Two hours in, we were still going strong. One hitchhiking escapade with a dodgy driver that ended in Death Valley could have been recorded almost verbatim as a complete short story. Others were pieces of narrative that might launch a whole symphony or be used in some work as incidental music: People and things that disappeared mysteriously. Ghost stories. Clairvoyants. A whole subcategory of jaw-dropping pet shenanigans.

The point of all this was to show ourselves that we have amazing, interesting stuff inside. We’ve had experiences. We’ve had emotional peaks and troughs. And we can draw on these in our own writing, much like the most uxorious actor, if he were cast as Othello, might seek out and magnify into mountainous proportions one minor wifely flaw. One member of our group could reconstruct her terror when locked in a room with a noisy ghost; another might recreate the merriment of family misadventures in Olde England; one has given the fear she felt when being stalked to her fictional character in a related situation.

This, I think, is how the often misunderstood dictum, “write what you know” should be interpreted. When it is taken too literally, it is patently absurd. Not to mention boring. “Another fascinating day in front of the computer, interrupted by a run to the grocery store. A literal milk run! Received 72 emails. Decided not to order FiOS.”

Writers can and should ground their writing in the emotions they know, distilling and intensifying them to the right pitch. We don’t have to write dully about emotions, we can write with them. Ready-to-tap, in full array, they are buried in the experiences that have amazed, amused, shocked, warmed, and frightened each of us. Two hours of round-robin storytelling proved the point. While none of the anecdotes we told each other this week will ever appear as a complete story—except perhaps the one about the wayward hitchhiker—we can filter the feelings these events inspired through new fictional situations and watch them emerge in emotionally compelling new guises.

Want to try it yourself?

Word Play

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The Sunday paper’s Word Guy column started me musing about words in general and  the April 29 New Yorker essay by John McPhee (Draft No. 4) that works its way around, in a McPhee-like peregrination, to commending “le mot juste,” and the thrill writers feel when they find the exactly, precisely, inarguably very best word in meaning, connotation, and sound (extra points!) to express a particular thought. That article inspired me to put a “favorite word used today” widget at the bottom of my website home page.

McPhee doubts that a thesaurus will help much in extricating that perfect word from our farrago of a language. He prefers a dictionary, so he can delve into etymologies and associations, and is a fan of those paragraphs that shave the distinctions between, say, dark, dim, obscure, gloomy, and murky.

Nevertheless, Visual Thesaurus is a subscription site I use when the word I want is off napping somewhere in my brain. The definitions component of the site is weak, precisely because it doesn’t adequately explore shades of meaning. But it’s helpful in reminding me about extended word families, which helps me sneak up on a napping uncle and poke him awake.

Visual Thesaurus has other pleasures, and allows some lucky folks to have the job of developing arcane word lists (“Ten Words from the New York Times – July 3, 2013,” a list that included autocrat, throes, culminate, and intransigence; “‘Jabberwocky,’ vocabulary from the poem”; “100 SAT words beginning with ‘A’”; and the like). It has word games, a spelling bee, and VocabGrabber, which can create word clouds and perform other analyses.

I dropped the 36,000 words of my novel-in-progress into VocabGrabber and found I’ve used 2500 different words so far, 94 from the fields of social studies, 65 from arts and literature, 128 from science, and 13 from math (huh?). That doesn’t add up. “Misalign” turned up at the bottom of the list based on “familiarity,” and it occurs in the book’s first paragraph: “biding his time while the alcohol-soaked reception ratcheted forward on misaligned social wheels.” Interesting, since “ratcheted” is the word that’s received question marks. It’s the bedraggled old words at the top of the frequency list that concern me most, though. I know, “When in doubt . . .”

Lerner and Loewe have the last . . . well, you know.