Great. Um…what’s a typewriter?
Filed under: publishing, publishing, publishing process
05/28/2010 • 8:33 PM 0
Word to Your Mother
Horror writers may benefit from the weirdness of this word…
Mastomenia
meaning
(brace yourself)
menstruation through the nipples.
(Or…next week on House.)
And speaking of House, here’s another thought to stir your neocortex. If you were in a TV show, are you comic relief, the star, co-star or (heaven forfend) an extra? House is obviously the star of House, but it’s more than just the name on the door. He’s the brilliant, crazy alpha.
Sure, we’re all stars of our own movies, but look around. Is this what being a star really looks like. Are you really the center of the plot or are things happening around you? Are you making stuff happen? Do things happen to you instead of you initiating the action? What role are you playing in your life? Is somebody else getting all the good lines? Is somebody else getting all the action?
If so, you need to stop reading this blog, fire your writer and get a new one. I don’t believe in God, but I do believe in heroes, and anyone can be a hero. All we’ve got is each other, so we need heroes. We need stars. We don’t need more underpaid extras following orders in the background and pretending they have conversations and lives and purpose.
What are you? Decide what you are. Then go be that, dammit.
This is the most inspiration you’ll ever find in what I write…but I really had to make up for laying mastomenia on you.
Filed under: Uncategorized
05/28/2010 • 8:21 PM 0
Guide to Literary Agents
Here’s a great blog on those agent people:
www.guidetoliteraryagents.com/blog
Getting an agent is tough and if you’re a pessimist, you’re probably not writing for publication.
Accept that writers are generally screwed.
Now get back to writing.
Good news:
No matter how bad it is, there will still be new books published next year.
Bad news:
They’re all gonna be diet books by Tom Arnold and YA by Jay Leno.
Filed under: agents, publishing, agents, guide to literary agents
05/28/2010 • 8:05 PM 0
What can you leave out?
In a recent short story I wrote a bag lady asks a city social worker, “You trying to convert me to Buddha, Jesus, Allah or L. Ron Hubbard?”
My first reader went over the story and rightly pointed out what I’d missed in subsequent drafts. There was something more to omit. I was treating readers like idiots and spoon-feeding them. The quote in the final draft was the same, but I cut one word: “Hubbard.”
Scientology is plenty well-known thanks to Tom Cruise. There’s no need to hit the reader over the head. The tendency to over-explain betrays a lack of confidence in the writer-reader connection.
I won’t explicate further.
Filed under: rules of writing, editing
05/27/2010 • 6:48 PM 0
About Editing
Recently I sent someone a piece of poetry. They liked it, then rewrote it (WTF?!) and then decided they’d edited it down too much and robbed it of its power. Ultimately they pretty much said “Eeeeh, stet it.”
A while back a friend of mine was an editor in educational publishing. She showed me some of her work and I was appalled. Yes, much of educational publishing is homogenized into a single tone but it was as if she made it her mission to water it down, make it worse and rewrite everything. In truth, I thought she was a terrible editor (too quick to cut) but she was a worse re-writer. Perhaps she was an editor who was a frustrated writer (the most dangerous kind.)
With my magazine work I’m very happy with my editors. They always preserve my voice and whatever they do seems reasonable (although I don’t care what The Chicago Manual of Style says, capitalizing Internet still looks dumb to me.) Mostly, I have a hard time finding their changes, so of course I think they’re brilliant editors.
When do you decide someone has crossed the line from critical (and helpful) to hypercritical and destructive? I’d be curious to hear your experiences.
Filed under: publishing, bad editing, editing
05/27/2010 • 11:55 AM 0
Writers: The Manifesto of Enough
The world is full of injustices and actions that make me rant and rave and curse. But things aren’t so bad today because I am focused on the things I can control. Others do not have the freedom to write. I do, so I should exercise that right to express myself and enjoy it, as others would if they had the opportunity. Others suffer, which I lament and protest, but they suffer no less when I fail to write.
I have found the joy in writing and so finally I am writing copiously without straining and etching it out slowly with all the recrimination and self-loathing procrastination injects into the brain and marrow.
I was deceived and I deceived myself.
I thought it should come hard to be valuable, but writing is finally play. I must be incredibly stupid because I’ve written for so long, for a living, for myself, for others…and now I’ve finally got it. How did I fail to notice?
New thought (to me):
To be valuable, on some level, writing has to be fun,
in execution and in reception.
I have experienced thrills and joys, but all with a wary and unwavering eye to how little time was left to enjoy them, how fleeting my smiles, how soon forgotten the awards, how soon spent the rewards.
Today I’m not doing that.
I write. I edit.
I have never been happier.
Filed under: Rant, Writers, writing tips, happy to write, writers
05/27/2010 • 11:45 AM 0
Cool Word of the Day
Opsimath
(noun) someone who learns late in life
Example A:
He was an opsimath in that he finally got it that he could stay out of much trouble if he just dropped the macho bullshit.
Example B:
He decided to write and edit full-time. He’s an opsimath in his 40s.
Filed under: Cool Word of the Day, cool word of the day, vocabulary
05/27/2010 • 12:22 AM 0
Garrison Keillor on the future of publishing
Garrison Keillor says in the Baltimore Sun that book publishing is about to slide into the sea. Shorter title? We’re screwed. Call him a pessimist.
Filed under: publishing, future of publishing, publishing
05/26/2010 • 2:21 PM 0
From YouTube through Literary Rejections on Display
05/26/2010 • 1:26 PM 0
The Death of Lit Journals (and query advice)
Okay, it’s time. Let’s rip it up and challenge some assumptions and piss off a few defenders of the faith…
Literary journals have traditionally been considered a proving ground. You get some stories published, establish a track record and develop a following. Agents and editors want you to have a platform as much as possible to push the sell-through. The wisdom was that lit journals gave you cred when as you developed your skills for longer works. Lit journals were where you paid your dues before you could hope to write the great American, Canadian, Jamaican or Serbian novel.
Well, goodbye to all that! Here’s why:
1. You can get pretty beat up in a long process where they take forever to get back to you, or never get back to you. No simultaneous or e-mail submissions and you take a year to say no with a snotty note? And all this for a journal with a tiny readership that pays in contributor’s copies? There are far less frustrating ways to find something to line the bottom of your birdcage. Lit journals, your time is up!
2. Some journals may have some weight with agents and editors. Many won’t. Many are still really zines that nobody’s ever heard of. You could make up a title and it would have as much credibility as many of these rags.
3. It’s arguable that short story writing and novel writing are different skill sets. (I’ll make that argument another time, but as a for instance, even now I prefer Hemingway’s short stories to his novels.) One thing won’t necessarily translate to the other thing. Everyone starts with short stories, but if you intend to be a novelist, start writing long soon. (Also, your sensitive little meditation/poem/short story on the return of the whippoorwills to Dead Grampa’s lake probably won’t help you sell your Masons-plot-to-destroy-universal-health-care conspiracy thriller.)
4. Who needs literary journals when you can build your brand on your own website? Write short stories and build your platform through instant self-publishing. Give out samples and teasers of your work. Keep people coming back and/or offering suggestions, praise, money, fame. Serialize. Monetize.
5. Lit journals publish a few stories here and there, mostly solicited (read: not you.) They don’t take their slush pile applicants near as seriously as they take themselves. (I also notice a trend in the journals where they’ll do a theme issue, or several. That puts slush entries even farther out of the loop, like amongst Saturn’s rings.)
BONUS:
If you were an agent, editor, sales rep or publicist, which author’s bio would you consider more helpful to your goals?
A: I was published in Northeastern Prairie Review* in 2005. Circulation 1200 people (most of whom are frustrated writers themselves who subscribe in the hope that it will help them get published. In fact, they hate most of what they read, they don’t read much of it anyway, hate the published, and the editor only publishes his four best friends and the rich cousin who funds their tiny enterprise.
or
B: I’ve built 40,000 regular readers of my blog and x number of unique hits on my author website. Look at my fan base! They loved the first chapters…blah, blah de blah I’m twelve kinds of sexy awesome etc.,…
If you answered B, congratulations. You’re sane.
You heard it here first, I say this internet thing?
It’s going to be big.
DOUBLE BONUS:
However…if you plan to start a lit journal and become a bitchy arbiter of good taste, aha! Now I think you may still have something in a dying industry. Publishing yourself and dressing it up in respectable clothes connotes more respect than being the schlub sending out your stories to an indifferent world. When you submit your novel, you’re an editor.
Save paper. Publish on-line. Be cool, and you too, could finally have enough cred to get your work actually read by an uncaring know-nothing no-everything MFA refugee summer intern.
TRIPLE BONUS:
The rule with lit journals is, the stranger the name (Three Monkeys and a Paperclip, Fish Stink of the Golden Future) the smaller the readership. In a world where even the “big” lit journals are really small, that’s rather snobby and irrelevant, however. (For some sense of scale, every couple of months 75,000+ people read my column and my features in a trade magazine you’ve never read.)
Filed under: publishing, writing tips, literary journals, publishing, queries
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