Deadlines

I don't like giving advice to writers because I don't necessarily consider myself an expert on anything.  When it comes to writing, I kind of feel just as lost as always.  But there's one thing I am good at and that's meeting deadlines.

The number one barrier most authors face is finishing the damn book.  They come up with all kinds of excuses.  The book sucked, they had a better idea, Lost was on.  But it usually boils down to an inability to get your butt in the chair and write.

What works best for me setting goals.  Like giving yourself 8 weeks to finish a first draft.  I should note here that when you set your goal, you need to be realistic.  For me, 8 weeks is a totally realistic deadline.  I write 6 days a week for a minimum of 2 hours.  That gives me 48 days of writing.  If my book is 60k to 70k words, that means I have to average between 1250 to 1450 words per day.  By breaking it down like that, I take the sting out of it.  Thinking about writing 70k words is painful but 1250 is totally doable.  Your schedule might be different so you should adjust accordingly.  If you can only write 3 days a week for an hour a day, then be honest about that.  But find the time to do it.  My agent told me about a friend of his who writes exclusively on his lunch break.  

But it's not enough to just set a goal.  You have to be accountable.  People do it in different ways.  They tell their friends, they talk it up on twitter, they challenge each other.  I do it with a spreadsheet.  I keep a daily log of my word count.  Then at the bottom, I have a countdown to the number of days I have left, the number of words I have left, and how many words per day I have to average to meet my goal.  That last number is important because it goes up or down depending on my output.  If I have a bad couple of days where I don't write much or I don't write at all, that average goes up.  It keeps me accountable.  It says, "Okay, you screwed up, but here's how many words you have to write per day to catch up." I've got a huge sense of self-guilt, so when I fail to meet my "goal," I feel really crappy and use that to surge ahead.

An unintended positive consequence to getting into a habit like this is that it enable you to be able to visualize later on how quickly you can complete a project.  Take the book I'm working on now.  When I began, I intuitively knew it would be around 70k words.  I set myself a deadline of January 15.  I'd started around the holidays and had forgotten to take into account the number of days I wouldn't be able to write, so I extended my deadline to Feb 1.  I finished the book yesterday with a word count of 67500.

I feel like I'm rambling here.  But if there's one thing I can impart it's the importance of deadlines.  You don't have to tell anyone about them, if you're worried about being embarrassed for not meeting them.  The only person you really need to be accountable to is yourself.  But setting deadlines and really trying to stick to them, can be a great motivator to do the one thing most unpublished authors are unable to do:  finish that book.

Blog Chain - Fears

It's Christine's turn to start the chain this time around, and she picked a hell of a question.

"What is the main character of you current WiP most afraid of and why? Don’t use a previously finished work. This is all about discovering the inner motivations of your current characters – the ones you don’t know all that well yet.”

How am I supposed to answer that one?  I'm currently working on my YA that's due out next year, but it's kind of bad luck for me to talk about something I'm in the middle of working on, so I'll use an MG I've been thinking about working on after I finish my YA.

The MG is about the day aliens invade a small town in FL.  My main character, Max Gamble, has just lost his father, and his mother works all the time.  On the day of the invasion, Max is left alone with an elderly woman and two delinquent neighbor kids.  Max's fear is simple:  That everyone he knows is going to leave and he'll be left alone.  That's Max's biggest fear.  And I think it's justified.  Losing his father woke Max up to the fact that people leave.  They die, they disappear, they simply walk away.  The things in his life that seemed so concrete before, suddenly became mutable.  The foundation of his beliefs is weak.

And then the aliens appear and very literally begin taking people away.  Max's greatest fear comes true.

I've only written one MG before but I like MG for different reasons than YA.  YA is all about exploring boundaries.  Exploration of the self.  Whereas MG is about coming to terms with the things in your world.  I think MG is that age where you're just beginning to learn that not everyone is nice, not everything is fair, and not everyone is what they appear.

So that's my answer!  Check out Laura who answered before me and Sarah who will talk about her characters' fears tomorrow!

You Gotta Have Character

A couple of posts back, I talked about the US remake of Skins and why it was important.  I stand by everything I said, but this morning I watched the first episode of the 5th season of the UK Skins and I want to talk about why the US version sucks and what that has to do with you as a writer.

It's all about character.  For those not in the know, every two seasons (or series as they call them in the UK) they dump the cast and start fresh.  So newcomers can always jump on board and get to know the new group of misfits.  This season began with a girl named Frankie.  She dressed like a boy and was bullied at her old school in Oxford.  She's trying to begin again, start new, but she's worried that no one will like her or that the past will repeat itself.  In this episode there is drinking and snogging and smoking and some drug use.  Along with trespassing and skinny dipping and theft and bullying.  But those things are there to titillate.  They're just part of the landscape.  The real stars are the characters.  The crazy diverse characters.

See, that's why the US version of Skins is failing.  Character should inform plot, not the other way around. The US remake is trying to be daring for the sake of daring, not because the characters demand it.  I feel that for the remake to be successful, they should take the concept but ignore all the characters that came before.  Start fresh, just like the UK version does every two years.  By mimicking, they're letting the plot lead the characters and not the other way around.

As a writer, that's an important lesson.  If you want to be daring or bold or "edgy" (which is such a bullshit word these days), then those things MUST flow from the character and not the other way around.  When Ollie gets high in Deathday, it's not because I wanted to be cool.  It's because it's his last day.  He's dying.  The opportunity presented itself and he went for it.  The plot flowed from Ollie.  An extreme example comes from The Marbury Lens.  It's one messed up book.  There's a lot of everything. Swearing, drinking, name calling.  But it all flows seamlessly from the characters.  It never feels forced.

The way to think about it is this:  If your characters were real, would they do the thing in real life that you're trying to make them do in your book?  If the answer is no, then don't do it.  I know some people will say that they're YOUR characters and they should damn well do whatever you tell them to.  They're right.  But then they won't be good characters.  Readers, especially teens, can smell bullshit a mile away.

Plot's important, I don't want to say it's not, but characters are the key, in my humble opinion.  And by the way, setting is a character.

The Writing - It Goes

I'm in the home stretch for the book I'm working on and that means that I've gotten to the point where I have to start bribing myself to finish.  It's not that I dislike working on it--I love it like cake--it's that I'm impatient.  I want to be done.  I want to move on to one of the other million ideas I've got.

My impatience was one of the first hurdles I had to overcome before I could become an honest-to-goodness writer type who actually finishes books.  I overcame it with bribes.  I have daily little bribes.  Like if I hit my word count, I can have cookies or a special dinner.  Then I have bigger bribes.  Like if I average a certain number of words for the week, I can go see a movie or buy something shiny.  And finally, I always buy myself something nice when I actually finish a book.  It doesn't have to be anything big.  For example, when I finish this book, I'm going to buy myself a new pair of running shoes.  Maybe not the most exciting gift in the world, but my feet will certainly thank me.

I'll actually be happy to finish because I miss talking to my friends here and on Twitter.  I haven't been very good lately.  Actually I've been bad for about two months.  I didn't want to be one of those people who only Tweets during their book launch season and then disappears.  But between real life and book writing, I've not been able to make much time.  With a little luck, that will soon change.

So what do you use to bribe yourself into finishing things?  Not just books, but anything.  I'm all ears.

Guest Post - Michelle McLean

I want to welcome Michelle McLean to the blog.  Her first book Homework Helpers: Essays & Term Papers is available now.  I got to read some of Michelle's book and she's got a wonderfully informative and warm approach that I think is going to be really helpful to anyone struggling with writing assignments or anyone who just wants a refresher.


I'm going to let Michelle talk now but I'll put up links to her book at the end along with all her contact information.  Thanks, Michelle!

Fiction and non-fiction may seem a world apart, but they have a lot more in common than you may think. Sure, non-fiction books are generally there for more educational purposes, to inform their audiences, maybe even teach them something. But you know, if you are a non-fiction author and you want people to read your book, you still have to make it interesting.

Which is why I have always been confused as to why so many textbooks and guidebooks are so dry, humorless, borrrrrrring. Yeah, they are there to teach you about something, but really, why not jazz it up a bit? Why bog it down with so many huge, unutterable words that only the highest degreed people in that particular field will understand it?

My guess is that a frustrated student isn’t going to get a whole lot of help from a book they have to have a dictionary, translator, and PhD to understand.

I kept this in mind when writing Homework Helpers: Essays and Term Papers. Yes, it will give you a bunch of rules. And yes, the purpose of the book is to show you how to write an essay or paper. But I worked very hard to make this book as understandable as possible. I want my readers to feel like I’m sitting right next to them, explaining as plainly as possible every single step they need to take. And just in case they are still confused, I have a TON of examples so they can actually see what I’m talking about.

And not just any examples…almost all of the essays samples included in the book are assignments I actually wrote for classes (the rest I wrote specifically for the book). So if you want to see the types of things I used to write about, go check out the example essays :D

Look, the bottom line is everyone out there is going to have to write at least one essay at some point in their lives. It’s unavoidable. Why make it any more difficult than it needs to be? :)

Michelle McLean is a writer and the Chief Editorial Consultant for PixelMags, LLC. In addition to her non-fiction work, Michelle writes YA historical novels and other children’s books. If she's not editing, reading or chasing her kids, she can usually be found in a quiet corner working on her next book.

Homework Helpers: Essays and Term Papers is a fun, user-friendly book that guides the reader, step by step, through writing a dozen different types of essays, including the dreaded SAT essay. Using straightforward, plain English, this book shows the reader exactly what they need to do, from start to finish, and includes rough draft, edited, and final draft versions of every type of essay discussed. This book also provides chapters that include tips and instruction on researching, proofreading, and citations.

Thank you again, Michelle!  

So where can you get Homework Helpers: Essays & Term Papers?  Here are some links for you:

Amazon

Borders

B&N

And you can find Michelle at the following places (as well as on the blog chain!):

Michelle McLean

Michelle's Blog

Operation Awesome Blog

Facebook

Twitter

The Reality of Young Adulthood

Before I write about what I'm going to write about, I want to let you all know that tomorrow I'll be hosting the amazing Michelle McLean on the blog.  Her book Homework Helpers: Essays & Term Papers is out now so she'll be stopping by with a guest post about how to jazz up non-fiction.  Michelle rocks so stop by tomorrow and show her some love!
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So here it is:  The Happy Days....not so happy.  Charles wasn't always in charge.  That Full House was full of lies.  Prime time family shows are bullshit.

There.  I said it.

This is a difficult post for me to write because it involves the new MTV version of Skins, a brilliant British import.  It's difficult because the remake was horrible.  It was a helpless, hapless ghost of the original.  And yet, I feel the need to support it for two reasons.  The first is that I hope it finds its voice and becomes at least as good as the original.  The second is that there is a need for shows like it on the air.

So what is Skins?  It's not a poor version of Gossip Girl.  It tells the stories of real kids doing things real kids do.  The thing about Gossip Girl and shows like it is that they feature obscenely rich kids in exotic locations...OUT THERE...doing things most kids will never get to do.  Whether you realize it or not, there's safety in that.  Most parents who let their kids watch GG aren't worried that their kid is going to suddenly inherit a trust fund and start doing lines of coke off of other rich kid's Gucci handbags.  Shows like GG are so out there that they're easy to dismiss.

A show likes Skins is not.

The kids in Skins are written by and portrayed by kids their age.  16-18 year-olds.  They're kids I could have known in high school.  They're kids, your kids probably know.  That's what makes them so scary.  You watch them getting high and screwing their brains out and, as an adult, a little voice in your head SCREAMS that kids shouldn't be seeing this.

But you're wrong.

Because kids aren't just seeing it.  They're DOING it.

Not all of them.  Kids are as diverse and varied as crayons.  I didn't experiment until I was out of HS, and I know people who have never tried drugs.  I know some who tried them all in HS and are now as straight as arrows.

But shows like Skins along with books that provide honest, frank depictions of teenagers (books by the likes of Hannah Moskowitz and Andrew Smith and Ellen Hopkins) are essential.  Pretending that kids don't do those things, or putting them in bubbles, doesn't actually protect them.  In fact, I'd argue that it does more harm than good.

I'm not going to argue that the show doesn't glorify some things that shouldn't be glorified but that's what honesty is about.  I know there's this idea that if you see a kid doing something they ought not be doing on TV that they should subsequently be punished in some way.  But that's just not how life works.

The reality of Young Adulthood is that it's fucking messy.  Kids are stupid.  They do stupid things.  They experiment with sex and drugs.  They're absurdly reckless.  Sometimes that leads down dark, terrible paths.  But more often than not, those kids grow up and go on to be your real estate agent or tax preparer or your kids' teacher.

So before you condemn a show like Skins, watch it.  Watch it WITH your kids no matter how uncomfortable it makes you.  Talk about it.  Understand that your kid and ALL the kids don't live in a PG world.  You may not like shows like Skins, but your kids probably do.  And if it helps them relate to their world, you should be for it too.

Steal This Post

There was a bunch of hoopla a week or two ago about book piracy.  My initial gut reaction was, "Argh! Stealing is BAD."  I mean, I know a lot of these people that book pirates are stealing from.  That's money out of my friends' pockets.  Bad pirates!  BAD!!!!

And then I saw another post today and I realized that people are thinking with their guts and not their brains.  So I've decided to put in my two cents.

First off:  Make no mistake.  If you download a book you didn't pay for without the author's permission, you are stealing.  There's no getting around it.  However, it isn't the bookpocalypse people are making it out to be.

Let me give you a little history on me.  Back in the early part of the decade, when Napster and Audiogalaxy made stealing music easier than breathing, I allegedly downloaded a ton of music.  I mean, I used to line up hundreds of tracks in my queue every morning and then let them download all day.  This was back before it was strictly considered illegal.  I knew it was wrong then and I know it now.  But the thing to take from this is that being able to sample music made me much more likely to buy a band's music.

It seems counterintuitive, right?  But stealing made me a better consumer.  Let's say I walked into a music store and was looking through the CD rack.  Maybe I came across a CD that looked interesting.  But I had no way of knowing if the band was any good.  Money was tight, so I passed more often than not, tending to stick to the bands that I knew.  But downloading introduced me to indie bands that I might never have given a chance.  Bands that I still buy music from to this day.  Bands I went to see in concert.  In short, if I hadn't been able to download music, I would have never taken a chance on a lot of bands and they would have lost my money.

Ten years later, there's no real reason to steal music.  Bands stream tracks for free on-line, iTunes gives you 90 second samples, Myspace is still a decent place to find unsigned acts (though not much else), Pandora and indie Internet radio stations consistently play little-known bands right among the well known ones.  These days it's easy to learn about and sample new music without stealing it.

But how does this translate into book piracy.  Well, here's the thing.  If your book isn't selling well and someone pirates it, chances are that they're much like I was when I was pirating music.  I couldn't afford to take a chance on an unknown, so I downloaded it.  If I liked it, I supported it.  Now, you can definitely argue that libraries and e-galleys and wonderful sites like PulseIt which put my book on-line for free for a month, give people the chance to sample books.  And you're right.  But e-books are still in their infancy and it's still easier to torrent a book than find somewhere to read it legally.

One of my greatest joys is reading a book so amazing that I immediately have to share it with someone.  Before I purchased my Kindle, I would just pop that book in the mail and let them sample the goodness within.  If my friends loved it like I did, 9 times out of 10, they purchased the author's next book.  By sharing, I'd made consumers of my friends.  But you can't share e-books.  Yet.  I know that both the Nook and Kindle have a "sharing" feature, but out of the 70 books on my Kindle, only 16 are eligible.  That's 23%.  Which is miserable.  Now, you can allegedly strip the DRM from Kindle and Nook books and share them with your friends, which is fantastic.  You just have to trust that your friends will delete the book when they're done and not share it with the whole wide world.

What I'm saying here is that stealing is bad.  But instead of punishing book pirates or scolding them we need to make sure that we're giving them easy ways to be consumers.  Now before someone comes and tells me, I know that some people are ALWAYS going to pirate books.  There's just no getting around that.  But I'm not going to waste my time tracking them down.  Because quite frankly, my hope is that if someone does hypothetically download my book, that they'll like it and tell their friends, and that when my next book comes out, they'll support me.  If even 10% of the people who steal my first book buy my second, then I've won.

Because the thing I believe is that someone who pirates you book likely wouldn't have bought it anyway.  But there IS the chance that you've created a fan.  Cory Doctorow takes this stance and releases all his books under the Creative Commons license.  He put his books up for free download on his site and lets people convert them into every known format so long as they aren't DRM'd and you don't make money off of them.  I downloaded Little Brother from his site and then recommended it to others who bought the physical copy.  When For the Win came out, I bought the book. See how that works?

I'm not going to defend piracy.  It's simply an indefensible act.  However, I think it's a waste of time to rant about its evils and chase down every single person torrenting it or sue your customers into oblivion.  I think our energy as a whole would be better devoted to finding ways to give people what they want, the way they want it.

Stealing is wrong, mmmmKay, but being unknown is wronger.

The Explainer

In The Deathday Letter, I know everything.  I know what I meant.  I know why Ollie acted the way he did.  I know where the letters come from.  I know everything.

And I'm not going to tell you.

There's this story called The Replacements by Lisa Tuttle that I studied in college.  Basically it's about a man who sees these creatures all over the place.  They're attached to women by a golden chain, and the animals drink their blood.  The women choose the creatures over the men.  You should really read it if you get the chance.  My professor taught this story as a look at how a man feels during a pregnancy.  Like he's being pushed out of the relationship by the unborn child.  When I read it, I saw it as a discussion on abortion.  I created the argument based on the text and presented it to my professor.  It was an interpretation of the reading he'd never seen before.  He didn't necessarily agree with me.

And there was no way to prove either interpretation.  Because they're that.  Interpretations.  They're not right, they're not wrong.  They're yours.

When I let go of Deathday,  I knew that people were going to read things into Deathday that I never intended.  The possibility existed that people wouldn't "get" Ollie the way I did.  And I made my peace with that.  In fact, I've seen some outstanding takes on Deathday...ideas that I didn't intend.  Interpretations I didn't expect.  And that's pretty cool.

Because people are pretty cool.

And smart.  Deathday isn't mine anymore.  It's yours.  All the books are yours.  All the books belong to you.

Handling Diversity

This is less of a post and more of an open call for discussion.  I'm curious how you all handle writing diversity and how you read diversity.

I love filling my books with people of all colors and races and sexual orientations and genders.  But I hate drawing attention to it.  Because people don't walk down the street going, "LOOK AT ME!  Over here!  I'm ASIAN!" Unless of course, you're Margaret Cho.  People just are who they are, and I like writing diverse casts.  I don't think you have to write a gay character and then make the whole book about their gayness.  I think race and all those other things are just facets.

But I'm asking you here.  Does it bother you when writers attempt to write outside their comfort zone?  Like Shane.  He was black.  I'm not black.  Did it bother anyone?  I'm curious.  Are any writers out there intimidated to write people of other races or genders or sexual orientations?

Speak to me!

Blog Chain - The Good and the Bad (but mostly the Ugly)

Welcome to the first blog chain of 2011!  I've been absolutely swamped the past couple of weeks so if I owe you emails or anything like that....sorry :)

So this blog chain was started by Sandra who wants to know:

What do you think your strengths and weaknesses as a writer are? Did you have to develop your strengths, or did they come naturally to you? How are you trying to overcome your weaknesses?

I actually think about this a lot.  Writers really need to be aware of their own strengths and weaknesses so that they can better themselves and their writing.

What do I think my strengths are?  My voice and my characters.  I think that above everything else, those are the things I do best.  I don't know why or from where those skills came but when I write people, I see them like 3-D.  I like to develop their flavors like stew.  I rely on them to push the story forward.

And I blame the voices on mental illness.  Don't you agree?  I do.  Thanks.

My weaknesses are many and varied.  I suck at plotting, I get caught up in minutiae, I'm easily distracted, I have tons of writing tics (like repeating things three and four times), I have rely too heavily on words and phrases.  I could go on and on.

I'm a pantser so it's hard for me to outline, but I'm trying to be more aware of plot before starting a story.  More often than not, I find myself 3/4 through a story with no firm grasp on the plot.  Sure, the characters rock, but what are they doing?

For the rest, I just try to stay cognizant of my flaws.  I rely on "just" a lot, so whenever I catch myself writing that word, I put in something different or delete it.  I try not to let people rolls their eyes or grin a lot.  I keep a list of words that I overuse.

I think weaknesses are only weaknesses if we fail to recognize them.  I'm sure I have more than I don't know about, but the ones I do see, I'm trying to fix.

Welcome to 2011!  If you haven't read Laura's awesome list from yesterday, go do so, and then tomorrow go to the Awesome Sarah's blog to see what she thinks her strengths and weaknesses are.

Authenticity

I hate preachy, self-righteous books.  The ones where you can tell that the characters are simply a mouthpiece for the author's agenda.  It doesn't matter whether I agree with the author or not, I don't read fiction for the sermons.  And if you love books, chances are that you don't either.

Sure, we love a good message.  I love getting to the end of a book and realizing some universal truth.  But subtlety is key here.  Some people maybe say that authors, especially YA authors, have a duty to shape young minds.  But I call bullshit.  My only job as a YA author is to tell a good story.  I was reading an interview with the creator of the Brit show Skins on his work importing it to MTV here in the states, and one of the things he said surprised me.  In essence he said that one of the main differences was that the consequences of the teens' actions had to appear much sooner.  If they took drugs or had sex, the punishment must come quicker.  Wait, what?  Why do we have to punish teens in stories for doing the things that teens do?  Yes, teens do bad things.  And sometimes bad things happen to them.  But there isn't a causal effect all the time.  Some girls have loads of sex and never get pregnant or get an STD.  Some girls have sex once and get one or both.

So I guess what I'm talking about is when authenticity and the messages we want to convey collide.  If I want to show a party scene in which a bunch of kids get high, do I later need to show them getting into a car crash on their way to a late night Taco Bell run?  Is it a literary sin to show a youth enjoying a debauched night of drinking and partying without consequences?  I drank as a teen and not every experience was bad.  In fact, some were pretty damn fun.  I'm not endorsing that kids go out and get plastered, but sometimes they're going to do it and it's not always going to have a lesson at the end of it.

On the other side of authenticity are authors who have their characters act and speak, not like adults exactly, but how adults WANT teenagers to speak.  And I think if we're talking about literary sins, that ranks WAY above sin without consequence.

Writing is all about making choices.  And I may have veered far, far from my point here, but if you choose to write a story that's about SOMETHING rather than about SOMEONE, then you're not writing for kids, you're writing at them.

Twain Rolls Over in Grave

First post of the New Year!  I'm not big on resolutions or anything like that but the end of 2010 taught me that I need to slow down a little.  So that's exactly what I'm doing.

On to other stuff.  So an Alabama publisher is publishing a version of Mark Twain's genius novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn but replacing all instances of the infamous N-word with the word "slave."  They'll also be replacing the word "injun."  The reasoning is that school curriculums are dropping it from their roster because of the offensive word.

To which I say:  Are you kidding me?

I can't actually blame the publishers here.  They see an opportunity to make money and they're taking it.  No.  I blame the parents and teachers.  I blame every moron who can't effectively teach their child the difference between a word used in a harmful way and a word used realistically in a novel mirroring the language of the era and region.  No one likes the n-word.  It's repulsive.  It's history is repulsive.  But rewriting history to expunge it from our collective memory doesn't change anything.  In fact, it simply retards our ability to learn from our mistakes.  Every child who reads the N-word in Huckleberry Finn SHOULD feel shame that we ever used words like that and take it as a lesson to never, ever let our society treat another member as a lesser class of person.

Eliminating this word from Twain's classic novel doesn't remove our collective historical guilt for its usage.  People may sit around and pat themselves on the back and say, "Look, we've learned!  Aren't we awesome?" But it doesn't change anything.  It's an awful word, but we have to understand it.  We have to keep it.  We have to hold it up as an example of what NOT to do.  Eliminating it tells kids it's okay to kill people so long as you bury the body where no one can ever see it.

And sadly, this only opens the floodgates.  Eliminate the n-word and injun.  Next it'll be faggot and cracker and redneck and kike and skinhead and fat and skinny and on and on and on. Yes, these words are hurtful but it's intent that makes words hurtful. Any word that some group finds offensive will be on the chopping block.  You think that maybe I'm being alarmist but this sets a precedence.  It says that it's okay to remove offensive words from use.  It's okay to censor.  It's okay to forget.

And what comes after words?  Images?  Do we eliminate the statue of David because people find the penis offensive?  Do we throw a sheet over the Venus de Milo because breasts are offensive?

Here's the thing:  removing the word doesn't remove the hate.  Just because you take away a murderer's knife doesn't mean he won't kill you another way.  If we want to change people, if we want to make this a world where the n-word is just a word that ignorant people once used, then we need to leave books like Huckleberry Finn alone.  We need to grow a set and let kids see for themselves how backwards we were, so that they can see an example of what we don't want to be.

Anyone who buys this bastardized book should be ashamed.