Comics - The Gateway Drug

By Claire Booth

The comics. Most don’t have extended storylines. Or contain important information.

And some of them, quite frankly, are just dumb. But …

If they sit on your breakfast table every day, your kids will pick them up. And read them. And then that leads to all sorts of other things. Like the sports page. And the local section. And international news. And eventually, informed citizens.

The paper can spark conversations about everything from the California drought to the discovery of new exoplanets, the price of Super Bowl ads, and of course, the presidential election.

And yes, this obviously means that you'll need to subscribe to the dead-tree version of a newspaper. Sure, you could read it on your phone, but that’s an individual experience, not a communal one. An online subscription doesn’t allow kids to drip cereal milk on Beetle Bailey as they read with their siblings peeking over their shoulders.

I was a newspaper reporter before I started writing books, so I realize that I consider the news (and newspapers in particular) more important than many people do. I will advocate for the importance of accurate, professional news outlets all day long. But this post is about the importance of the consumption mechanism involved. READING.

You start with the comics. Move on to news stories. Then maybe magazines. Entertainment Weekly, National Geographic, Motocross Action – it doesn’t matter. From there, maybe there’s a turn toward comic books or graphic novels. Or non-fiction. Or that most beautiful of art forms, the novel.

So if you’ve got kids and you don’t subscribe to home delivery, think about popping out for a Sunday paper today. Give ’em the comics page and see where it leads them.

I Really Made That Mistake Eleven Times?

By Claire Booth

I got the copy edited manuscript for Another Man’s Ground four days ago. This is the stage when a person of exacting standards and keen grammatical skill scrutinizes every word, punctuation mark, and fact in 338 pages of text. This person is my best friend.

I’m reading through everything – accepting changes, evaluating suggestions, answering questions. I’m about halfway through and so far, it’s become apparent that I don’t know how to punctuate around an em dash. And that I miscounted the number of days that transpire between two significant plot points. And that I call one character different names in different chapters (Bill or Lee – pick one!).

This might sound like painful reading, but I love it. I am very, very picky about details and grammar, and I enjoy delving back into my book at that level. It’s great to have a copy editor who has the same (or greater) level of obsessiveness as I do. I also appreciate not looking like an idiot when the book comes out.

And if a book copy editor can keep a writer from looking stupid, that’s nothing compared with what a newspaper copy editor can do. Having a fictional character with two different names is one thing, but imagine spelling the name of the city’s mayor wrong. On the front page. Or mixing up the numbers of a phone hot line that the copy editors catch because they called it right before deadline and discovered it went to somebody’s Aunt Marge and not the animal shelter featured in the news story.

I don’t think I ever spelled the name of a politician in one of my cities wrong, but I did once spend an entire breaking police story writing that a priceless Aston Martin was stolen from an airplane hanger. Now, a “hangar” is where you park an airplane. A “hanger” is what you put a coat on. Thankfully, one of the best copy editors in the business caught it, and my front page story ran error-free.

Who can ask for a better friend than that?