TWIC: catching up, starlings, reviews, habits, 3rd person, words to use more,

I am behind in my Nanowrimo count. It is Friday the 25th here and I am 210 words behind. Today, I should do the standard 1,667 words plus 210. This isn't so bad. I was a full day behind going into Thursday and typed 2,700 words on that day to nearly catch up. Still, in the years previous, I was a day or two ahead at this point.
Now it is the morning of the Nov 29. I am 1000 words ahead and at this late point I don't expect to lose that lead.
Now it is the morning of Nov 30. I have 900 words to go. Expect a Nano recap in the next few days.

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I don't know what  this has to do with creativity but it is a magical event that leaves me in awe:

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Also not entirely within the domain of creativity, Google's AI translation tool is figuring things out on its own.

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Amazon is now cracking down on 'incentivized reviews'.

Incentivized reviews are those where the vendor offers free or discounted products to reviewers, in exchange for recipients writing their “honest opinion” of the item in an Amazon review. However, data has shown that these reviewers tend to write more positive reviews overall, with products earning an average of 4.74 stars out of five, compared with an average rating of 4.36 for non-incentivized reviews.
Over time, these reviews proliferated on Amazon, and damaged consumers’ trust in the review system as a whole. And that can impact consumers’ purchase decisions.

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Habits of  productive people.
An interesting pair up: Productive people don't overtalk their projects but they are passionate about their projects.

There points that were of interest to me: The know how to finish a draft, They work on more than one thing at once, and They leave off at a point where it will be easy to start again.
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Writing in various forms of third person:

"There's been a murder..." Learn how to write with a third person narrator using this gruesome infographic https://t.co/1yobrIkIaQ pic.twitter.com/PKDrVsWjJ8

— Reedsy (@ReedsyHQ) November 25, 2016

The link goes here, where there is a good discussion of the subject. I don't embed tweets often so I am not sure if there is an image above. Whether there is or not, the image is too small for my eyes.
Here is a piece of the image at full size (or click for full size):

I can only read the titles. Ah, nearly halfway down a long scroll is the full size set of image that i can read.
(This has been stream-of-consciousness blogging by S. Aplenty).
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A Facebook post on the subject led to this search. The image I saw on Facebook came from here.
Here are cropped images from the Facebook post and from another that looked interesting in my search.

Again, both images have been cropped. I want to be a good internet citizen and I hope that I show enough for visitors to decide if they want to click through to see the rest. Also copyright...mumble, mumble...
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Too much mystery or not enough?

...and other musings.
Below are excerpts from my Goodreads reviews of two books and a review of another that is more inside-baseball than I would prefer to post there.
Castleview by Gene Wolfe
This story reminds me of Castle Perilous where so much of the exciting stuff happened off-screen (or off-page). I found the style of switching POV with a cliffhanger every stinking time to get annoying pretty quickly.
The cover tells you it is an Arthurian epic set in Illinois but that is only mostly spelled out in the final chapter.
I think this story is supposed to be experienced as a dream or an LSD trip (as one character remarks), where things happen with no explanation, people change and random people appear and disappear often.
If you choose to read it, do so in as short a time as possible as there are a lot of characters and the POV changes frequently. It actually reminds me of my own Nanowrimo attempts in that there are too many incomplete ideas and what would only appear to the author, who has researched the subject specifically, to be an appropriate amount of mystery.

The library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins
The one technical aspect of Hawkins' writing I was most impressed with was his control of mysteries. We start with the hero walking along the road covered in blood so we start with a lot that is unexplained. As a question is answered, another one appears. The book never crossed my frustration point but remained close to that level throughout. I had enough questions but not nearly so many I discarded the book in exhaustion.

The Furies of Calderon 
This story goes at a breakneck pace. I kept expecting the groups to reunite but they never did, no matter how close they occasionally came. I also expected Tavi to gain some enormous power but he never did. Clearly, he didn't follow any set trope.
One trope he did follow was the use of a magical device that controlled a person.  There are many stories with such a device and my own half-written novel contains one, too. The use of such a device takes a story into the Horror genre and it didn't fit my own desires for fantasy. In his story, it wasn't wrong but in my own story, the use of such a device upset me so much that I had my character released from it pretty quickly. Butcher, too, soon has his character escape from the effects of the device.
What does it say about me that I could imagine myself using it as a tool to control bit players or NPCs in the story? Don't use it on my favorites but on the extras, that's okay.
At the time I introduced the device, I was making the story up as I went along. The consequences of the device was as unknown to me as to the eventual reader and I didn't like it.
I have already begun to read the second book in Butcher's series. The first was thrilling but I am not sure I would read another book in the series except that my Kindle died and I don't have a lot of variety in my reading choices right now.
The second book starts with Tavi being again threatened by a bully. He is now at a school and I am as interested in reading how Butcher uses or avoids 'magic school' themes as I am in the story as a whole.
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A lot of the issues I brought up here will be important when I work on the second draft of my stories. For the first draft, it is enough that I get the ideas down. Then I can work out how to share those ideas with the reader. My steampunk story is more like Butcher's Furies than the other two in that it describes a chase and battle scenes rather than mysteries to be solved. There is at least one of the latter and I like it but I don't feel the whole arrangement of the books is like that.

At least one author happy with Amazon's money per page program

Years ago, David Simpson asked me to read his book Post-Human and post a review on GoodReads.  I did.  I thought the book was good but there are many who thought/think it is great.  Simpson is thrilled with Amazon's pay-per-page program.

His books on Amazon.

His GoodReads page.

His book's Facebook site.
His personal page.

Image Below Added July 13 (still no 'million pages' image):

UPDATED July 14 (well, July 15 but with news from the fourteenth):

It took just 12 days for the Post-Human series to get over a MILLION page reads on Kindle Unlimited in the US! Wow! That...
Posted by Post-Human by David Simpson on Monday, 13 July 2015

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Original Post:

I will update this post when his book hits a million pages read in July.  That should happen today or tomorrow (Sunday or Monday).

In this recent blogpost, I discussed how I didn't like Amazon's PPP program.  Mostly, my concerns came down to privacy issues (which are unaffected by Simpsons success) and by fears over a new hoop to jump through for the author to get paid.  The latter fear is a result of pessimism or lack of self-confidence and I am impressed with Simpson's strength in these areas.

Congratulations, David Simpson!
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The Telegraph's Harry deQuetteville pretends to like Amazon's program.

What we readers have been lacking all this time are books with the fun-filled, life-affirming qualities of the crack-pipe: fiction filled with endless hooks and twists that drive a boundless craving for more. Meanwhile, the stuff that you have to work at, put down, plan to get back to later but never do – that stuff like Ulysses, Moby Dick and The Golden Bowl – that’s out.
Now, if only we could apply the same model to music. I mean, I know that no one has to buy whole albums any more, but we do still have to buy entire tracks. Outrageous. Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, for example. I like the Dah-dah-dah-DAAAH bit at the beginning. But you have to admit it flounders a bit after that. So next time it’s on at the Festival Hall, I’d like a ticket. But only for the first minute please. Shall we say 35p?

The Guardian and Atlantic agree that it will change the way books are written: From the Guardian:

Self-published authors can opt in via Amazon’s KDP Select programme, which gives them a cut from a fund calculated by Amazon on a monthly basis: for June 2015, it’s $3m (£1.9m). This naturally puts a cap on author’s earnings, as they can never earn more than the fund allows and are competing for a share with all the other authors on the programme.

Amazon used to start paying royalties on the borrowed book once a reader got to 10% of the way through, but this was proving unfair to authors who wrote longer books. A reader perusing a short book reaches the trigger point for payment much faster than one reading an 800-page tome. The result was a flood of very short reads as authors spread their writing over as many books as possible.

Ah, I hadn't realized it only affected borrowed books rather than purchased ones.  The Guardian's post is a great explainer; read the rest of it.

From Peter Wayner at the Atlantic:

The sweet spot in this formula, then, must be books full of cliffhangers that keep people flipping the pages. The answer is now to pack a book with ticking time-bombs, unexplained plans, and lots of secrets to be revealed later. What did she whisper? Hold on, let's jump to a different thread halfway around the globe! (Of course, there’s a fine line between books with needless suspense and books that are simply engaging—the latter will probably sell well in any marketplace.)
As I worked hard to make my short books shorter, I may have shattered the effect that some readers crave, the chance to lose themselves in another world. One of my former editors read one of my short books and told me that he didn't have time to relax. "Instead of a leisurely stroll through a book I felt like I was on a bit of a forced march," he said. The staccato recitation of facts wasn't a nice way to spend a lazy afternoon.

I wonder if we will return to Dickensian pay per word and serializations of books.

Authors: grow a thick skin (part 2)

First example to be found here.

As a wannabe writer, I sympathize with a published author who finds a bad review.  My own stories, which still have not escaped my computer, are precious things and if/when I decide to show them to the world,well, a bad review of my book is nearly a bad review of me.

Well, nearly.  I identify as a writer but also as a father, husband, teacher, .... and I do pretty well at most of those things most of the time.  A bad review would hurt but not destroy me.  I hope.

I may name the book, the author and the reviewer and there is enough information below to Google the identifying details but for now, let me avoid names.  Ah, how do I quote people if I don't link to them.  Links possibly coming soon.  I have ordered a sample of the book for my Kindle and will post more after I read it.

The review:

This was just...so unnecessarily wordy and pretentious. I just did not enjoy it at all. .... So how did I loathe this so entirely from page one? I don't know.

The author's response:

This review is not good for my business, so unless your desire is to ruin my dreams, it would mean a great deal if you could remove this review from my work and forget about it. But if it’s your desire to hurt me financially and ruin my business, then it’s understandable why you would post such a harmful review.

The book might describe a conspiracy theory judging from further comments.  Here is an excerpt from one:

But you left a 1 Star review on someone’s life’s work, someone who is trying to warn people what’s going on in this world so that they can protect themselves and help others, and think that is a moral action. 400,000 children go missing each year in the US alone.

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To be continued.