Change of Plans

My apologies to Kate Gladstone and those of you who were looking forward to reading part 2 of the interview. I’ve had a medical emergency arise and have been told to expect a hospital stay of three or four days.

Did you hear that loud groan? Not exactly the plans I had for my day when I got out of bed Thursday morning, but life tends to be full of surprises.

Anyway, I am suspending blogging until I’m back home, which I hope will be sooner rather than later. I will post the remaining installments of the interview as soon as I can.

Thanks for stopping by.

A Brief History of Handwriting

Part 1 of an Interview with Kate Gladstone

“A man's penmanship is an unfailing index of his character, moral and mental, and a criterion by which to judge his peculiarities of taste and sentiments.” - Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield

Last July I wrote “Another Dying Art Form,” a blog about the demise of handwriting. That post elicited a phone call from Kate Gladstone, who identified herself as a Handwriting Repairwoman. I found the idea intriguing and her story fascinating. I asked if she would share it with my readers, and she kindly agreed. Then life happened, interfering with her plans and delaying her response time.

I recently heard from Kate again when she forwarded her answers to the questions I had asked. Her passion for handwriting shines through in her detailed responses. Since the interview turned out longer than I anticipated, I am turning my blog over to Kate for the next 5 consecutive days. I wanted to warn you as I am deviating from my usual Monday/Thursday post days.

I am starting with my last question, because Kate gives a short history of handwriting, which I think is a good lead in to the other questions so here goes:

Is there anything else you’d like to say?
Handwriting history tends to go in cycles about 500 years long. Even throughout the millennia before anyone thought to publish books on handwriting, we can look at surviving scripts and see that they all started out very clear and easy to read. Then either the impulse for speed at all costs, or else the desire for ornament, takes over – legibility gets pushed onto the back burner – and after half a millennium or so, an originally legible writing system becomes so decorative, so scribbly, or both that people consciously or unconsciously start casting about for something that will work better: just as the early Renaissance scribes did, trying to find something clearer and more practical than the decorative but complicated handwriting styles of the late medieval era.

Today too, we have people dissatisfied with their handwriting styles, consciously or unconsciously casting about for something better: everyone from Italic teachers like me, right down to college students (and those kids and teens in the survey) who increasingly say “No” to cursive – not to mention the millions of people at any age who write fast and clearly in a semi-joined printing that tends to look more and more like Italic the faster and clearer it gets.

So the sad state of handwriting today may mean a culture desperately seeking some better form of the skill. This lets me hope that our own times can see a modern Renaissance of simply beautiful – and beautifully simple – handwriting.

The year 2022 will mark the 500th anniversary of the earliest widely influential handwriting book published in our alphabet: an Italic handwriting textbook written by, of all people, a Vatican bureaucrat (after all, back then a bureaucrat had a quill, not a keyboard, on his bureau). What if each and every one of us prepared for the occasion. by committing to repairing the state of our own handwriting, – and to making sure our children and grandchildren learn a handwriting that works? When that 500th anniversary rolls around, let's celebrate it as a world of legible writers.

What exactly is a “Handwriting Repairwoman?”
I improve people's handwriting (or teach children “write” from the start) using a streamlined modern writing style based on the style of the earliest handwriting books ever published in our alphabet, long before the print-writing and cursive styles taught today.

What made you decide to become a “Handwriting Repairwoman?”
I came into it through repairing my own – formerly – very bad handwriting, which probably had a lot to do with various neurological disabilities I have (including dysgraphia) because even my best efforts and a lot of outside help had failed to bring it to functional legibility, let alone speed. My bad handwriting and its consequences reached a crisis at age 24: halfway through graduate school.

To find out why handwriting didn't work for me, and how I could make it work, I combed through literally everything I could find on handwriting that anyone had written over the past 500 years: right back to those earliest published books. I tried anything and everything, threw out what didn't work, and retained and integrated what did work.

At first, folks who knew me thought I shouldn't waste my time on this. If I hadn't learned to write “normally” as a child or teenager, no matter how hard I tried, why did I want to spend precious time and effort on it now? But when they saw the results – especially when I helped my father (then age 65 and also a lifelong handwriting washout!) – my family and even my graduate school instructors convinced me that the world needed my services. Starting in 1987, I took on some private students as a sideline to my (then) day job as a school librarian in Brooklyn, New York. Eventually the “sideline” became full time, though I didn't start teaching group classes until 1996 when I began getting calls from hospitals begging me to teach their MDs to write legibly. A few years after 1996, schoolteachers and school administrators started calling me too – and not just about the children. Amazingly often, I've run into teachers who couldn't read their own handwriting – which always makes me wonder how they expected students to read it.

Kate, will be back tomorrow with Part II – "Why Kids Hate Cursive." In the meantime, you can learn more about Kate by visiting her website, HandwritingThatWorks.com.

Please feel free to leave your questions and comments for Kate or myself.

Thanks for stopping by.


Tags: Philip Stanhope, Kate Gladstone, handwriting repair, history of handwriting,

Qualifications versus Imagination

"I feel that luck is preparation meeting opportunity." – Oprah Winfrey

I am happy to be a published author. Yet I don’t feel the act of being published qualifies me as an expert on writing or in any other field. I feel like it simply makes me one of the lucky ones.

The reason I bring this up is that I recently ran across an old email request for a radio interview. I like doing radio interviews from my home, but this one I turned down. I don’t know if it was a good decision or bad; at this point it no longer matters. What’s done is done. But, I can’t help thinking about it all over again.

Here’s the deal. I was offered the opportunity to be part of a three person radio panel. I assumed (assuming always gets me into trouble) it was to discuss something to do with The Ride, writing or with books in general. I don’t feel like you have to be an expert to contribute your personal thoughts and views so I was okay with participating. In fact, I was flattered to have been asked.

A few days before the interview I received more information. The topic was not to be about my book or any aspect of writing. The topic was addiction, depression and recovery. The host was a clinical psychologist. The other panelist had opened a mental health facility and had written a nonfiction book about recovery.

The questions to be discussed included: If you were to set public policy on improving care what recommendations would you present? How would you convince the government to spend money on treatment programs when we are going through one of the most difficult economic times?

Alarm bells sounded. I was supposed to be the third panelist? Me, a writer of fiction? My qualifications: I created a character and labeled her as depressed with low self-esteem.

What could I contribute to this discussion? My character didn’t turn to a professional health care worker for assistance. Instead, she dealt with her problems with the help of chocolate, wine and a vivid imagination. These ineffective techniques, I felt sure, were not what the radio host wanted to hear.

I have never figured out why I was asked. Perhaps they had me confused with some other Jane Kennedy Sutton. Or, maybe when the radio host read my book (if he actually did), he missed the fact it was a novel. Possibly he assumed it was based on my life so I could add the experience of one who’s been there, done that.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Well, except… I do like wine and chocolate. Oh…and I do have a vivid imagination. Wait—this isn’t sounding good, is it?

Though I have an occasional down day and I’m currently suffering from “unseasonal” affective disorder as something evil has sabotaged the normally 75 degree sunny days we have this time of year (yes, I realize the rest of the country is worse off, but it doesn’t keep me from whining), ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the time I am far from depressed.

Out of curiosity, I tried to find the show and listen to see how it turned out, but I guess the station had cleaned out their archives. If I had received the offer this year, instead of last when I was such a newbie in the world of the published, maybe I would have gone through with it just to see if imagination can hold its own against qualifications.

Have you ever turned down an interview/panel? Why? Have you ever participated in a discussion you knew nothing about?

Thanks for stopping by.

Tags: Oprah, The Ride, depression, self-esteem,

Do Blurbs Matter?

"Whether a book is worth buying lies in its content, not its blurb." - Chen Cun

Though I agree with the above quote, I admit if I were to receive a blurb from a well-known author such as Jodi Picoult, Janet Evanovich, or Stephen King, I’d probably jump up and down with delight. (I’d like to say I’d turn flips or do handsprings, but I do know my own limitations.) Yet the practical side of me wonders how important blurbs are in selling books.

In my post on eponyms last April, I mentioned that the word “blurb” came from the book cover of Are you a Bromide? designed by Gelett Burgess in 1907. Miss Belinda Blurb, a fictitious female declared, among other things, that, “This books has 42-carat THRILLS in it.” I haven’t read the book, but the with the subtitle of “The Sulphitic Theory Expounded and Exemplified According to the Most Recent Researches into the Psychology of Boredom Including Many Well-Known Bromidioms Now in Use,” I think that blurb could be a bit of a stretch.

There’s no way we can know if the book would have sold any fewer copies if Miss Blurb had never made an appearance, but the fact that very few books are published without blurbs leads me to believe someone thinks they’re important.

Not to long ago Lynn Sellers wrote in her post, Writer Promo Swaps, “Writers have always exchanged high-praise blurbs with each other (with the most famous example being the writer who blurbed himself using one of his pseudonyms).”

That intrigued me and forced me to go digging to find out the name of this gutsy person. The man was Donald Westlake. According to an article on EW.com, “On his website, Westlake noted that the cover of Cunningham’s 1970 book, Comfort Station, even contains one of his favorite blurbs: "I wish I had written this book!" — Donald E. Westlake. You’ve got to admire a guy who could get away with blurbing himself.”

In an recent article, from The Guardian, “What’s the Point of Book Blurbs?” the author, Daniel Kalder says, “Then there are blurbs, the more of which you can plaster on your paperback the better. Usually these are from newspaper reviews reduced by your sales people to a string of superlatives here, a comparison to somebody more famous than you are there. If the blurb comes from a review by a famous person, then they may just run with the name of the celebrity alone ("The Da Vinci Code is f*cking awesome!" – Salman Rushdie).

“Do these blurbs – many of which could be transferred from book to book without great difficulty – actually sway readers? I mean, if you believed them then you'd think every book published is, like, really amazing.”

You can click here to read the entire article.

I’d love to know what you think. Are you swayed by a blurb or the person who wrote the blurb? Have you ever not bought a book due to lack of blurbs or because one was written by someone you didn’t like?

Thanks for stopping by.

Tags: Chen Cun, Jodi Picoult, Janet Evanovich, Stephen King, blurbs, Lynn Sellers, Donald Westlake, Daniel Kalder, Belinda Blurb, Gelett Burgess,

Buzzwords

"It's a strange world of language in which skating on thin ice can get you into hot water." - Franklin P. Jones

The New York Times ran a fun article called “The Buzzwords of 2009.” According to the article,

“Catchphrases and buzzwords can tell us much about a year past — what resonated, what stuck, what the year revealed about the sensibility of the nation, whether you’re a wise Latina woman, a mini-Madoff, a teabagger or Balloon Boy.”

The article finished with Grant Barrett’s buzzwords for 2009. Octomom and birther made the list. However, there were others I haven’t heard but liked such as:

aporkalypse
Undue worry in response to swine flu. Includes unnecessary acts like removing nonessential kisses from Mexican telenovelas and the mass slaughter of pigs in Egypt.

Chimerica
The intertwined economies of China and the United States, which together dominate the world economy. Popularized by Niall Ferguson in his book “The Ascent of Money.”

crash blossom
A headline that can be misconstrued, like “Shark Attacks Puzzle Experts.” Will Shortz is not in jeopardy; the sharks are just confounding scientists.

Dracula sneeze
Covering the mouth with the crook of the elbow when sneezing, like Dracula hiding his face with a cape.

green shoots
Signs of an economic recovery or of a company’s financial turnaround.

heinie
A pronunciation of H1N1, the swine flu virus.

mancession
A recession that affects men more than women. Also hecession.

vook
A digital book that includes some video in its text.

ununbium
The temporary name of a newly found element, Uub for short. It comes from the Latin for the element’s number, 112.

Click here to see the complete list or to read the entire article.

Do you have any favorite words from 2009? Can you predict what some of the 2010 buzz words might be?

Thanks for stopping by.

Tags: Franklin Jones, buzzwords, Grant Barrett, New York Times,