As I sit here tinkering with my third draft, it occurs to me that I could be doing almost anything else. It’s summertime, time for loafing with a G&T and beach reading.
Not that I’m not doing these things, but even so this writing gig eats a lot of time for uncertain ends (and I hate uncertainty). So why do I do it?
It sure as hell isn’t for money. Kameron Hurley does a yearly breakdown of her earnings to illustrate how difficult it is to make a living as a writer. She’s an established sci-fi author with awards so I’ll count myself lucky if a newbie like me in a niche genre breaks even. No, I will always have a day job.
It’s not for fame. While I’d like recognition for a well-written book, the odds of being a J. K. Rowling or Stephen King are close to nil. Which is good for me. Celebrity appears (from the outside at least) to complicate life so much that managing it would be a whole separate job.
Speaking of well-written, more than one writer I’ve interacted with online has said that they write in order to improve their writing. This does make sense to me because I fence, an activity at which you never become expert even after years of practice. There is no graduation, you never arrive—there’s just the next lesson (writing exercise), competition (book), medal (publishing deal) etc., in an endless process of improvement.
No, I think in the end, for me, writing is about the opportunity to share ideas that intrigue me with interesting people. I love good conversation but for most of my life I didn’t feel like I had anything to contribute or any means of doing so. Writing has proved that perhaps I might and can.
I want to get a book out in the world that’s compelling enough to inspire discussion, if not with me then among readers.
And I can’t find a gif for that.
So that people like me will have something to catalogue? –GRIN__
BTW, based on the state of the Library of Congress collection as of this moment, your assigned author call number would be PS3620.H876 (followed by a second letter/number sequence based on book title)
I like the way you think! I sincerely hope I can provide something for you to catalogue one day!
I’m not overly familiar with LOC – what do all these stand for??
P is the general literature section of the Library of Congress Classification system. PS identifies you as a North American author writing in English. PS1-3626 is the current range of call numbers assigned to United States literature (there’s space in the system for U.S. lit to eventually occupy PS1-7999**). Within PS1-3626 blocks of numbers are assigned to time periods; PS3600-3626 is for authors whose works have mostly been published from 2001 onwards (LC will likely cut that off mid-century and assign 3627- to authors primarily publishing in the second half of the 21st century (the 20th century was divided this way). You can see an outline of the English language portion of the P classification here: https://www.loc.gov/aba/publications/FreeLCC/PR-PS-PZ-outline.pdf (shows you the time period breakdown)
Note that PS3600-3626 is exactly the number of letters in the alphabet. In the literature section LC, instead of using the first few letters of the author’s surname to sort books into order, assigns a number to each letter. So authors with surnames beginning with A are in PS3600, B is PS3601, and so on. So you’re in PS3620 because you’ll be published after 2001 and your surname begins with T. Within each letter’s number the authors are further sorted with a letter/number system known as a Cutter number (named after creator Charles Cutter). Because the PS3620 section of the call number already takes care of sorting authors by the initial letter T of their surname, the Cutter begins with the second letter, hence it begins with H. The numbers after the H correspond to letter groupings … that’s the Cutter system which allows a little more flexibility than just using the actual letters in the author’s surname. Here’s the official Cutter number table: https://www.itsmarc.com/crs/mergedProjects/cutter/cutter/basic_table_cutter.htm
One of the core rules of the Library of Congress Classification System is that no two books shall have the same call number. The Cutter table is what makes this possible. It’s not written in stone … cataloguers tweak the numbers and use as many as necessary to keep the numbers unique while still keeping everything alphabetical. Within the literature section, each individual author is assigned a unique Cutter … it will only be used for that author and no other. So I looked up the current Cutter assignments in PS3620 for authors with surnames with second letter H and third letter U. If we follow the Cutter table exactly, U=8, R=7, M=6, A=3, N=6. Practice is to only make the Cutter as long as necessary to be unique. Because H87 and H88 are already assigned and your name falls between these two authors alphabetically I only have to add one more digit to shelve your books between those two. Thus you get H876. Note that Cutters are read as individual digits, decimal-style, not as complete numbers. So you are H eight seven six shelved between H eight seven and H eight eight, not H eight hundred and seventy-six weirdly shoved in between H eighty-seven and H eighty-eight.
Fiction gets “double Cuttered” so after your author number a second Cutter would be created to represent the unique title of your book. That would be followed by the date of publications (so that different editions of the same novel still have unique call numbers). Translations into other languages would be shelved beside the English editions; there’s a whole add-on-to-the-end-of-the-title-Cutter system for identifying and grouping the languages)
Welcome to the wonderful world of classification! (cataloguing is merely the physical description of the book … author, title, publisher, date, paging, series, etc. … while classification is the assignment of subject headings and call numbers to describe the content)
**PS8000+ is used for Canadian literature by the National Library of Canada; LC prefers to classify us in PR with the British, Australian and New Zealand English literature.
To check your author “position” in the Library of Congress, I went to https://catalog.loc.gov/
and chose the “Browse” option for searching. Within Browse I chose “Call Numbers (LC Class No.) and typed in PS3626.H (since I use LC for my personal library and own fiction by fairly new American authors it was easy for me to figure out where the new T authors would be. Then it was just a matter of paging through until I found where you would fit alphabetically. Would have been faster if I’d used PS3626.H8 but where’s the fun in being logical and efficient?
DAYUM!!! I knew cataloging required precise, complex knowledge but I didn’t realize how context sensitive it was! Impressive! And thank you 🙂
Congratulations on surviving your first exposure to cataloguer geeking! 😉
P.S. Your Dewey number will be 813.6