Ravenous Wednesday with Hal Bodner

One of the greatest pleasures of writing for Ravenous Romance (beyond being published multiple times) has been getting to know some of the other RR authors during our publicity events (the infamous Ornery 11 BBT springs to mind, as well as our current HSN Blog Blitz), author's ning (and yes, I really do have to stop myself from saying "We are the Knights who say Ning!"), and Yahoo group(s).

One of these authors is Hal Bodner, author of Bite Club (first in the West Hollywood Vampire series) and In Flesh and Stone, now out with Ravenous. I met Hal during The Zombie Stomp, an online discussion with Lori Perkins, literary agent and RR editor. The discussion was about Hungry For Your Love, an anthology featuring...well...zombies and romance!

Anyway, Hal made a comment about Thurber, one of my favorite humorists, and then lectured me on writer's block. His acerbic humor and tongue-in-cheek manner prompted me to buy a copy of Bite Club, which is a darkly funny take on vampires in West Hollywood. It's not just a vampire novel or a detective novel or for gays only. It's a damn good story and I am anxiously awaiting the next in the series. Gimme!!!

I asked Hal to write a post for Ravenous Wednesday and he obliged with one that I love and absolutely agree with: the importance of technical proficiency as a writer. I do not argue with any of the points Hal makes in the following post. Too often technical proficiency, basic rules of grammar and punctuation, are ignored. And (IMHO - I hate that acronym, but it DOES serve its purpose here) I've seen too many examples of just lousy writing becoming the next literary big hit because someone out there thinks it's really cool to never use capital letters or commas.
What I'm saying here is Hal has my vote, no matter what he runs for! You go, Hal!

And now, please welcome Hal Bodner to Un:Bound!

Recently, I was doing an author chat, or a lecture, or a personal appearance or one of the other public events that we authors do as part of promotion, and the topic of what it takes to be an author came up. To my surprise, about half of the established writers who participated were enthusiastically waxing on about ideas, and expression and creativity. The other half seemed concerned with establishing a work ethic and the more business-oriented aspects of the profession, getting an agent, publicity and so on. The subject of my contribution, a fairly well known pet peeve of mine, was the odd man out; I stressed the importance of technical proficiency.

A dead silence descended upon the board.

Knowing how to write ‘ the basics of grammar and sentence structure ‘ isn’t very sexy. It’s far from the fodder of late night coffee house work sessions or writing groups. I suspect it’s rarely the kind of thing that pushes a writer toward an over-indulgence in absinthe or toward walking into the sea with a pocket full of rocks. It’s not racy or exciting.

Moreover, let’s face it, we all probably hated high school English classes and freshman Basic Composition 101. We were writers, dammit! We had Great Thoughts to express! The wretchedness of learning useless stuff about predicates and tense were beneath us. We were Artists, and Artists should not be troubled with such mundane trivialities.

Any time a young writer mentions he or she is using ‘heightened’ language or an ‘experimentation’ with literary style, each time a budding novelist tells me about the ‘innovation’ they’re bringing to their work, I confess, I cringe. Far too often ‘heightened’ language results in pretension and ‘experimentation’ ends up practically unreadable. The reason, sadly, is usually a failure on the part of the eager beaver to bother to learn how words and sentences work.

I’m not talking about spelling. Many people cry out against laziness induced by spell checkers; that’s not a problem for me. In the computer age, I’m all in favor of the machines correcting my added consonants in words like ‘apparel’; just as keyboards rendered the knowledge of how to block print obsolete, the computer is a tool. Of course, it helps if the writer knows the difference between ‘they’re’ and ‘their’ or ‘passed’ and ‘past’ as even the grammar checkers are not infallible. But, all in all, so long as Little Paper Clip Guy remains a helpful reminder, and not a crutch, the issue doesn’t seem worth bothering about.

But, as authors, our craft is in the words and the sentences and, in the end, our art is in communicating ideas to the reader, effectively and in new ways.

I’m generally appalled that many writers cannot distinguish between past tense, imperfect and plus-perfect. ‘Had’, ‘were’ and the ‘-ed’ ending get used with reckless abandon, mostly improperly ‘ and that’s a shame. Choosing active versus passive voice, or dependent versus independent versus parenthetical clauses are often crucial to the flow of a sentence. Yet they get mangled together indiscriminately. Can you screw around with tense, sentence structure and the like’ Of course you can. And you should. But not before knowing the rules that you’re breaking.

A painter, a good one, would never (one hopes!) slather paint on a canvass and call it Art without first knowing the rules of color and light and composition. The Impressionists could not have created new movements in the visual arts unless they were abundantly familiar with the established structure they sought to go beyond. Yet, lousy writers do it all the time.

Sentence fragments, run-on sentences, inverted subject/predicate formats can all be used to great effect but, one has to understand what they are before dicking around with new uses. As for punctuation, although the dreaded Comma Rules have changed immensely during the past several decades, deciding where to place one can make or break a sentence.

Basic grammar and structure should be so well-ingrained that it becomes instinctive. True, we all have quirky difficulties with specific things. For example, since I spent much of my youth speaking French, I’m often ignorant of the differences in the uses of ‘which’ as opposed to ‘that’; in French, we have the universal ‘que’, and all we have to worry about is masculine/feminine/plural noun agreement. It’s a grammatical rule that I may never master but, at least I generally catch myself when I place the modifier after the noun. A phrase like ‘the truck blue and pretty’ tends to stick out like a thumb sore even to me!

Funk and Wag-All (as we used to call it), and E.B. White should be on every writer’s desk, right next to the Thesaurus. And, it should be used. (Don’t even get me started on Thesaurus Abuse! Though the damned things may provide synonyms in concept, no matter how you slice it, the words ‘comely’ and ‘exquisite’ do not mean the same thing, even though you may find them both under the heading of ‘pretty’.)

Copy editors are, I’m sure, lovely people. They provide us a valuable service but, an author should rely on them only to catch the occasional oversight or omission. Otherwise, why not let the editor write the book in the first place?

So since this has to be a relatively short post, I’ll say in sum: Learn the basics. Once you fully understand the blueprints of language, once you have become as accustomed to them as you are to breathing, then twist them, alter them, use them to shape words and sentences so that your meaning can be communicated to the reader in new and exciting ways.

As authors, that is part of our job too!

Hal Bodner is the author of the best selling gay vampire novel, Bite Club. He tells people he was born in East Philadelphia because so few people know where Cherry Hill, New Jersey is located. The first person he saw in his life was C. Everet Coop, future US Surgeon General, who delivered him. Thus, Hal was ironically destined to become a heavy smoker. He moved to West Hollywood in the 1980s and will probably never leave. Hal has been an entertainment lawyer, a scheduler for a 976 sex telephone line, a theater reviewer and the personal assistant to a television star. For awhile, he owned Heavy Petting, a pet boutique where all the movie stars shopped for their Pomeranians. Currently, he owns an exotic bird shop. He has never been a waiter. He lives in a fabulous apartment with two dogs, a mini-macaw, a lovebird and an irritable, flesh-eating military macaw named after his icon - Tallulah. He often quips he is a slave to fur and feathers and regrets only that he isn't referring to mink and marabou. He does not have cats because he tends to sneeze on them. Rapidly approaching middle-age, he remembers Nixon. He got "married" very late in life to an incredible man. Sadly, after five amazing, if turbulent, years he was widowed and can sometimes be found sunbathing at his husband's grave while trying to avoid cemetery caretakers screaming at him to put his shirt back on. "In Flesh and Stone" is Hal's first crack at paranormal erotic romance and he enjoyed writing it immensely.

For Love of the Dead is his second Ravenous Romance title and it may very well be the first guy-on-guy paranormal erotic zombie romance novel ever written! He will be following up with Generations in the spring of 2010 and, like his other romance work, it is a truly unique book.
He is currently seeking incredibly hot guys in their thirties with amazing bodies as volunteers to help him do the...er...research for his next foray into erotic romance.

For sell links and/or more information on his titles, please click on the book covers!

Also, Hal is without computer access for most of the afternoon, but will stop by later today/this evening to answer any questions/comments you have for him!