UPS! Ebook Buyer Beware
By Piso Mojado
Copyright 2012 by Piso Mojado
Smashwords Edition
UPS! Ebook Buyer Beware
"UPS! Ebook Buyer Beware" is mainly about a few lines in the initial chapter of my new ebook about the quest for the Secret Sound (the Secret Sound is also the title of my book). Initially I was very proud that I could imagine the daily life of a village (the village name is also the Secret Sound) about which I knew nothing. It's extremely difficult writing about a subject about which you know almost nothing. What if someone who reads my book has actually heard of the village that is the title of my book?They'll expect my prose to be authentic, right?
Good luck with that. I can't afford the travel fees I need to be "authentic". Therefore, my rendering is by necessity creative, even though it is unheard of (outside of the political arena) to write an entire book on a subject of which one is completely ignorant. I had an adviser, though. However, my girlfriend, Diane, is still not sure whether she was on a continent or an island when she went to Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllandysiliogogogoch. Her information may be slightly unreliable. To be fair, the fact-finding trip to Wales was a traumatic experience for her.
Diane was my main source for information about Wales. Which means I had almost no reliable material for my book. Therefore, when I wrote the lines about certain aspects of Welsh life, I took a great leap of faith and went far beyond the bounds of what previous reporters have dared. I was forced to imagine the truth. I had to copy what geniuses in other disciplines, such as mathematics, do. I had to extrapolate. For instance I can assume that the people of Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllandysiliogogogoch aren't called Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllandysiliogogogoch-ites. Here's what I wrote about that:
"Logically, we English-speaking people shouldn't expect the Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllandysiliogogogoch dialect, whatever that is called, to use English suffixes. The name of an inhabitant might have native suffixes. They might just as possibly be called Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllandysiliogogogoch-mndkasloendkjnehbskwjlllmjndddwwandysiliommmnnwdhhgaffllls, or Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllandysiliogogogoch-gogeryllllwwwwrlafairlllllchchchgogowwllllylllldfllgylllrndrnds."
The preceding paragraph, as you can see, is ground-breaking. It set a precedent for fearlessness. I felt terrific about the writing, since I had retained the direction of my plot even after cutting so much of the first draft of this chapter that I could have filled several hundred other books with the waste.
The paragraph is great, isn't it? It successfully theorizes some of what may be possible outside our American experience. It slams home the point that outside our borders we Americans shouldn't expect that language and customs follow American rules.
Good writing? Nope. It's UPS. Really, I'm the proud author. Why would I tell you my book is UPS if it weren't UPS? It's definitely UPS. But it's not UPS for the obvious reason.
You're not sure what UPS means, are you? Good.
UPS is a German word that isn't in any English-German dictionary that I've ever used. But even if you've never studied a word of German you should be able to decipher the meaning of UPS (I've always seen it spelled in all capitals) by the time you finish this article, readers. Sometimes unfamiliar words are easy to decipher just from context. Not for me. It took me six months to figure out what those northern Europeans were talking about in the German chat room every time they'd type UPS as a response. However, I expect my readers to be brighter than I and quite a bit faster at grasping the meaning of UPS than I was. (Hint: UPS does not refer to a package delivery service. Also, it is not the opposite of DOWNS.)