Thanks to some hard work, I’ve managed to restore most of what I lost when my browser crashed on me. Maybe it’s even a little better.
Now I have a couple of backups. Duh. Onward NaNoWriMo! or NaNoWriMo Ho!
Now there’s yardwork to do.
A couple of days ago, I was walking home from the grocery store. It was after school had let out, and it was Halloween. In front of me, on the sidewalk, around the corner from my house, a couple of kids were walking, a boy and a girl, and the girl was carrying a single red rose. Maybe early teens. I liked that image, the boy and girl walking together, the girl carrying a rose, the sky overcast, the rose the only real color on a gray day. About them? Nothing particularly interesting or noteworthy, except while they were together, it was clear they weren’t together. Continue reading
For anyone who didn’t know, today marks the beginning of NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month. The idea is to write 50.000 words during the month of November. My former professor and member of my personal pantheon of interesting minds, Roger Lathbury, did it a couple of years ago.
But what about this, then? To actually write 50,000 words in 30 days? Let’s break that down: it’s about 1700 words a day. Can I do it? Sure, I can write 1700 words a day.
In reality, I’ve probably written 5000 or more words in a day many times – but then likely spent the next several weeks marveling at where the heck that came from. Continue reading
I grew up in the Washington, DC area and in the first 20-something years of my life, I don’t remember the power going out. I vaguely remember it going out once—but I may be just giving Mother Nature the benefit of the doubt.
But then also, in those days when the most sophisticated electronics I had were a transister radio, and later, a stereo system, a TV, and a Smith-Corona typewriter, we weren’t as dependent on electricity, so maybe it wasn’t that big of a deal.
Then again, I’ve always been dependent on food, and I grew up with an electric stove. So….
But the real point of this post is that even if we could prevent 95 percent of the power outages in the DC metro area, I don’t think we would. If we had wanted to, we would have. Continue reading
As my nifty little wireless Brother laser printer churns out pages behind me, in preparation for a video I’m making on making my own books (stay tuned), and the massive hurricane Sandy makes its way up the coast to turn off my power, knock down my neighbors’ trees, wreak celestial havoc, and generally maybe just eat the East Coast, I just wanted to get in a post on great new stuff from Poets & Writers magazine, where, back in the days when I was working in publishing, I once applied for a job, and which, also many years ago, ran a piece of mine on simultaneous submissions.
(For my money, P&W mag, even in the old days when I first subscribed to the magazine called Coda, has the most news writers can use. Some right thinking philanthropist needs to help P&W get their whole magazine on line, for electronic subscription. Seriously. P&W, how much would it cost?)
Talk about your serendipity. In the new edition, which arrived in my mailbox on Friday, there’s a substantial piece on independent publishing, featuring the family affairs that are Two Dollar Radio, Ig, and Small Beer Press, which publishes the awesome Elizabeth Hand. Continue reading
(The fourth in a series of writing tips you don’t need and didn’t ask for, but are going to get, such is my insanely selfless altruism.)
Writing Tip #4
Many years ago, I went through a state of Salinger addiction. Anyone who has ever been a fan of the late stylist at an impressionable age likely goes through something like that with reading Salinger. His sentences are just so good. Can’t say I much re-read him these days, but there’s a moment in one of the Glass family books when he offers some really good writing advice.
The writer of the stories is allegedly Buddy Glass. His older brother, Seymour, is a saint too good for this world. In (I think) a note to Buddy about one of his early stories, Seymour (I’m paraphrasing, here) tells Buddy something to the effect that he’s trying too hard. He tells him that he was a reader long before he was a writer, and so he should write that thing that he most wants to read.
I think it’s exceptionally good advice, and I got similar advice from my professors over the years. I remember going to Richard Bausch, one of the earliest of my teachers, who (unbelievably) may have been unpublished at the time and asking how to end a story.
At the time I was maybe 18 or 19 and wanted to write more than I knew what it was I wanted to write about. The real problem was that I had no idea how to set up a conflict so that it could be resolved. (I was kind of hooked on Kerouac at the time, and just wrote, figuring that by doing so, I’d get something worthwhile.
He said something like read other writers. See how they end stories. I also needed to see how they began them, but the real point was reading.
Several years later, I taught an undergrad fiction class at the University of Houston. It was an evening class, at one of the satellite campuses, and it was pretty full, the first night. I handed out the syllabus, assigned the book (Burroway’s)
Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft), and stood hopefully in front of the class and asked what these hopeful young writers were reading. Few of them actually were, aside from the books they were assigned to read for their other classes.
I won’t say that I was shocked but I sure as heck was chagrinned. But the reality is that a whole lot of folks who take undergrad creative writing courses just plain aren’t interested in the idiotic life that being a fiction writer can be. They just needed an agreeable elective.
Read poetry. One of my professors when I was an undergrad, Peter Klappert, said something to the effect that fiction writers ought to read poetry, and lots of it, to get the latest news on what language can do. I could not agree more.
Of TFAOAFGND, and I think they look pretty good. But so I’m reading the first page, and thinking this is a killer first page, and then get down a few grafs and see, crap, a freaking typo. But this is what advance copies are for, or one of the things.
It’s a curious thing, a physical copy of a book that is going to be an ebook — all the heft you’d expect from a book that will, when it is finally published have no heft.
If you’re a reviewer or tastemaker, thought-leader, or just a general bon vivant (you must have evidence of status as bon vivant), shoot Margaret an email at margaret@shelfmediagroup.com and request a copy. You might get lucky.
Interesting story on The Millions : Why Are So Many Literary Writers Shifting into Genre? by Kim Wright. “Once upon a time,” she writes,
genre was treated as almost a different industry from literary fiction, ignored by critics, sneered at by literary writers, relegated by publishers to imprint ghettos. But the dirty little and not-particularly-well-kept secret was that, thanks to the loyalty of their fans and the relatively rapid production of their authors, these genre books were the ones who kept the entire operation in business. All those snobbish literary writers had better have hoped like hell that their publishers had enough genre moneymakers in house to finance the advance for their latest beautifully rendered and experimentally structured observation of upper class angst.
Seems to me that her somewhat ironic and overstated take is accurate.
From my perspective, one of the issues In ghettoizing books into genre is the perennnial need to arm a sales force with some handle to sell books. Got a treatise on treating corns and bunnions? No problem whatsoever for the sales force. That is something that people with corns and bunnions need. Nobody, in the strictest sense, “needs” fiction. So, got a novel with a lot of baseball in it that’s not baseball? Who, in the strictest sense, needs that? Got a novel about
I don’t think it’s entirely new that “mainstream” literary writers are “shifting” into genre (and neither does Wright). I kind of think all of this is sort of coincidental. In my own case with my new novel, THE FINAL APPEARANCE OF AMERICA’S FAVORITE GIRL NEXT DOOR, I could not have told the story I wanted to tell without a bit of genre-bending. The funny (to me) think about all of this is that we’d totally accept such excursions if we saw them in the movies, but it is somehow a Problem in selling a novel.
To me, this seems just another way that mainstream (i.e., not indie) publishing has chased itself So far up a very tall tree that it’s no longer very easy to see the ground.
And you can get it here. The folks at Shelf Media Group are fixing to publish my novel, The Final Appearance of America’s Favorite Girl Next Door in October as an ebook. I’m going to try to get a little more diligent about posting on the progress. This is a huge experiment for them and for me.
The novel was, of course, rejected by all of the finest old world publishing houses in New York, but the weird thing about the rejections was there was essentially no common theme. I’ve been sending out stuff for centuries and my experience had always been that there was a common theme — peripheral characters were a bit thin. Main character too whatever.
But with this novel, the comments were all over the board. One editor admired the subtlety and depth of the prose. Another felt that the prose wasn’t sufficiently subtle to carry the story. Continue reading