In brief: Book Design

For some reason, graphic design books never seem to put the author's name on the spine of the book. So even if I can see on my scanner that the author's last name is say, "Jenkins," I still have to scan a half-dozen books in order to find the "J"s on the shelf.

One would think that graphic designers, who are all about designing text for function and form, would realize that books often end up on shelves, spines out, in alphabetical order.

Or maybe not.

Last night the air conditioning in the store was broken. I'm pretty sure that shelving graphic design books in 90-degree weather with no AC could be used as an interrogation technique by the DoD.

In and Out: The reality of bookstore inventory

I frequently pick up ARCs (advance readers' copies) of titles at work, and this one caught my eye some months ago. It's such an interesting premise: a woman recovering from divorce and loss of custody of her children rights herself via finding moving to a house which belonged to Nabokov, finding a manuscript, and opening a male whorehouse (crazy!). And it also caught my eye because the author is also a debut author writing contemporary mainstream.

On Naming Characters

So during the writers' strike a few years back, I stopped watching most network TV. I simply got out of the habit, and all my watching went by the wayside. But a friend recently alerted me to a storyline on Grey's Anatomy in which I'm very interested. As a result, I've been watching a lot of the show lately, trying to catch up on almost three years of missed episodes, and it has me thinking about character names. Look at some of the names from Grey's Anatomy:

Meredith
Derek
Christina
George
Isobel
Alexander
Mark
Miranda
Lexi
Preston
Addison
Owen

From Prose to Pulp

The problem with starting a blog is that you're always in the position of asking, what on earth do I know? I figured the answer to that was, "Nothing of consequence." I mean, I can talk your ear off about vowel formant measures, but let's face it, there are about twenty people on earth who are crazy about that, and we see each other at conferences. So I figured, why have an author blog? Everyone has an author blog, and I don't know anything that would be interesting to write and read about.

Except for one niggling thing.

I do know books.