As Fool’s Republic opens, Simon Wyley floats in a tiny all-white cell. A short-order cook with a genius-level IQ, Wyley has had a steady job for twenty years, paid his taxes, kept to himself. A dedicated husband and father, he’s a model citizen. So why is he being held?

Wyley is accused of committing crimes against the state—the charges are always implied, never specified—and is being held without formal charge, benefit of counsel, or due process of law. He confuses and confounds his interrogators using the only weapons at his disposal, irony and whimsy, to challenge their arrogance and false assumptions. As Wyley’s journey proceeds, we develop a deeper understanding of the complicated man behind the wisecracks and the dark underbelly of the society that has imprisoned him.

After he sold his company, WinterSilks, in 1990, businessman Frank Farwell started to think about writing a book about his experiences. He dictated his journals, notes, and memories into a tape recorder and had them transcribed, which, he says, “resulted in a hell of a mess: 1,500 unorganized pages that overflowed two cardboard file boxes. [It was] such an overwhelming sight that I left the file boxes in my office closet, untouched, for eight years. Every now and then I’d peek inside, only to recoil in horror.”

 

Really? Did I really write that first post without mentioning how good fiction editors are first and foremost enthusiastic readers?

Indeed I did, but only because I can’t imagine anyone seriously considering a career as a book editor who’s not an avid reader and hasn’t logged more than a few all-nighters with a book they’ve been unable to put down. So let’s assume that as a given.

After exhibiting and presenting at last month’s Tucson Festival of Books, I’m reminded just how lucky I feel about being able to do what we do here at The Editorial Department. With an estimated 100,000 people in attendance over the weekend-long event came a steady stream of people of all ages stopping by our booth, many of whom wanted to know, among other things, how to become a book editor in the first place and what to expect from that career path, should they choose it.

There’s nothing I like more than getting out of the office, away from the computer, and out into the trenches where writers gather to talk writing. One such opportunity came earlier this week when I had the opportunity to do a seminar for the Santa Cruz County chapter of the Society of Southwestern Authors, one of the biggest and most active writing groups in Arizona.

The topic was self-editing but with the time for the session limited to only an hour and a half, there simply wasn’t time to do our full self-editing workshop. We typically need at least four hours to fully explore the most important principles and guidelines from TED’s own Self-Editing for Fiction Writers and so the challenge here was to quickly introduce those principles and find an angle that worked for the time we had available and still deliver something substantive. The idea I came up with was to explore a small but important aspect of the benefit of self-editing: how paying attention to mechanical fundamentals can not only improve an author's style but also help writers deepen their characters, improve their dialogue, and make their scenes more immediate and memorable.

There are a number of books that come out any given week that reflect what has happened in the world, commenting on history, whether recent or ancient.  The nature of publishing means that a manuscript was turned in as many as 18 months before a book hits stores,  so by the time you open the front cover, the ideas within reflect a reality the author was considering quite a while beforehand.  What ends up being rare is a book that's prescient, that ends up being about a time that hasn't yet been realized when the author is first putting the words on a page.

Jacqueline Gum's Confessions of a Corporate Slut (released in 2008) managed to reflect universal themes about men and women, but also tell a story that will sound familiar to anyone who has heard the last names Spitzer, Sanford or Woods. Written as a memoir, but one composed by a fictional character named Roberta who gives up her identity for her husband's success. Confessions... is a really interesting book, and we're happy to have it on our bookshelf of titles we had a part in. Jacqueline puts the mirror up to society, and anyone who has any familiarity with the corporate world or the culture of success will find something on nearly every page that rings true. She's witty, insightful and great fun to read. In fact, there's been interest from producers in turning the book into the seed for a TV series.

The Tucson Festival of Books is rapidly approaching, and at the Editorial Department, we're excited for two days of sun and book events.  We'll be there with a booth, meeting people and talking about our services, so if you happen to be around, we hope you'll say hello.  Also, we'll be previewing the festival here on Ellipsis up until the festival kickoff on Friday.  If you're planning on attending, you better have a plan.  There's so much going on from workshops to book signings to children's events.  Thankfully, The Arizona Daily Star has developed an iPhone app for the occasion. While there are far flashier applications, if you're the iPhone sort, the entire festival schedule is at your fingertips, so you can make vexing decisions about how to spend your weekend on the spot.  Isn't technology grand!

Since the calendar changed from 2009 to 2010, at the Editorial Department we've been thinking about the best way to interact with our customers, past, present and (hopefully) future.  We feel like our e-zine has been the home to some great material this year, but is that the best way to get information out there these days?  Waiting a month between issue release dates just doesn't seem to fit within the way the Internet works.  We have a blog, but most of the attention has gone to making the most of the e-zine.  So, how do we balance out the larger, in-depth pieces we like to put together with a bit more immediacy mixed in?  The answer we've come up with is our forthcoming new blog, complete with a new name (...Ellipsis...), a new focus on providing information about our company, helpful writing advice and a look at the world of publishing.  We're going to pull together all of our resources, voices and insight into the new blog in an attempt to make our site a must-read destination for anyone writing, editing, representing, publishing or even just interested in books.  We'll still keep our e-zine archives available online for your persual, but we'll also bring some of that great material back on the blog every Friday.  We're excited about what ...Ellipsis... will offer the reader in the next year and the conversations that will arise.  Thanks for your support.