fidelio: I think catcher slowness is more an issue of knees than muscles; you're absolutely right, speedy catchers are a rare breed and tend to age in dog years. (In fact, back in the early '90's, the Houston Astros moved Craig Biggio from catcher to second base to try and give him a longer career as a player. Worked pretty well.)
One of the most unique players in baseball history was Ernie Lombardi, a Hall-Of-Famer who played for the Reds in the '30's and set the all-time gold standard for catcher slowness. He was a blistering line-drive hitter, but may have well been the slowest man ever to play the game. The running joke was "He had to hit doubles just to hit singles." Infields used to play him so deep that Lombardi once quipped that Pee Wee Reese had been in the league five years before Ernie realized he was a shortstop and not a left fielder. Lombardi's knees were so bad that he couldn't stand up fast enough to throw out would-be basestealers; he always threw from the crouch position (and was reputed to have a hell of an arm, too).
Teresa: As somebody who likes Bill James and dislikes the DH, you may be interested in an argument he made for it back in the early '80's on the grounds that it increases the amount of strategy in a game. The argument goes, if you have a pitcher coming up for a crucial at-bat late in the game, the "choice" for the manager is purely illusionary; he has to use a pinch-hitter (unless you're dealing with a pitcher who can hit well, which is an incredibly rare breed of animal). Similarly, there are a lot of conditions where the manager more or less has to ask the pitcher to bunt rather than swing away.
I couldn't turn up the full article online, but I did find an excerpt:
"I'm not an advocate of the Designated Hitter Rule; I'm only an advocate of seeing the truth and telling the truth. What the truth comes down to here is a question of in what does strategy reside? Does strategy exist in the act of bunting? If so the Designated Hitter Rule has reduced strategy. But if strategy exists in the decision about when a bunt should be used, then the DH rule has increased the differences of opinion which exist about that question, and thus increased strategy...[the research shows] that there is more of a difference of opinion, not less, in the American League." - Bill James in The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract (1986)
(This is, BTW, an excellent book. If you like baseball and you see this book in your local used bookstore, your choice is purely illusionary; you have to pick it up. ;-) )
Of course, James stops short of actually advocating the DH, and doesn't really address your specific point. But, food for thought.
If I ever have grandchildren, I intend to tell them all about Curt Schilling's performance in Game Six.
I will tell them how I watched him sitting in the dugout re-assembling his right foot with duct tape and a staple gun, then charged out onto the field screaming "LET'S ROCK!!!"
I will tell them how he then struck out twenty-one consecutive Yankees before his foot simply fell off. After chucking his foot at Alex Rodriguez's head, he fashioned a tourniquet out of the lacing from his glove and dragged himself off the field, trading obscenties with Derek Jeter then entire way.
And I will tell them how a terrified Yankees team didn't even bother showing up for Game Seven, as they weren't sure whether Curt was kidding when he promised to "feast upon their entrails" after the series was over.
Man . . . almost makes me want to have kids.
Heh. Reading those first few pages, I'm particularly fond of the implicit assumption that the reader's writing skills are already professional-grade. All the reader needs is a little more business savvy, and voom! Off to the bestseller lists!
He wouldn't be pandering to the likes of Dn Rc, would he?
Give the man credit: he's learning.
You will note that the new auction description is seperated into discrete paragraphs and everything. The references to J. K. Rawlings are gone.
Though admittedly, the last few paragraphs make for a very peculiar addition.
Well, two steps forward and one back is still progress.
Elese: I believe you're recalling The Most Dangerous Game, by Richard Connell.
Strangely enough, Mr. Rice's strategy might not be as deeply flawed as one might think.
A friend of a friend -- a student of one of my workshop buddies -- was the moderator of a fanfic site for a series I'd never heard of before. He was approached by the copyright holders and asked to ghostwrite another novel in the series, to be published under a more famous name. (I don't remember the name, but I can find it out. It wasn't anybody I'd heard of.)
Of course, he made substantially less than $150,000. It was either a flat $600 or $2000, no royalties, and no credit whatsoever. To the outside world, he remains an unpublished writer.
In other words, he got completely screwed. Poor guy just didn't know any better; he thought novel deals fall like manna from heaven all the time.
Beth > (I THINK you were talking to me . . .) Thanks for the link; it's always interesting to see how other writers handle it. (And I love the secret diaries, BTW.)
Daniel > You're making a terrible mistake.
"Oh i get it, you are all talking about my write up on EBay itself. Well who the hell cares about that? I wrote that in a minute. It's not my story, so I didn't put any effort into it. I also knew what the out come would be after I posted my manuscript, so why would I put any more effort into something than I have to?"
Technically, you are absolutely right. The quality of the manuscript you're trying to sell has nothing to do with the quality of the EBay sales pitch.
But.
Let's say I'm Stephen King's agent. Let's say Mr. King wants to take a year off and have somebody ghostwrite a novel for him. And, thanks to all the hullabaloo, I see your manuscript up for sale on EBay, for a price that's massive in Normal Person money but actually well within Mr. King's budget.
The big question on my mind is not "Is this novel good enough?"; it's "Can this guy write?" After all, if I don't think you can string a sentence together, why would I want to bother reading an entire novel?
So, what's my first impression of Daniel Rice's writing ability?
Daniel Rice is difficult to read. He doesn't bother with paragraph breaks; his sales pitch is one enormous monolithic lump of text that fills my entire browser window. Damn thing just LOOKS exhausting before I've read a single word. His use of words is sloppy, and occasionally gramatically incorrect. He is confusing "Rawlings," a sporting goods manufacturer, with "J. K. Rowling," the Harry Potter creator every writer secretly wants to be. (Or, at least, have her bank account.) This is not the sign of a writer who pays attention to detail.
And, like most first-time writers, he is being very protective of his work, meaning I'll have to jump through hoops aplenty to even see this novel, which I have no objective reason to think will be any good in the first place. And the first draft is two chapters short of completion anyway.
Pass.
I give you credit for creativity and chutzpah, man. And you're right, from a self-promotion standpoint, your name most definitely is out there now. If that was, in fact, your goal all along, then take a bow; you've done very well. (Though again, I wish you'd left behind a better first impression of your actual writing talent.)
But make sure you don't spend that $150,000 just yet.
I've seen people mentioning how writing and critiquing are two seperate skills, so I just wanted to chime in with the third piece to that puzzle; RECEIVING critiques. It's every bit as much a skill as the other two.
The first hurdle people have to get over is, of course, the battering to your ego. Having your work disected by people who have no particular reason to be nice to you hurts, more than people who've never been exposed to it think. Your ego wants you to reject their criticism as invalid for some reason and cling to the belief that your story is perfect. Learning how to beat your ego into submission can be tricky.
But even after you get to that point, it's still not easy to know what to do with all the feedback you've gotten. It's not a democracy. If everybody tells you X is screwed up in your story, there really is a chance they're all wrong. The weird-ass, out-of-left-field comment you get on a single critique may be the thing that takes your story to the next level.
Examples.
Everybody says one of your scenes is completely superfluous. It needs to be cut. Dead weight. Get it out of there.
So do you cut it?
Well . . . maybe.
All you know at this point is that your story has a problem, and people are noticing the problem in that scene. MAYBE they're absolutely right; maybe it's as simple as a block-delete. But . . . what if the problem actually lies elsewhere? What if this scene is actually VERY relevant, and you just did a lousy job of connecting it to the rest of the story? What if the way to correct the problem lies in editing the text that comes before and after it? It's possible that this hated passage can be fixed entirely without changing a single word within it.
Another example.
I once had a critiquer tell me he wanted to see more of character X -- a LOT more, she was barely in the piece.
Well, there was a good reason she was barely in the story -- she was a throwaway character, introduced between the first and second versions to illustrate a single plot point. She did her job, and I tossed her and went on. Initially, I ignored the comment; his request was entirely out of keeping with my vision of the piece.
Except . . . he was absolutely right. (The bastard.) Every time I thought about how I wanted to edit this story, I thought of ways to give this charcter more to do . . . and I liked where it was going. So I broke down and overhauled the story, converting her from a disposable walk-on to a main character. It worked. I like the story a lot better now.
Another example.
Another one of my critiquers pointed out a technical glitch in a story I had written. Nobody else saw it, nobody else made anything resembling that comment. So, I could ignore it, right?
Wrong.
As soon as the comment left her mouth, it marched across the table and started smacking me upside the head with how RIGHT it was. If you noticed this flaw, the entire story was sunk. Dead. In fact, I could no longer read the story without thinking "Yeah, but given what Flo pointed out, it doesn't really matter, does it?"
So, I got to work correcting the flaw. I found a way to do it, and my fix wound up making the story MUCH creepier than it had been originally. (And in the context of this story, that's a Good Thing.)
Sometimes it's obvious. Sometimes the group consensus is dead-on. Sometimes an idea that sounded stupid when you first heard it becomes, after some time as passed, really REALLY stupid. Sometimes your readers just flat-out miss what you were trying to do in the story and provide you with absolutely nothing you can use beyond typo corrections.
But not always.
Editing your story in response to honest feedback is a skill, one well worth learning.
(So says the guy with a single pro-rate sale to his name.)
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| 2004 | 10 |
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