I’m a huge fan of John Irving. If you happen to not like the stuff I write and wish I’d never gotten the itch to put it out in public, then you can put at least a bit of the responsibility on his shoulders. To me, his work is the perfect blend of literary and popular fiction. You get the brain candy of his absurd plots and loveable characters, and yet, when you’re done, you don’t feel like you’ve just junked out. Your brain has been nourished, you’re a little more understanding of everyone’s eccentricities, and you understand that you can laugh and cry about the world at the same time. I remember reading someone’s review of A Prayer for Owen Meany. They used the book as a test for whether or not a relationship could last. If the person reading it didn’t like it, then they simply didn’t have a soul, and there would be trouble ahead. That’s pretty high praise for a book, but it’s praise that is well earned.
Irving’s writing has soul. If he was a musician, he’d be an old blues player. His writing is very firmly grounded in the world of the average American, and he has a talent for making those lives into epic tales of love and loss. Yes, he seems to have a predisposition towards bears and writing about writers and New England and a number of other things that you come to expect will show up at least once in every couple of novels, but that’s what he knows, and I would argue that it’s a testament to his talent as a writer that he’s made those things vivid enough for us to notice their repetition.
I haven’t read his latest novel, Last Night in Twisted River, yet, but it’s on the bookshelf begging for me to finish off those other books and get to it. I’m looking forward to the moment I can do that.
(more…)
Just the word “collective” makes me shudder. Every time I hear one described, I can’t help but think about the failed experiments of communism and hippy communes. Just mention the former and you’ll get any serious right-wing American frothing at the mouth, and the latter has been a punchline almost since it was conceived. At the centre of our distrust seems to be a fundamental rule: people tend to look out for themselves.
Yes, there are and always will be plenty examples of altruism out there. But the only ones we can really be sure about require someone to toss a grenade and someone else to jump on it. If the threat is not immediate, we just have too much time to wonder about the players and the game they may or may not be playing.
So when bloggers talk about the evils of the more established media industry and band together, guest-blogging, re-blogging, etc., are we really doing it because we truly believe in the cause? Or do we believe that the established media has no place for us while new media does? Are the loudest, most eloquent spokespeople for new media talking about it because they believe it to be better, or because it’s been better for them?
Perhaps the generations that follow mine won’t have to grapple with this particular question because new media will then be the status quo. But for my generation, whose artists grew up with the notion of getting signed by a record label or picked up by a publisher as the one road to making a living doing what you love, new media ventures represent a scary new world. We see the old world crumbling around us while the new one hasn’t even fully formed and we sometimes wonder if we’re crazy to bother. Wouldn’t it be a lot more enjoyable to just sit back and watch the show?
Well Transition Generation, I’m going to make a humble suggestion that may or may not work for us. I haven’t even tried it out myself, but in the spirit of the New World, I’m going to publish it anyway. Here’s the suggestion: We should embrace collectives for what they are – a low overhead and potentially more equitable alternative to corporations. The goal of each: to reach a critical mass through which the ideas of individual members can be promoted more effectively than on their own.
(more…)
This is what a rejection letter looks like:
Thank you for your query. I regret I have to pass on many interesting projects due to time constraints. I urge you to query widely of course!
It’s pretty simple, and you can see how it’s been honed through the years to be inhuman enough to discourage you from trying to persuade the person afterwords – which would, of course, necessitate a much harsher shut-down. It feels a lot like a date gone horribly wrong. You know that it’s not really about time constraints. If they really liked you, they’d find a way to fit you in. And you sort of want to know where you went wrong. What can I do so this doesn’t happen again? But you don’t want to be one of those jerks who just won’t take a hint. So you suck it up and try to figure it out on your own. Or you could take the other extreme and rant about how dumb this person was to not recognize such genius! That’s what Gerard Jones does on his site, www.everyonewhosanyone.com. (more…)
I received a response from the publisher I was forwarded to this morning. Very exciting stuff. So exciting, in fact, that before I hurriedly sent off that manuscript, the musician in me, who has been screwed over so many times he’s lost count started to speak up and say, “Hey, this isn’t so different from the music world, and nothing good comes without the feeling that you’ve smashed your head against a billion brick walls.” And so I whipped out my google-fu and did a quick check on this “traditional publisher”. Aha… they are under investigation in Florida and also on at least one “Writer Beware” page. I also found some forum posts from people who have submitted queries to them where the initial responses seemed very similar to the one they sent me. People who went further, were recommended to pay for professional editing. The editors chosen were also associated in some way with this network of companies and were presumably getting kickbacks from referrals. Basically, they seem legit in the sense that they’re not completely scamming you, but more in the sense that you’ll probably end up paying as much as you would if you went the self-publishing route, plus you’d be under contract with them. The warnings also mentioned that the company’s track record of commercial book or script sales is not known. I double-checked on Amazon and found that every title I searched for was indeed listed and they were listed as the publisher, but I wasn’t able to find any book with more than one review, which makes me wonder how much these books are pushed. (more…)
I find myself with mixed feelings about being a writer today. On the one hand, I heard via BoingBoing that poor Harry Nicolaides has found himself in a Thailand prison for the crime of – get this – insulting the royal family. Hell, he didn’t even throw a shoe at them. He just made some harsh remarks in a book hardly anyone had read. Reading the comments I was, on the one hand, inspired by the Western rally cry of free speech, one person after another taking shots at Thailand’s royalty. On the other, I wonder how brave we’d all be if we were in Thailand right now. Hell, even CNN is silent about the actual insults, due to the fear that any correspondents in the country could get similar treatment. And here’s the real kicker. Only fifty copies printed. Fifty. He sold seven. That’s gotta suck. On its own, not so bad. I’ve found that it’s a difficult thing to even write a complete novel, and I remember every so often, between the nail biting of and self criticism that comes with knowing others are (or will be) reading it, to give myself a pat on the back for getting it done. But to write a flop is one thing. To have it come back and bite you in the ass like that (three years in jail!) is insult to injury. Funny thing is, he might very well sell a lot of books this way. I’m certainly interested in seeing what the fuss was all about… and whether it’s any good. (more…)
