The Editing Process. Louis Shalako.

Louis Shalako

I’m just in the process of winding up my eighteenth novel and the sixth in the Inspector Gilles Maintenon Mystery Series. (Smashwords.)

It’s called How to Rob a Bank. (Excerpt.)

The first draft came in at about 54,000 words. A week or so later, and the final book is approximately 63,000 words. Editing is definitely a process. I’ve just completed my fifth deep edit, a really stiff read through the book that took a good twelve or fourteen man-hours. The average person would read the book in anything from two and a half to four hours.

At some level, it is entertaining. There are times when you think, ‘man, I can’t believe I wrote this thing…’

There’s definitely some level of satisfaction there.

So. You have a good story—now you want to take that story and use it to knock the reader’s socks off.

Editing is work, that’s for sure. It is work that must be done.

At some point it becomes excruciating. It’s really tedious, painstaking work.

It’s startling to discover, in the first really good end-to-end read of your book that one character, described as having a wife and two kids in an early chapter, has mysteriously turned into a single man with an active night-life near the end of the story.

There are two solutions. The first is to accept the change later in the book. Your single man would have a wife and two kids again, and you would have to add material. You would be adding material here and there all through the book. You would have to go back through everything and justify it logically, because every little thing in the book relates to every other thing in the book.

It has to make sense.

As easier change was to go to the early chapter, remove the reference to the wife and kids, and then everything about that character made sense again. It still requires careful reading, (you want to look for further references to wives and kids), but having discovered this error, now we’re hyper-alert to more.

And find them we did. In another scene, I had a character who began life as Mathilde, and then switched over to being Phoebe, and then back again to Mathilde. It was a simple choice, as I already had another character named Mathilde in the book. (At least I think I did!) It can get confusing.

To avoid confusion, Mathilde in that chapter became Phoebe.

In another scene, a police officer is interrogating a witness or a suspect. We start off with Grosjean in the chair, with Levain coming and going. For whatever reason, during the writing process, we must have gotten up and walked away, shut down or whatever. When we started up again, we just grabbed Andre Levain by the scruff of the neck and then all of a sudden we had him asking the questions.

That required careful reading, as even I don’t know what the hell I’m trying to say sometimes.

The scene wasn’t completely visualized as to actions and characters and their movements. 

Sometimes it really does take five or six rewrites before the scene makes total sense, and yet it is important during the writing process to forge ahead to the end of the manuscript.

The nice thing about a mystery novel is the denouement. This is the scene where the detective lays the case and its solution out to some attentive audience. Very often in the old-school novels, all the suspects would be sipping tea in the drawing room of some big old mansion.

It is only after reading your own book ten or fifteen times that you can really nail all of it down.

Writing a mystery novel is a lot like conducting an investigation. You want to have all of your facts in place before snapping the cuffs on your suspect or suspects.

Every little place where I fudged as a writer, every place in the book where I’m writing pure fiction, of a sort based on information that can’t be easily verified, it all comes back to haunt you. But this is an opportunity. Court procedures in France in 1929 are one grey area for me. 

I’m not a lawyer and to do the research online would be difficult as the best sources are in French. There is the problem of key-word searches when you want to ask a very specific question. Very few readers will ever question it, and even fewer have the knowledge to contradict the text!

The book’s not really written for scholars, lawyers or police investigators, it’s not written for bankers. All of those folks have a million times more knowledge than I can claim.

It’s written for people who like a good murder mystery, and of course I want to do the best job I can.

Every objection that I can raise to my solution can also be dealt with. It does require going back, through vast sequences, and finding the perfect spot to put another little detail into the story.

You have to get to the end of your manuscript before you can really begin shooting it down.

It’s all part of the editing process, the writing process, and ultimately the publishing process. 

No one wants to produce a book that’s full of typos, misused words the author clearly didn’t understand, errors of logic and an ending that underwhelms the reader.

Even on the fifth run through the book, I was still fixing clunky sentences. I still found missing words and the odd extraneous word in a sentence. As far as logic, it seems pretty good, pretty detailed, and hopefully convincing enough for the average reader.

How to Rob a Bank will be available through many fine online bookstores very soon, with paperbacks to follow.

***

This may be a bit controversial.

In my opinion, a beta reader, one that had read the book once might have picked off any number of these errors. They might even pick off all of them. But they didn’t write the book, they don’t know who the characters are supposed to be. That’s not the real problem.

The trouble is that time element. I don’t want to wait three weeks to hear back from people. I would be on to the next project. It would dominate my mind—and this story would be almost forgotten at that point.

I really don’t want to go through that sort of process multiple times. Let’s assume beta readers caught every mistake. My solutions would have been pretty much the same. The book would be substantially the same. Either way, it would still take x-number of hours of my time, and probably a lot more doing it that way.

That’s not to say there are not concerns, because there always are. With each book, we learn new things and that all goes towards the next book we write.

There comes a time when it’s done and it’s time to let it go—but I will read the book again once or twice just to make sure, ladies and gentlemen.

You can trust me on that one.

END

Here’s my blurb:

Inspector Gilles Maintenon has finally run up against an original mind—someone who’s very good at wasting their time. The dead body of a young bank employee is discovered in a vault that shows every sign of being robbed. The premier Paris branch of Crédit Lyonnais has ten or twenty million francs on a busy day. Then there’s the safety-deposit boxes. A proper investigation takes time. The police are nothing if not predictable in their procedures. But that other mind has already gone down that road. They’ve had plenty of time to think about it. Their killer, using simple human psychology, has come up with a brilliant plan. Gilles would dearly love to meet the mind that conceived of that plan. He intends to do just that.

Mystery fans are sure to enjoy How to Rob a Bank, the sixth volume in Louis Shalako’s Inspector Gilles Maintenon Mystery Series. (Amazon.)

Thank you for reading.

***

Why is Facebook Cracking Down on Pseudonyms?

Geogozz, (Wiki.)

Louis Shalako

When I first got on Facebook, I thought it was the most amazing social experiment. It still is, really. It is, and will be, a wonderful socializing influence on the world.

Yet there is a time to pay the bills—and a time when investors and shareholders want to start seeing some real profits, not just cash funds accumulating based on paper estimates of the company’s worth. It's not that the value of their shares didn't go up. But they want to see income growth, which will further drive share prices up.

Even the possibility of income growth tends to drive up share prices and company valuation.

I’m sure there are other factors we don’t know about, and probably don’t have the knowledge to speculate about.

So. Why is Facebook cracking down on pen-names, aliases and pseudonyms?

The stated reasons sound pretty reasonable. They want to get rid of fake accounts. They want to get rid of spam, and they want to improve the service for all users. There must be fifty or a hundred million fake or even just dead accounts on Fb.

(A couple of my Fb friends are in fact dead. The accounts still exist.)

According to them, they’re concerned with the safety of the community. There is, no doubt, some element of truthiness there.

From my perspective, it’s a mistake to believe that this is all about drag queens. They were merely vulnerable, in that they were clearly and obviously in violation of the site’s rules. 

Generally speaking, Fb wouldn’t respond without a specific complaint about a specific account. The people complaining may have had some disapproval, or they may troll for other reasons.

They might have simply exploited the most obvious vulnerability.

If you are trying to avoid criminal online harassment, whether from individuals in your home town or anyone online, Facebook’s position is that users can simply block and report. But my online presence is not just Facebook. I sell books on other platforms. I have blogs under my pen-name. I have my presence on Twitter, and LinkedIn, etc. Someone who targets me personally, would love to know those pen-names, and especially those products. They could go off and make all kinds of troll reviews. They will be able to indulge their every evil little whim, and Facebook won’t be able to do anything about it. Facebook can’t block a troll review on Amazon or prevent threats via contact forms on your blog or website.

In a very real sense, the situation on Fb is similar to the troll problem on Amazon, where people basically exploit a weakness, for whatever reason, to do a bit of harm.

Shareholders don’t care about that, do they? This is true of all such companies.

Here’s the truth. Facebook is responding to customer complaints.

Facebook has to play by its own rules.

That sounds fair enough. But private individuals are not customers of Facebook. We are a resource.

Facebook sells our data. That data is seriously flawed if we are using incorrect names.

More than anything, Facebook wants to provide its customers, (not us), with accurate, tight, extremely specific data on individuals. That means you and me.

We are the audience.

We are consumers.

We are a target for marketing efforts and attempts to persuade us on social, economic and political issues.

The price of this data will be based on its value—and fake names take away some of that value.

Marketers want good data. They want fine data. They want very, very specific data. Knowing (or merely having no other information, which is the same thing), that Louis Shalako lives in Sarnia is useful. Knowing my real name would be even more useful. Knowing my income, my habits, what I eat for dinner is more useful still.

Criminals, spammers and trolls will still use fake names and bogus accounts. The real spammers will set up an account, and use a bot or an overseas service to make a lot of friends in a hurry. They will target real people and real Facebook accounts with spam and advertisements. They will post ads for sunglasses on your profile page. There are worse things they can do. They might be shut down a few hours later.

Even so, the damage will have been done. Their job will have been done. Hey, maybe Facebook has done a great thing by preemptively doxing us.

Rather than be outed, we are being asked to out ourselves, I guess.

The real psychopaths won’t post anything. They’ll just read your profile. They’ll come around to your house and slash your tires, break your windows and rape your dog.

Our real identities are worth money to a sophisticated, perhaps perfectly legitimate marketer.

There are a lot of illegitimate marketers in this world.

We will now be more vulnerable to social engineering, which has legitimate applications as well as fraudulent ones.

No doubt Facebook will have terms of service that apply—and appeal—to their customers.

They will make all sorts of claims about how no one’s privacy will be violated, and about how all of their clients and partners will be behaving in an ethical and legal manner.

Once the data has been transmitted, and presumably once the money has been paid to Fb, Facebook will no longer have any control over that data.

At that point, you and I are on our own, ladies and gentlemen.

My email inbox is already busy with unsolicited ads. There are new people in there every day, some trying to lend us money, some of them trying to get us to register for their email newsletters.

Some of them are frauds and con artists.

I started off, right from Day One, using a pen-name.

For one thing, I don’t much want to be famous. It comes at a very high price. That’s not the only reason, though.

The truth, a little paranoid as it might sound, is that I was hoping to evade a stalker right here in my own home town. That person will stalk me for the rest of my life.

They’re a real piece of work. Facebook doesn’t care. Their position is that I can always close my account. Yet I need that social interaction. The fact is that it has done a lot for me.

I was kind of isolated before I went online and signed up for Fb. I have enjoyed it very much over the years.

That’s the great thing about the internet—all kinds of people in all kinds of places will have our names, addresses and phone numbers, our email addresses and all kinds of personal detail.

ISIS will have my real name. The Mafia and the Cartel will have my real name. Ordinary users, for example black people living in America, will become a little bit shy about making political statements or engaging in social activism. Because the bad guys, hell, even the good guys, can now find you so much easier.

Anonymity is our best protection sometimes, and yes, it can be abused. The powers of justice can also be abused, which is my basic point here. Most users really don’t abuse it. Facebook is not concerned about your quality of life, only the quality of your data.

As for myself, I’m a little bit concerned with the effect in totalitarian countries, where a simple tweet can get you in a hell of a lot of trouble.

My advice, ladies and gentlemen, is to do everything in our power to corrupt that data. Not everyone has access to burner phone after burner phone, and total mobility, which might be a requirement in a legimitate social upheaval situation in whatever country we choose to name.

Can’t stand artichokes? Post glowing praise of artichokes. Don’t like Donald Trump, or Coca-Cola, or the latest in funny shoes? Post something nice about them. Like Bernie Sanders, or Hillary Clinton? Say you don’t. Your vote is your own business anyhow.

Normally you wouldn’t be that mean, right? You are a nice person. Being really devious is foreign to your nature. They might know your real name, but you can still confuse the hell out of them. Talk about your thirteen lesbian daughters. Talk about your hemorrhoids even if you don’t have them. Make the most ridiculous statements about yourself. For example, I have three arms and a parakeet. Look up ads for mustache cups, and butter churns and how to buy an iguana embryo.

Facebook’s customers will eventually figure out that all the people they targeted for back-to-school sales aren’t buying anything. They will learn that people they target with ads for white shirts or black shoes haven’t actually bought anything.

That Joe Foreman sandwich cooker and the plastic briefs you reviewed on Amazon are not the real you. When Fb floods your timeline with plastic briefs and sandwich cookers, click on there and tell them you don’t want to see that ad. Tell them you find it offensive. Tell them it’s a religious or moral issue for you.

It’s a question of you feeling comfortable in this community.

Or, somebody real smart could come up with another winning formula—another business model for social media.

So far, Facebook has been the most successful. No one else even comes close.

The truth is that we could kill Facebook if we wanted to—if only we could act together.

That seems a bit hasty.

Maybe we should just think about that one a little bit.

Most of us like Facebook just the way it is now. We don't have a problem with pen-names and are more than happy to see that continue.

END