tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-61489036534608700822024-02-07T08:16:25.915-05:00jefishmanThoughts on publishing, writing and craft.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10993993618743862343noreply@blogger.comBlogger37125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6148903653460870082.post-70179478194745449292012-10-18T08:00:00.000-04:002012-10-18T08:00:00.912-04:00In Between<br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">My friends who are business people consider me an intellectual.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">My intellectual friends consider me a businessman.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">My conservative friends think I’m a liberal.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">My liberal friends think I’m a conservative.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">My Brooklyn friends find my writing commercial.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">My Hollywood friends may find my writing literary.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">My shy friends think that I’m outgoing.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">My outgoing friends think that I’m shy.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I’m none of these things. I’m all of these things.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I read the description of the artistic personality type, abbreviated as ISFP (Introverted Sensing Feeling Perceiving), and I find myself in half of it. Not so much the other half.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">On a Caribbean vacation a few years ago, I was playing in a pickup tennis game when the guy across the net asked, “What do you do? You some kind of writer?”</span></div>
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<a name='more'></a>Unpublished at the time, I wondered how he knew. He said it was the way I spoke, the observations I made.<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">There may be a “type” who is drawn to storytelling, who seeks meaning by processing the human condition through the prism of fiction. Or perhaps the characteristics of the writing life just force certain traits on us novelists.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I do think successful novelists must have some specific traits or have to acquire them. (By “successful” I don’t mean monetary success. I mean the ability to make fiction work.) He must observe everything around him. He must learn the names of things. He must accept the physical world for what it is. He must be willing to go wherever his heart takes him. He must have an ear for voices and the rhythm of story. Above all, he must possess empathy — the ability to put himself in the position of any character, to understand all living motivation: good and evil, human and non-human.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">If he succeeds at all that, he will pass through reality as a wraith, fully understood only by those who are willing to know him deeply.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">For all others, through his work he will leave his mark.</span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10993993618743862343noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6148903653460870082.post-29930913995084629812012-10-02T15:02:00.002-04:002012-10-02T15:02:49.314-04:00The Shouting Muse<br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">My recent move to a new office prompted a non-writing friend of mine to ask whether the place had a good creative vibe, the implication being that an office with a bad vibe would render me unproductive.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">This kind of question gets my gander up, because by implication it trivializes the creative process, feeding into the myth that creativity is something that finds you rather than the other way around.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">If you feel compelled to tell stories — as I do — the place where you sit down to do so should be mostly beside the point. I say “mostly” because, of course, some basic requirements do apply. The place needs to be heated in winter, for example, or you may freeze to death. It needs electricity, either for lighting or for your computer, depending upon how you write. It needs to be accessible — not up a tree somewhere three counties away. And it needs to be quiet.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Actually, I withdraw that last one — quiet is a luxury, not a necessity. Writing requires being solitary — not having people bugging you all the time — but it shouldn’t require absolute quiet all around you. The honking horn or the voices rumbling through the wall are obstacles that can be overcome with determination.</span></div>
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<a name='more'></a>Think of the journalist pounding out a story in a noisy newsroom or a courthouse hallway. A significant number of successful novelists, in fact, began their careers as journalists, and many of them have proved to be prolific. One reason for this is that they trained themselves to write on deadline, but another is that they often had to craft their stories in the aforementioned noisy rooms, where nobody was going to pipe down just because you had a story to file and couldn’t get past the first graf. You learned to overcome or you were fired.<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In that context, distractions to the novelist's concentration are just an excuse for not getting your job done. People who aspire and aspire and aspire to write but never get anything written must not have a burning desire to tell stories. If they did, the feng shui wouldn’t matter — nor would the view, nor the creaky desk chair, nor the sound of neighbors.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I don’t claim to be perfect in this regard. There have been times, no doubt, when I’ve allowed outside forces to distract me — when I’ve waited for the muse to come rather than going out to find her. But these days I understand that if you need a muse to get your work done, you had better know her address. And once you’ve dragged her to your workspace by the hair, if need be, you’d better teach her to shout.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">After you’ve done that, the only writing space that matters is the space between your ears.</span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10993993618743862343noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6148903653460870082.post-24972446105198202782012-09-20T09:21:00.000-04:002012-09-20T09:23:01.564-04:00More Genres Explained<br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The king died in a mutiny, and then the queen walked the plank is Sea Adventure.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The king died, and then the queen overcame great odds to live is a Thriller.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The king pretended to die, and then the queen went mad is a Psychological Thriller.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The king died, and then the queen was a witness for the defense is a Legal Thriller.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The king died at the cutting edge, and then the queen outsmarted the mad scientist is a Technothriller.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The king almost died at the hands of an evil nurse, and then the queen found the cure is a Medical Thriller.</span></div>
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<a name='more'></a>The king died, and then the queen’s guard had to figure it out is a Police Procedural.<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The king died in a ratty hotel room, and then the queen punked the killer is Hard-Boiled Mystery.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The king died of mysterious causes, and then the queen found a pilgrim outcast to solve the crime is Historical Mystery.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The king died, and then queen’s stepdaughter found true love is a Romance.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The king pretended to die, and then the queen fell in love with the man who solved the crime and who was really the king in disguise is Romantic Suspense.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The king died of a vampire bite, but the queen could still only go out at night is Vampire Romance.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The king died, and then the queen went back in time to save him is Time Travel Romance.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The king died at the hands of the evil count, and then the queen fell in love with the count’s only good son is Gothic Romance.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The king died abroad, and then the queen went undercover is a Spy Story.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The king died dressed as a broad, and then the queen went under covers is Erotica.</span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10993993618743862343noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6148903653460870082.post-47401328783936580422012-09-13T10:49:00.000-04:002012-09-13T10:50:32.237-04:00Book Genres Explained<span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; letter-spacing: 0px;">"'The king died, and then the queen died' is a story. 'The king died, and then the queen died of grief’ is a plot.'” —E.M. Forster, </span><i style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; letter-spacing: 0px;">Aspects of the Novel</i><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The king died in the brothel, and then the queen went to the sheriff is a Western.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The king died while fleeing through the jungle, and then the queen triumphed with her saber is Action/Adventure.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The king died in battle, and then the queen got the castle is an Historical.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The king died, and then the king’s son died, and then the king’s grandson died, and then the king’s great great granddaughter became queen is Family Saga.</span></div>
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<a name='more'></a>The King died on the cross, and then the queen ascended to heaven alongside Him is Religious/Inspirational Fiction.<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The king died in a pratfall, and then the queen died laughing is Satire.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The king died, and then the queen carried on a conversation with him is Metaphysical Fiction.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The king died after a long illness, and then the queen picked up the pieces is Medical Fiction.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The king died of fright, and then the queen had to confront the monster in the basement is Horror.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The king died a suicide, and then the queen went into therapy is Urban Fiction.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The king died at the hands of an assassin, and then the queen ran for his seat is Political Fiction.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The king died in battle, and then the queen triumphed in battle is War Fiction.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The king died, and then the queen checked out and the children learned to cope is Coming of Age.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The king died before the big game, and then the queen had to win it for the Gipper is Sports Fiction.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The king died famously, and then the queen died even more famously is Biographical Fiction.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The king died, and then the queen took up with the lady in waiting is Gay & Lesbian Fiction.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The king died in a car chase, and then the Queen drank Coca Cola is a Movie Tie-In.</span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10993993618743862343noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6148903653460870082.post-75566079514873509232012-09-07T15:58:00.002-04:002012-09-07T16:08:01.449-04:00That Sock Puppet Won't Hunt<i style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; letter-spacing: 0px;">Times are hard, especially for a man who aspires to make his living by words.</i><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>You begin at the bottom of the editorial heap — fair enough, most people do in this trade. But it rarely gets better. To make ends meet, sometimes you teach school, sometimes you write and edit. Your professional successes are rare — and those you have rarely last long.</i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>Yet you are determined to leave your mark on the world, as a writer of any kind, but primarily as a poet. You have things to say — things that the world must hear.</i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>At the age of thirty-one you begin writing your masterwork, and five long years later you have it finished. Publishing is in disarray </i></span><i>—</i><i style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> part free-for-all, part insider’s game. You decide to self-publish your book of poems.</i></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>There’s a thin reed of hope, however. From all that editorial work, you retain a few connections. So you write a couple of reviews anonymously, getting some extra publicity for the masterwork. Of course, for the most part, you praise it. You know you’ve crossed some kind of ethical line with this sock puppetry, but a man can’t eat ethics, can he?</i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>And the reviews — well, they’re true, at least so far as any opinion goes </i></span><i>— and isn't your opinion as valid as another's? So the reviews go out</i><i style="letter-spacing: 0px;">, posted on your own behalf. They don’t have an immediate effect, but eventually you do become famous.</i></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>The work you wrote is </i>Leaves of Grass.<i> Your name is Walt Whitman.</i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Until a few weeks ago, Walt Whitman having written anonymous reviews of his own work was an amusing footnote to the career of a great American author.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In the past few weeks, however, a small scandal has erupted over more contemporary figures. I won’t rehash the scandal here. If you have writer friends, you’re probably aware that certain individuals admitted to buying reviews of their books on Amazon, and others were found to have written positive reviews of their own work and negative reviews of others using so-called “sock puppet” identities — which is to say, by concealing their own real names and interests.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Writing anonymous reviews that tear down the work of others solely to settle a score (as has been alleged) is certainly reprehensible, not to mention childish, behavior. It is literally beneath contempt — which is to say, not worth taking much trouble to condemn.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">On first blush it seems equally clear-cut to judge fake self-reviewing as wrong — possibly even illegal, to the extent it intends to deceive consumers. But I suspect that it’s intent is not exactly to deceive — certainly not in the way that a con man does it, tempting someone into a transaction where the consumer is bound to lose. In fact, I’d lay odds that those who write sock-puppet reviews of their own work believe deeply in its excellence and intend only to call attention to that “fact.” As Walt Whitman did.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In the interest of full disclosure, let me state now that</span></div>
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<li style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I once gave my book <i>Primacy</i> five stars on <i>Goodreads</i> and wrote a brief review saying it was good, but I did it under my own name and mentioned that I was the author in the first sentence. I subsequently removed the whole review and rating, not because it was unethical but because it made me look pathetic.</span></li>
<li style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I have “liked” my own books on Amazon, just to get the ball rolling.</span></li>
<li style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I have solicited blurbs from fellow authors. No payment was exchanged.</span></li>
<li style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I have suggested to a few friends that it would be nice if they reviewed my book on Amazon, but there was never a quid pro quo of any kind.</span></li>
<li style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I have never written a sock-puppet review of my work or anyone else’s and I don’t intend ever to do so.</span></li>
<li style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In fact, I use social networks to promote my work only under my own name.</span></li>
<li style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I have never paid for a review and never will, though as per industry standards I have provided free copies to reviewers.</span></li>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">So, on balance, I think I’ve behaved pretty ethically in this regard, though perhaps not quite so ethically as to avoid the judgment of sticklers.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">And yet I find it difficult to screw myself up into high moral dudgeon over the review-buying sock-puppetry issue, as certain authors have, signing petitions that name names and insisting on codes of ethics.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I’m not a libertarian, but in this case why not let the marketplace sort it out? If someone gets suckered by a positive sock-puppet review and buys the book, they’re likely out a few bucks. Nobody died or had his life ruined. Ultimately, proof of the work’s worth will be in the reading of it. If a customer likes the book, she may buy more from that author. If not, she’ll move on. This scenario may not be ideal, but sometimes I think novelists forget that real life is not as clean as the worlds they create with words.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The other day, I bought a bag of crackers. I thought, based on the packaging, that they’d be the best ever, but they weren’t. I’m out six bucks and now I know to try something else. I can be a grown up and learn my lesson or I guess I can start a petition against the cracker manufacturer, protesting its too-clever packaging. If I put that petition in front of you, what would you do? You’d laugh in my face and tell me to get a life, wouldn’t you? And you’d be right. When nobody buys the crackers a second time, that’s when the cracker manufacturer gets its comeuppance. It’s what makes marketplaces an efficient way of dealing with matters of taste.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">So why are so many authors so upset over the transgressions of others? I think it’s because they’re scared for their own future, and when people get scared they find scapegoats in the form of “the others” and take up pitchforks and try to drive them out of town. There’s a lot of competition in the book marketplace right now and it builds resentments. Sometimes it’s easier to blame the competition than to raise your own game.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I’m not saying sock-puppetry is an act of which its perpetrators ought to be proud. In fact, I think it’s pretty cowardly. But cowards are for the most part to be pitied, not pilloried. They’re pathetic, not threatening.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Walt Whitman, when he wrote those anonymous reviews of <i>Leaves of Grass,</i> was an outsider. He was poor, not a particularly successful journalist, not a successful school teacher, not a successful novelist. He was probably homosexual at a time when mainstream society ostracized homosexuals.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">We praise him not for his subterfuge but for his poetry. Yet it’s worth noting that the subterfuge didn’t make him less of a poet.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Are the people who have taken to sock puppetry worthy of being spoken about in the same essay alongside Walt Whitman? As odds would have it, probably not. But who knows. The marketplace will vote. Posterity will decide.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The best I can do as an author is to promise my readers — not through some petition or code of ethics that someone else wrote, but one to one — the following:</span></div>
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<li style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I will write the best books I can write, given the constraints of time and talent.</span></li>
<li style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I will see that those books are properly edited and designed, no matter how they come to market.</span></li>
<li style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I will never promote my books to you other than as myself, in real life or in the netherworld of social networks.</span></li>
<li style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I will never pay for a review.</span></li>
<li style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Finally, I will respect that my readers are the final arbiter of the worth of my novels.</span></li>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Enough of novelistic scandals. I’m off to re-read <i>Leaves of Grass.</i></span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10993993618743862343noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6148903653460870082.post-82111996114649390042012-08-07T12:02:00.003-04:002012-08-07T12:06:07.839-04:00Why We Read Fiction<span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; letter-spacing: 0px;">This past weekend, we adopted a dog from the SPCA of Delaware. The dog has a beautiful lab head but a narrow body, possibly greyhound. When we viewed her in the pen at the shelter, we saw that she had a problem with her right rear leg. She was also suffering hair loss from a flea allergy. She’d been picked up in the city of Wilmington as a stray.</span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">We were told not to call a dog by its shelter name (Sallie, in this case), which may have bad associations for the animal, so we renamed her Cue — short for Rescue. What exactly we rescued her from we’ll never know, but it wasn’t good.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">At some point this dog seems to have had a normal life. While exuberant, she obeys basic commands, is properly house trained, and aims to please. But at some later point, it all went to hell for her.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-d7ouoytPybAbFony0t73BtPH6C6SWD_0X16LRXzUYsKxq5BlDb2RWcJR2ObBuy5_88ufSuvruM-B3nRVxrY8Qj2mD6-Hf9QFwdgs4b6vZihT-Aepo81Rncp9D5PellbSRZcbvQlShoQ/s1600/Cue.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-d7ouoytPybAbFony0t73BtPH6C6SWD_0X16LRXzUYsKxq5BlDb2RWcJR2ObBuy5_88ufSuvruM-B3nRVxrY8Qj2mD6-Hf9QFwdgs4b6vZihT-Aepo81Rncp9D5PellbSRZcbvQlShoQ/s320/Cue.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Cue had her first visit to the vet on Monday. The fleas are gone, but she still has a skin problem that we’re working on. She also has early-stage heartworm (curable) and a tumor that needs removal. The problem with her rear leg is the result probably of having been hit by a car and never treated, which permanently affected her hip and gait. The vet also found evidence that someone had shot Cue multiple times with a BB gun.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Think about that. A stray dog in distress shot with a BB gun. There’s a word for that kind of behavior. It’s called inhumanity.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">That is the story of Cue. A true story that we hope will have that all-too-rare real-life thing, a happy ending.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It has been said that humans must have stories. But every life is a story already. With so many stories everywhere, why do we feel that we have to <i>make up</i> other stories?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I think it’s because fiction can give us what we too infrequently get from life: moral clarity. In real life, people often get away with cruelty. When even many murders go unsolved, who’s going to track down the person who wields a BB gun on a sweet-tempered dog?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">But in fiction, more often than not, moral order gets restored. The bad guy dies or goes to jail or sees the error of his ways. The lonely person finds love or discovers the ability to live alone. Epiphanies happen.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Cynics deride the happy endings of Hollywood and commercial fiction, but we deeply need happy endings. They give us something we rarely get from life, the satisfaction of seeing rightness prevail.</span></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10993993618743862343noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6148903653460870082.post-21776418776652748082012-07-19T13:36:00.001-04:002012-08-07T12:06:33.319-04:00Aspects of the Novelist's Dilemma (7)<b style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; letter-spacing: 0px;">7. Agents still matter, sort of.</b><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">What we’re talking about when we talk about digital publishing vs mainstream publishing is that loaded word of the internet age: disintermediation.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">In the old system, of which many remnants remain, everyone has a hand in the novelist’s pocket. Let us count the ways: agent, subrights agents, publisher, printer, wholesaler, bookseller. Six intermediaries at least. Directly or indirectly, each of these takes a piece of the cover price before that check finally reaches the author.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">In the digital system, the fixed costs of editing, proofreading, formatting, and cover design remain. They must be paid upfront, but their providers do not get between the buyer and the author on every sale, as they do in a mainstream publishing deal. If one digitally self-publishes, the only one who's still interposed between novelist and reader/customer is the bookseller. If one uses an indie publisher as distributor, as I'm inclined to do, that distributor also takes a cut, of course, so there may be two entities between author and reader/customer. But that's a far cry from six or so under the old model.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">What of the agent?</span><br />
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<a name='more'></a>One might argue that the agent's role has diminished, but one might also say that it makes sense to keep the agent in the equation. For one thing, writing is a lonely game and it helps to have a friend. More deeply than that, it also helps to have an advisor, someone who knows the business and can help you strategize, do quality control, make creative decisions. The agent can also help you sell rights to your work, presuming he or she is willing to stick his neck out. (If you make yourself a bestseller without the agent's guidance, who needs him when the phone starts ringing? Just hire an attorney.)</div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">But, even if you do value an agent relationship, a big question hangs in the balance: if you’re only or primarily publishing digitally, is this a relationship the agent is prepared to have? Well, you have to ask the agent.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">At the moment, most authors' representatives remain stuck in the old paradigm, focused almost entirely on attempting to get conventional print book deals. But eventually, I think, agents will begin to sell their advice to high-quality digitally published authors on a percentage basis, the way managers have long done in the music business.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Some agents — very few so far — have already begun to offer “assisted self-publishing” and marketing services. Forward-thinking agents like these may very well be worth keeping in the equation.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b><i>Dilemma:</i></b><i> Can my agent and I work out a new relationship where he’s not doing the same old thing but he continues to add value?</i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Looking back over the seven dilemmas, I see that they may point some authors toward self-publishing. I do still believe (though it’s a subject for another post) that under certain circumstances novelists can continue to benefit from a mainstream publishing relationship. But taking that relationship, if offered, drifts farther every day from a slam dunk. After all, the mainstream publisher's greatest strength remains distribution to bookstores, but fiction is rapidly migrating to digital.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">One dilemma I might have included involves time. The novelist who doesn’t already have an agent might expend a year trying to find one and still come up dry. If one does get an agent, it might take that person six months to shop a novel, an effort that — even for a good novel in the hands of a good agent — </span>is highly likely<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;"> </span>to meet with futility. Then, if you do get the mainstream publishing contract, it might take another six months to a year for that book to get published.</div>
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Months...years. What might you be doing with that time instead of waiting? You might be selling books, for one thing.</div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">In opposition to the once-conventional path, the quality self-published or indie-published novelist, even while making allowances for the editorial process and a few other aspects, might take just a few months to get his work out into the world. Earning is better than waiting. More important, you can't begin building a name for yourself until you have a product in the marketplace.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">So your choice boils down to the old cliché: the bird in the hand (get it out now to the wide world) versus two in the bush (broader but later distribution from a mainstream publisher). But -- wait! Maybe I was just seeing double when I looked in that bush. After all, how many books will move through the shrinking bookstore market before I've established my brand?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Dilemma indeed.</span></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10993993618743862343noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6148903653460870082.post-76827809437498790472012-06-26T10:21:00.000-04:002012-06-26T10:21:11.913-04:00My Face in a TrailerI have declared myself skeptical about the marketing value of book trailers, but I do confess to getting a thrill when the filmmaker decided to shoe-horn my face into this one. Photo courtesy of my lovely daughter, who managed to hold the camera steady during all my bossing.<br />
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<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10993993618743862343noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6148903653460870082.post-22311263277480449312012-06-21T10:05:00.001-04:002012-06-21T10:05:51.137-04:00Aspects of the Novelist's Dilemma (6)<br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b>6. Book bloggers replace book pages.</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">There’s another group to whom the publisher still seems to matter, and that’s print and television journalists and book reviewers who need a way to decide what to report on. The imprint of a major publisher can be one shortcut to deciding whether a book is worthy of their review or coverage.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">There’s no question that a news or feature story in a major national newspaper or a large local paper can (though won’t necessarily) spike book sales. For nonfiction writers in particular this may be a good argument for going with an established publisher. But novelists rarely receive what we used to call “off the book page publicity,” and when they do it’s usually because their novel is already selling in stratospheric numbers or they’re a living legend like Stephen King.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The poet Philip Levine once commented that when you’re an unknown writer and can’t afford to pay your rent, nobody gives you anything, but when you’re already established and no longer need the money, you start to win awards and stipends. Mainstream media coverage is a little like that for novelists. Usually you already have to be famous or unusually successful to get it. These unspoken rules apply as much to Simon & Schuster as they do to a self-published author.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The real action these days, it seems, is on the internet, whether it’s via social media or bloggers. Indeed, as the number of newspaper pages devoted to book reviews has fallen through the floor, the number of book reviewers online has exploded. But it turns out that these people don’t have quite the same biases as mainstream journalists do. In fact, they might respond to the list of self-published authors I provided below by saying, “I knew that.”</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">So…</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b><i>Dilemma:</i></b><i> When you’re not already a famous novelist and book bloggers overwhelm mainstream media reviewers in numbers and impact, does it matter very much whether your publisher can open doors at the</i> New York Times?</span></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10993993618743862343noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6148903653460870082.post-61992736668626151382012-06-11T10:54:00.001-04:002012-06-11T11:01:52.673-04:00Let Me Be ClearToday I happened to read two unrelated opinion pieces, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/11/opinion/krugman-another-bank-bailout.html">one by Paul Krugman</a> of the New York Times and the other by Peter Beinart of the Daily Beast, that use a similar phrase. As a rhetorical pivot, they write, respectively, "Just to be clear..." and “Let me be clear…”<br />
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It seems to me that this kind of construct has become increasingly common, and I have the sense that Krugman employs it a lot. The strange thing is that Krugman usually writes pretty clearly, in my view, at least in relation to his rather complex subject of macroeconomics and certainly with respect to his erudition. (Ph.D. and Nobel in economics and all that.) When he falls back on a phrase such as “just to be clear,” then, it’s not so much a cover for his lack of prior clarity as it is a sign that he may lack faith in the intelligence of his audience. Or maybe he’s just being defensive. Krugman, after all, has become a favorite whipping boy of conservatives.<br />
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In any event, in today’s column he argues that the bailout of Spain’s banks is just another example of policy makers ignoring those who have truly been hurt by economic events of the past few years: regular folks. He opens by saying that yet "another bank bailout" in response to the European crisis is "starting to feel like a comedy routine." Then he writes, “let me be clear,” and in this new bid for clarity reminds readers that he’s not against the bank bailout per se; he just doesn’t think it goes far enough, policy-wise.<br />
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In Beinart’s case, he opens his essay, <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/06/11/trying-to-kill-bashar-al-assad-not-so-radical-given-u-s-security-interests.html">“Trying to Kill Bashar al-Assad Not So Radical Given U.S. Security Interests”</a> (is that a headline or a master's thesis?!), with the words, “Let me propose an unpleasant thought experiment.” He goes on for six paragraphs sketching out an argument for killing Assad. Then, to open his seventh and penultimate paragraph, he writes: “Let me be clear: I’m not proposing that we try to kill Assad…”<br />
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Perhaps readers are so dumb that they can’t discern the ironic tone of an argument that sets itself up as an “unpleasant thought experiment.” Perhaps, given the size of their platforms, both of these guys get so much mail from idiots that they feel compelled to cover their flanks three-quarters into their arguments.<br />
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After all, a phrase that begins, “Let me,” is a kind of exhortation. Please, reader, indulge me for the sake of those who are slower than you. Still…<br />
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Just to be clear, let me be clear. If you write the piece clearly enough to begin with, there’s no need ever to use a phrase, that includes the words, “be clear."Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10993993618743862343noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6148903653460870082.post-47485488802270122672012-06-07T10:23:00.001-04:002012-06-07T10:23:34.679-04:00Aspects of the Novelist's Dilemma (5)<br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b>5. From shopworn to non-perishable products.</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The other thing that’s different about digital books is that</span>—presuming the content is not time-dependent—the book itself is no longer perishable.</div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In the old days (also known as two years ago), books, which were still mostly print, were perishable for two reasons. First, because the longer they sat on a bookstore shelf, the more they were handled and the less "new" they became. If they didn’t sell pretty quickly, they got shopworn, diminishing their value.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Second, due to limited shelf space, the selling cycle was relatively short—often for hardcover fiction only a few months.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">But in the digital world shelf space is infinite and a book may look as fresh today as it did last year. Every day is a new chance for that product to sell, yet publishers, with limited resources, cannot aggressively promote a book forever. Well, maybe they could with a different business model, but they’re certainly not in the habit of doing so.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">When bookstores were the main means of distributing fiction, access to that limited shelf space was a sine qua non for success. Thus established publishers could leverage their relationships with bookstores into market power. I was at Doubleday (though not personally involved, in this case) when that house put John Grisham on the map with a huge coordinated push into chains and independents. In those days, publishers could select a couple of books from their list and really get behind them. The strategies they used didn’t always succeed, but the odds of success were quite high for awhile.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Now publishers are stuck in a love-hate relationship with the biggest ebook distributor (Amazon, of course), while the second biggest (B&N) pants to catch up. Big publishers still have power in bookstores, but bookstores are a shrinking part of the equation for fiction. And they still have some power to get a book on the front page of the big bookselling websites, but for how much longer?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b><i>Dilemma: </i></b><i>When digital shelf space is limitless and digital books are non-perishable, will mainstream publishers adjust their attention spans for promoting novelists long term</i></span>—<i>or will authors have to do that themselves? If the author is in the marketing game for nine innings and the publisher is in it for one, does it make sense to be sharing revenue with that publisher for all nine innings?</i></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10993993618743862343noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6148903653460870082.post-37605850868222029452012-05-22T10:30:00.002-04:002012-05-22T10:30:29.045-04:00Seven Aspects of the Novelist's Dilemma (4)<br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b>4. Incremental costs approaching zero.</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">An empty ebook reader makes a very poor doorstop. Filled with content, it’s invaluable. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Content, as the saying goes, is king. It’s king because readers are seeking not an object but an experience — the experience of reading (duh).</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">That’s why, despite well publicized challenges to their business models, publishers with big fiction backlists are still making pretty good money.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In the modern world of intellectual property, the cost of producing one more copy approaches zero. This is why Microsoft (whose intellectual property is software) has gross margins that players in other industries can only envy.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The difference between Microsoft and, say, Random House, however, is that Microsoft <i>created</i></span>—and therefore owns—its intellectual property. Most big publishers have licensed theirs from authors. Yet these publishers, adding some value (see previous posts) but not as much as they used to, are still taking a majority of the revenue from sales of each incremental copy. Sales that—once fixed costs are recouped—cost them essentially zero. What's a poor novelist to do?</div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b><i>Dilemma:</i></b><i> Is the validation that derives from having the name of an established imprint on your book worth the outsized cut that a big publisher takes of the proceeds?</i></span></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10993993618743862343noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6148903653460870082.post-26419708560341757882012-05-17T10:04:00.002-04:002012-05-17T10:06:18.664-04:00This Guy Knows What He's Doing<br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I can’t give testament to the writing of Amazon bestseller Aaron Patterson, whose new novel, <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Michael-Airel-Saga-Book-ebook/dp/B0082GESJ8/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&qid=1337180054&sr=8-5" target="_blank">Michael,</a></i> launches today. I simply haven’t read it yet.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">But I’ll tell you this: For a year now I’ve been watching Aaron Patterson reinvent book publishing from his perch in Boise, Idaho. (Insert all the potato farmer jokes you want here, have your laugh, and now pay attention.) I have watched him make No. 1 Kindle bestsellers of former Big-Six-published mid-list authors and newcomers alike, including himself. This guy is smart. If he writes anything like he thinks about the world, watch out!</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Curious? Go check out Aaron’s new <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Michael-Airel-Saga-Book-ebook/dp/B0082GESJ8/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&qid=1337180054&sr=8-5" target="_blank">novel</a> today, Book Two in his young adult Airel Saga. The book is available at a special promotional price with a chance to win a free Kindle. Free is good, too. The only thing better than a Kindle is a free Kindle.</span></div>
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<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Michael-Airel-Saga-Book-ebook/dp/B0082GESJ8/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&qid=1337180054&sr=8-5" target="_blank"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUlc24Oz6J6s26fcGpPtb23t6vm3fHrTwbOKKzlc8bAatykA-pGG6lQVa4Fs8YYF1j20e_flcm8xgrbKFaj_diMZ8SryvVJ4T5qcOIfksqe7dCV1-rt927uMqHVOkFfROTHvCBFOQc-04/s320/Patterson+Michael.jpg" width="219" /></a></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b>3. Where does credibility lie?</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">As I was writing this post, an email blast arrived from bestselling author, blogger, internet marketing guru (and my old friend) Seth Godin. Under the heading “Self published” he listed thirteen well-known authors who had self-published, stated that “The question isn’t whether or not you should wait to be picked, the question is whether you care enough to pick yourself,” and included a link to a blog post on the “Information as Material” website entitled “Do or DIY.” You can read that blog yourself, but the site is down at the moment, so I haven't linked to it. Nevertheless it seems worth listing all the once-self-published authors, because the sheer number of important ones speaks loudly. In alphabetical order:</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Kathy Acker, Jane Austen, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Kate Chopin, Tristan Corbiere, Stephen Crane, Nancy Cunard, Emily Dickinson, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Benjamin Franklin, Nikki Giovanni, Nikolai Vasilevich Gogol, Ian Hamilton-Finlay, Nathaniel Hawthorne, A.E. Housman, Charles Ives, Rudyard Kipling, D.H. Lawrence, Martin Luther, Herman Melville, George Meredith, Anais Nin, Thomas Paine, Beatrix Potter, Ezra Pound, Marcel Proust, Irma Rombauer, Raymond Roussel, Carl Sandburg, Edith Sitwell, Gertrude Stein, Laurence Sterne, Italo Svevo, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Henry David Thoreau, Derek Walcott, Walt Whitman, Virginia Woolf</span></div>
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<a name='more'></a>Today, it goes without saying, it’s easier to self-publish than ever before. It’s not necessarily easier to sell in commercial quantities (it may be harder, in fact), but that is offset to some extent by how inexpensively one can publish an ebook, compared to a traditional (i.e. offset printed) print book.<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">So if it’s cheap and easy, and if there’s an illustrious history behind self-publishing, where does credibility lie? I think I would argue that it derives from three things: authenticity (by which I mean an author genuinely striving to be the best she can be), proper editing (everyone needs that), and good packaging (which for the most part can be purchased). If you have all three of those things, you likely have a right to be proud of your work.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Yet, still, among the cognoscenti, when an author tells someone at a cocktail party that she has a novel coming out next month, the question often follows: Who’s the publisher?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Thus the…</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>Dilemma: Should novelists make business decisions based upon our discomfort at a cocktail party or are we better off learning how to frame a positive response to the question: Who’s the publisher?</i></span></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10993993618743862343noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6148903653460870082.post-79485549111034802262012-05-08T10:20:00.001-04:002012-05-08T10:22:39.723-04:00Please Join Me<br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I’m not a big joiner. Oh, I can be social if need be — can talk my head off at a cocktail party with a glass of wine (or two) in my hand. But even when I’m at the dance I feel like the guy looking in the window. (See Mann, Thomas.) It’s the novelist’s plight, perhaps, to be more inclined to observe than to participate.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">So a few years ago, when my old friend <a href="http://www.dystel.com/" target="_blank">Jane Dystel</a> (to whom I’d sold my literary agency in 2000), recommended that I join International Thriller Writers, I fretted and resisted. Last year, however, I took the plunge, and although my participation in the organization has been gentle rather than gung-ho, I have found it rewarding.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">At the ITW conference in New York, I sat in on some lectures in craft, picking up a thing or two. I spoke on a panel, reacquainted myself with some old colleagues and started some new relationships. The overarching theme of ITW is that times are tough (and changing) in a difficult profession. If we authors stick together, we can help one another, better satisfy readers, and grow the genre.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">One of the things that makes ITW unique is that it doesn’t charge dues to its members. It only charges for its conference and it sells ads on its website. And one of the biggest ways it raises funds is by selling an annual collection of short stories.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I’m here today to plug that collection, <i><a href="http://www.thebigthrill.org/love-is-murder/">Love is Murder,</a></i> edited by Sandra Brown.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>Publishers Weekly</i> gave it a starred <a href="http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-7783-1344-1">review.</a></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>Booklist</i> called it "wonderfully diverse and exciting."</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">If you need to watch television to get inspired to buy it (something I don’t really understand, dinosaur that I am), visit the trailer through <a href="http://www.facebook.com/HarlequinBooks/app_103520946352747">Facebook.</a></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">There are some big names in this collection, but it’s largely about assisting the rest of us, the ones still striving to “make it.” By <a href="http://www.thebigthrill.org/love-is-murder/">buying this book,</a> you’re not only helping authors in a popular genre. You’re helping authors get better at what they do.</span></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10993993618743862343noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6148903653460870082.post-62938613846784408622012-04-30T09:48:00.000-04:002012-04-30T09:48:30.829-04:00Seven Aspects of the Novelist's Dilemma (2)<br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b>2. Who’s adding value when distribution shifts?</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Established publishers will say, not incorrectly, that a big part of publishing isn't about making stuff. Rather it’s about getting that stuff in front of people: distribution. But with the rise of digital books, distribution also changes markedly. So far, distribution of ebooks has proven to be a natural monopoly — or at least an oligopoly.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">No one wants to go all over the Internet searching for a book to buy. And — at least as long as ebook formats (locked with digital rights management) are mostly tied to a particular brand of reader — once you have the reader you’re stuck with a single vendor. (Technically that’s not necessarily true, but it is as a practical matter.)</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">As a result, Amazon currently owns more than sixty percent of the ebook market, while Barnes & Noble has thirty percent. As ebooks continue to displace print books — especially in the fiction category — the effort required to achieve near-one-hundred-percent market penetration diminishes. Instead of shipping thousands of books to thousands of stores, you're sending an electronic file to three or four, and inexpensive services have already arisen to facilitate this distribution.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b><i>Dilemma:</i></b><i> When ninety percent of the market is available to authors at the click of a button, what value is a traditional publisher adding?</i></span></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10993993618743862343noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6148903653460870082.post-72519969913933710392012-04-24T10:38:00.000-04:002012-04-24T10:38:49.850-04:00Seven Aspects of the Novelist's Dilemma (1)<br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I just completed another novel, my third in three years, and now I have to figure out how to publish it.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Not long ago, all a novelist had to worry about was pleasing his reader. Getting published was a part of reaching that reader, of course, but presumably those who occupied the middle — agents, editors, bookstore buyers — were only super readers, people who stood in for the eventual customer.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Pleasing the reader meant facing up to certain dilemmas inherent in storytelling, matters of characterization, pacing, voice, etc. None of these is easy to master, but they’re the kinds of issues that authors enjoy resolving. Having to reinvent the book publishing industry, on the other hand, is a chore we’d rather avoid.</span></div>
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That’s why, with a few notable exceptions, authors fall silent on the matter of Amazon vs the Big Six or on the terms under which publishers ought to sell ebooks to libraries or on what’s the proper price for any book, etc.<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">But, watching media coverage on the massive disruption happening to the book business, I am struck by two things. First, I’m amazed by how little of that discussion in the mainstream media deals with the impact upon <i>authors</i> of all this disruption. After all, without publishers or bookstores or agents, books still exist. But without authors they never can.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">And, second, it surprises me that evaluations of this disruption too often fail to distinguish between book categories. For example, it’s not very helpful to state that ebooks are still “only” twenty percent of revenue in some broad categories (adult fiction, say), when in fact their market share is single digits in some subcategories but perhaps approaching the halfway point in popular genres such as Romance and Horror.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Anyway, in an effort to frame my thinking about all of this, over the next seven weeks (and seven blog posts) I’m sharing aspects of the current novelist’s publishing dilemma.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b>1. Intellectual property is different.</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">We’ve known for a long time that there’s a big difference between the invention of something (say, a machine) and the effort required to produce it in an economically viable way. That’s why we make a distinction between inventors and manufacturers. Inventors invest time and expend intellectual capital. Manufacturers expend time and invest financial capital.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">These distinctions can bleed into one another in the widget world, but until recently there hasn’t been much overlap in the creative world. In the vast majority of cases, authors and other artists are more like inventors and publishers are more like manufacturers.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">When the book business was mostly about printing up thousands of copies and shipping them to far-flung markets, publishers took big capital risks and required massive infrastructure. Editing — i.e. quality control — was one of the smallest pieces of this investment. Money spent on people and infrastructure (i.e. overhead) was the biggest piece.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">But when intellectual property can be delivered digitally and thus stands on its own, much of the capital risk disappears. Nobody has to invest in a printing press to produce an incremental copy of a digital book. That doesn't change everything, but it changes a lot of things.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b><i>Dilemma:</i></b><i> If a book is the product of intellectual property brought to fruition by manufacturing, but now producing a book requires less manufacturing, why shouldn’t creators be collecting a bigger piece of the revenue?</i></span></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10993993618743862343noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6148903653460870082.post-66025599297968808972012-04-16T12:41:00.001-04:002012-04-16T12:44:56.070-04:00The Story of E?<br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">For many years my father, who was the managing partner of a small accounting firm, had an impressive executive secretary. She was a refined old New York type who spoke in a cultured voice that came across with great assurance, especially over the telephone. She was also a large woman, built like an opera singer and with the refinements of one, a person whose physical qualities and classy manners led you to assume, without knowing for sure, that she was a serious consumer of art and literature. In support of that assumption, she was a voracious reader and spent her entire lunch hour immersed in mass market paperback books.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">What was she reading? I couldn’t know, not exactly, because the covers remained hidden beneath a fabric sleeve with a fringe bookmark that she transferred from volume to volume like a talisman. When I inquired after what she was reading she invariably blushed and refused to tell me. They turned out — yes, I peeked — to be conventional romances.</span></div>
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When I learned this I didn’t think any less of her, and I found it curious that she should be embarrassed about it. But I was a teenager at the time. Some years later, I was a little wiser to both publishing and human nature. I learned, for example, that among the cardinal rules of popular romance was a very specific coyness about actual physical sex (in some series, heroines weren’t even allowed to fall down and bleed, let alone to be sexually active) and I learned that a middle-aged woman might feel embarrassed about losing herself in fantasies of romantic love.<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Yet in some respects wrapping one’s book in an anonymous cover (like the proverbial plain brown wrapper) was an invitation to even greater suspicion (remember: I peeked), which perhaps is one reason few people employed said covers. So unless you kept the suspect book permanently inside your purse (hard to read it in there), good luck keeping your secret from prying eyes.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">In any case, I think of this woman when I hear about the phenomenal success of the soft-porn S&M bestseller <i>Fifty Shades of Grey,</i> because I wonder how much of its success may be attributed to the easy and novel privacy that ebooks provide. Maybe, with your personal information flying all over the internetherworld, Google knows all of your darkest secrets, but the good news is that the guy across the aisle on the train no longer gets his casual glimpse of them.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Some have written about the sad fact that, when it comes to ebooks, one can no longer see what other people are reading. This has cultural implications because to some extent seeing what people were reading (or what they had read, lined up on their bookshelves) might take one’s own tastes in another direction. And for similar reasons this has implications for authors, whose work now misses the free advertising of a book cover being displayed in public by the simple act of a reader carrying it about.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">But maybe there’s another implication to this kind of privacy.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">While there has always been a category designated Erotica and this category is sometimes considered a subset of Romance, it has rarely if ever produced mega-bestsellers. Yet here is <i>Grey,</i> a book featuring lots of bondage, I’m told, sitting at No. 1 on the <i>New York Times</i> list. Neither <i>The Story of O</i> nor <i>Emmanuelle</i> nor <i>Delta of Venus</i> — while all were commercial successes — achieved the status of <i>Grey,</i> so far as I know.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Early anecdotal reports attributed the new book's success to middle-aged women in the heartland, but it turns out, according to other reports, that sales are being driven by women in their twenties and thirties. Either way, I wonder whether a book on this subject would be doing so well if not for the ebook version.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I also wonder whether this will change the “rules” of the romance category. In future, maybe more than the bodices will be getting ripped. Maybe the way ebooks change storytelling isn’t so much with the bells and whistles of moving images, hyperlinks and interactivity, but by giving previously embarrassed people the freedom to read whatever they please, without having to wonder what that person across the train aisle thinks of them.</span></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10993993618743862343noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6148903653460870082.post-40106102428364245142012-04-09T10:23:00.000-04:002012-04-09T10:27:27.359-04:00Anatomy of a Writer's Rant<br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">This morning I read a <a href="http://theworstbookever.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">blog rant</a> from an acquaintance named Aaron Patterson, an author and the publisher of StoneHouse Ink. I met Aaron last summer at the International Thriller Writers conference. His enthusiasm and his business savvy impressed me.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Last month Aaron sold nearly 20,000 copies of his ebooks. In some respects, he is running circles around much bigger publishers, and he’s only been in the business for three years. In his rant, he compares most authors to casino goers: “Authors from everywhere are all on the plane whooping it up, drinking and full of visions of the money filled pools of their future. But on the airplane ride back, sad faces and hung over looks cover the silent air like a wet dream crushing blanket.”</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Now, this is a sentence that began with great promise and then devolved into an awkward mixed metaphor. If you’re turned off by the writing of his post (which clearly was just spit out, typos and all, in a fit of frustration bordering on rage), you might be inclined to dismiss Aaron. In that case, you’d be the poorer, because he’s right. Hope is not a strategy. The business point of being published (self or otherwise) is not to acquire a lottery ticket but to build a brand of some kind.</span></div>
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I have never read any of Aaron’s fiction. Therefore I can’t say whether it’s any “good,” but I know that it sells and that he’s a shrewd marketer. (Don’t believe me? Search James Patterson on Amazon and see what other author’s books show up in the top five.)</div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">What’s interesting is that in Aaron's rant he notes that reviewers whom he suspects are embittered authors have gone on Amazon and ripped him with bad reviews. He may be right about their motives; I don’t know. But I do know this: in my experience the authors whose books don’t sell complain about a system that undervalues their work while authors whose books do sell are happy to be pitched like a can of beans if it puts money in their pockets.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">If you pay attention at all to book publishing, you know that some awful reads sit on bestsellers lists while many great reads languish. Of course, it’s always been thus. The difference today seems to be that — due to the Internet and ebooks — the playing field for marketers is more level than it ever has been.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">In their day — as has been well documented — Charles Dickens and Mark Twain were master marketers. There were other great publishing salesmen of that era, no doubt, whose works are long forgotten. Contemporary critics don’t get to decide what’s literature (Melville’s <i>Moby Dick</i> got panned, remember); posterity does. Meanwhile, we writers have to feed ourselves, and there are only a few options: get a day job, get lucky or market yourself like hell.</span></div>
<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10993993618743862343noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6148903653460870082.post-31599741895658615752012-02-10T11:45:00.000-05:002012-02-10T11:45:20.813-05:00Narrative Friction<div class="p1">I recently learned (maybe I’m the last to know) that Ben Zimmer of <i>The Boston Globe</i> has been tracking anachronistic language in the PBS hit show <i>Downton Abbey</i> for a project called <a href="http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/wordroutes/3133" target="_blank">Visual Thesaurus.</a> The anachronisms are also the subject of a YouTube <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzY4ieghO0w" target="_blank">video.</a></div><div class="p2"><span class="s1"></span></div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p2">The examples (“I couldn’t care less”) have not struck me while I watched the series, so I can’t claim they took this viewer out of the fiction. It could be that I’m just a sucker for an English accent, lapsing into instant credulousness at the first seemingly erudite syllable. Then again, some of these “mistakes” seem like a great deal of hairsplitting. For instance, the word “floozy” — which Zimmerman flags — is said only to have begun in American (not British) slang in the earlier part of the decade in which Downton takes place. I don’t know — I’m not a linguist — but the first written citation in the Dictionary of American Slang dates to 1902. Wouldn’t the oral slang precede the written? Doesn’t at least sixteen years seem like enough time for that usage to have crossed the pond, especially with a world war on? And isn’t it possible that the character who speaks this word was at least exposed to an American in England who introduced her to the usage?<span class="s1"></span></div><div class="p1"><br />
</div><div class="p1">Well, never mind the pilpul; it’s all in good fun. But this exercise does bring to my mind the issue of narrative voice in fiction.</div><div class="p2"><span class="s1"></span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1"></span></div><a name='more'></a><br />
<div class="p2">Whether writing in the first or third person, it’s the job of the narrator to create a kind of immersion in time and place. When this works and the voice is applied consistently, this immersion acts as a lubricant that enables the author to tell his or her story with minimal resistance from the reader. Anything that takes the reader out of the story we might call “narrative friction.”</div><div class="p2"><span class="s1"></span></div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p2">Because of the possibilities for narrative friction, the first task of all narrative voice is to get out of the way, but it’s more complicated than that. For example, James Wood, in his insightful little book <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/How-Fiction-Works-James-Wood/dp/0312428472/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1328891681&sr=1-1" target="_blank">How Fiction Works,</a></i> notes that “so-called omniscience is almost impossible. As soon as someone tells a story about a character, narrative seems to want to bend itself around that character, wants to merge with that character, to take on his or her way of thinking and speaking.”<span class="s1"></span></div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p2">I might quibble: it’s not really the “narrative” that wants to do this but the author, because what a novel has over other forms — movies, say, or television — is its ability to get inside a character’s head. Every art form inevitably plays to its strength. Still, there’s something instructive here.<span class="s1"></span></div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p2">This selective quote from Wood — taken a bit out of context, in that it comes originally during a discussion of the distinctions between direct and indirect speech — may sound like a criticism of the omniscient voice bending itself toward its character, but I don’t believe it’s meant to be. More to the point, anything that brings us closer to the conditions of time and place that the novelist wishes to evoke seems like a fair technique — so long as it doesn’t go overboard and create narrative friction.<span class="s1"></span></div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p2">I recently read <i><a href="http://www.powells.com/biblio/71-9781410436368-0" target="_blank">West of Here</a></i> by Jonathan Evison, a successful novel that jumps back and forth between the 1880‘s and 2006 while employing a third-person narrator. I don’t know whether there were any anachronisms in the historical parts — I wasn’t really reading critically — but I thought Evison did a good job of creating an immersion in time, which when it’s executed correctly involves much more than references to period clothing or swapping cars for horses.<span class="s1"></span></div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p2">In fact, what Evison does quite cleverly is use (in the narrator’s voice — not necessarily in dialog) no contractions (“It is said”) when he’s in the 1880s and plenty of contractions (“She hadn’t expected”) when he’s in 2006. I might, if I look carefully, find a few quibbles, but nothing jumped out at me while I was immersed in the story. The narrative seemed relatively frictionless.</div><div class="p2"><span class="s1"></span></div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p2">This may seem like a simple thing to the reader, but it isn’t a simple thing for the writer. On the creator’s part, it requires a great deal of thoughtfulness and discipline.<span class="s1"></span></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10993993618743862343noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6148903653460870082.post-33826986437829833242011-08-15T14:37:00.001-04:002011-08-15T14:38:05.880-04:00What's It All About?As I labor through the early stages of writing my next novel, <i>Proximity,</i> I find that it’s worth considering the role that theme plays in fiction.<br />
<br />
When we place a book in a genre, that can suggest a certain theme by itself. We can presume that a literary novel, for example, will give us some insights into human nature. A mystery will be a search for truth. Science fiction will treat the promise or consequences of technology. A thriller will demonstrate the resourcefulness of the seemingly overmatched hero. Et cetera.<br />
<br />
<div class="p2"><span class="s1"></span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">But most successful novels, I think, have a central theme that transcends category. This may seem obvious when discussing literary fiction, but it is also true for most so-called “category” fiction. In all cases, the theme may be pre-ordained by the original intention of the author, it may flow logically from the overall subject matter, or it may arise on its own as a byproduct of the author’s efforts to lend depth to the story.</span><br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
<span class="s1"><br />
</span></div><div class="p2"><span class="s1"></span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">My serialized novel, <i><a href="http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/jefishman/2009/11/cadaver-blues/">Cadaver Blues</a>,</i> is a fairly mainstream mystery. As such, it contains the obvious theme of truth seeking, but there is another element that arose as I plotted and wrote. The protagonist, Phu Goldberg, is a Vietnamese-American who was adopted as an infant by Jewish socialists. His face looks foreign to some, but his accent is American. In addition, he is short, which further exacerbates his self-consciousness.</span><br />
<span class="s1"><br />
</span></div><div class="p2"><span class="s1"></span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">With all these things in the stew, the underlying theme of prejudice arose naturally, and here’s the kicker: Phu himself is prejudiced. He assumes a couple of black kids are thugs, he believes overweight people have brought all their problems on themselves, and he accepts too easily that his beautiful female client must be stupid. Although Phu is not the only one in the story who is prejudiced, these views inhibit his ability to solve the mystery. As he sheds them (subtly, I hope), things begin to come clearer.</span><br />
<span class="s1"><br />
</span></div><div class="p2"><span class="s1"></span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">In any case, this theme of prejudice arises from the character of Phu. Prejudice is only central to the story because it is central to Phu’s character.</span><br />
<span class="s1"><br />
</span></div><div class="p2"><span class="s1"></span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">By contrast, the main theme of <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0983380902/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=verbitrage-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0983380902">Primacy</a>,</i> my just-released thriller, arises from the subject matter of the story. The main action involves a talking ape that shows up in an animal testing laboratory. Her presence forces each character to confront the question of whether individuals should be sacrificed to the greater good. How they deal with this question reveals their inner character, of course, but the theme does even more than that for the reader.</span><br />
<span class="s1"><br />
</span></div><div class="p2"><span class="s1"></span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">Theme in fiction stimulates readers — consciously or subconsciously — not only to understand the protagonist’s character but to examine <i>their own character.</i> How would I act if I were Phu and two black teens crowded me on the sidewalk? What would I do if a “lesser” life were in danger because of choices that I’d made? Thus does theme lend resonance to one’s reading experience.</span><br />
<span class="s1"><br />
</span></div><div class="p2"><span class="s1"></span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">My new novel regards ordinary people suffering the consequences of the actions taken by a few powerful Wall Street players. As such, it will undoubtedly be categorized as a “financial thriller,” leading to the presumptive theme of an individual fighting great odds with money on the line.</span><br />
<span class="s1"><br />
</span></div><div class="p2"><span class="s1"></span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">Might it have another, deeper theme? I certainly hope so. Perhaps that theme will grow from the personality of Shoog Clay, the central character, or maybe it will grow from the thrust of the story. One thing I can promise already: This book will be about more than dollars and cents.</span></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10993993618743862343noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6148903653460870082.post-15607810708349771402011-06-14T16:34:00.000-04:002011-06-14T16:34:03.344-04:00The End of the HiatusCan this really be only my second post ALL YEAR? Well, er, yes, unless you count my weekly posts on <a href="http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/jefishman/2011/03/publishing-primacy-%E2%80%94-folio-1-act-of-creation/">The Nervous Breakdown</a>. Those posts will explain a good bit of what’s kept me away: being edited and designed and working out distribution arrangements for <i><a href="http://www.verbitrage.com/">Primacy</a>,</i> and making good on my promise to bring that novel to the world as well as the Big Six publishers might.<br />
<br />
<div class="p2"><span class="s1"></span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">Not that any of that work is finished, but it’s finally settling down into something of a routine, which means not only that there's a smidgen of time left over to get back to sharing my thoughts here on writing, but there's also finally a chance to get to work on the next novel.</span><br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
<span class="s1"><br />
</span></div><div class="p2"><span class="s1"></span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">With regard to the next work, I have knocked around ideas for quite a while, some of them conventional mysteries (like <i><a href="http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/jefishman/2009/11/cadaver-blues/">Cadaver Blues</a>),</i> others of a more literary bent. But I keep coming back to what makes <i>Primacy</i> a compelling and penetrating novel (if the early <a href="http://www.verbitrage.com/products/primacy-hardcover">blurbs</a> are to be believed) and what deeply interests me: writing thrillers that, although they're primarily entertainment, force readers to confront aspects of our shared values that are ripe for reexamination.</span><br />
<span class="s1"><br />
</span></div><div class="p2"><span class="s1"></span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">In <i><a href="http://www.verbitrage.com/buy-now">Primacy,</a></i> of course, I highlighted the tragedy of animal testing by imagining a bonobo that had developed the ability to speak and been discovered in a lab. The next book, tentatively entitled <i>Propinquity,</i> doesn’t require science fiction for its plot to get off the ground. It’s more about what we humans do to one another.</span><br />
<span class="s1"><br />
</span></div><div class="p2"><span class="s1"></span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">If anyone’s still out there, I hope you’ll join me on my new journey.</span></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10993993618743862343noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6148903653460870082.post-20087330646297663672011-01-14T16:46:00.002-05:002011-01-14T16:50:24.274-05:00Crap on the Path of LifeNo, the above title isn’t a list. It’s an exhortation.<br />
<br />
<div class="p2"><span class="s1"></span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">We’ve been having a lot of snow around here — who hasn’t? (O.k.: shut up, San Diego.) And this has necessitated more than a little shoveling around the house.</span><br />
<span class="s1"><br />
</span></div><div class="p2"><span class="s1"></span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">When I’m shoveling, I am ever mindful of our two dogs. I always dig a path across the patio to the lawn in order to facilitate their — ahem — doing their business away from the house.</span><br />
<span class="s1"><br />
</span></div><div class="p2"><span class="s1"></span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">Naturally they don’t comply. Ever. Even when the weather is perfect, more often than not they drop their load right near the house, sometimes smack in the middle of the garden path.</span><br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
My only solace is knowing that dogs don't have a monopoly on this behavior. It’s actually something to do with all dogs and, I venture to say, most beasts.</div><div class="p1"><span class="s1"><br />
</span></div><div class="p2"><span class="s1"></span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">In Zimbabwe years ago I was fascinated to see the amount of manure that animals deposit right in the middle of the game path. It’s so common, in fact, that anyone walking those paths soon loses all compunction about striding right through it. To get anywhere in the African bush is to step in shit.</span><br />
<span class="s1"><br />
</span></div><div class="p2"><span class="s1"></span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">None of this should be a surprise. Social animals that can’t talk (which is to say most species) sometimes report on their adventures by regurgitating some of what they just ate, setting it at the feet of the tribe, as it were. Once they’ve digested, however, it’s their rivals and enemies who get a message from the other end of the digestive tract. Even not-so-social animals do this. The message says: this is my neighborhood; you’ve been warned.</span><br />
<span class="s1"><br />
</span></div><div class="p2"><span class="s1"></span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">Another way to phrase it: I’m alive; I’m putting the world on notice. Isn’t this what the writer does?</span><br />
<span class="s1"><br />
</span></div><div class="p2"><span class="s1"></span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">My recollection of Saul Bellow’s <i>The Adventures of Augie March </i>is that Augie’s imperative was to “make a mark” on the world. Though I can’t seem to verify the exact quote, something like that is the essence of Augie — and of many, if not all, of Bellow’s greatest main characters: Augie and Herzog and Henderson and Humboldt.</span><br />
<span class="s1"><br />
</span></div><div class="p2"><span class="s1"></span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">It is certainly what drove me to write: to leave my own mark, my notch in the tree, my tattoo on the collective mind of the world. So what if earth is a big place and most people will never hear of me? Most never heard of Bellow, either, and he was one of the greatest men ever to set pen to paper.</span><br />
<span class="s1"><br />
</span></div><div class="p2"><span class="s1"></span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">An artist of any kind can’t help himself. He must throw down that marker. Where others tread, he must lay down his crap — and not far from the house where no one will see, if he can help it — but near the common domicile, in the middle of the path. Right in the center. Lay it true and if it sticks to someone’s shoe, well, isn’t that the point?</span><br />
<span class="s1"><br />
</span></div><div class="p2"><span class="s1"></span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">As Augie said for sure: “I may well be a flop at this line of endeavor. Columbus too thought he was a flop, probably, when they sent him back in chains. Which didn’t prove there was no America.”</span></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10993993618743862343noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6148903653460870082.post-90399304571527487212010-12-06T13:40:00.005-05:002010-12-06T13:47:28.983-05:00Why 127 Hours Felt Like 130<span class="s1">Some time ago a friend of mine saw Aron Ralston speak at a business function. He told me that it was the most inspirational talk he’d ever heard.</span><br />
<br />
<span class="s1"></span>Ralston — as everyone knows by now — is the young man who became pinned by a boulder during a misfortunate solo hike and used an all-purpose tool to cut off his right arm below the elbow in order to escape. It was an act of astonishing courage, the kind of thing that prompts normal people to pause in their daily routines when they first hear about it, to reflect for a moment on the human capacity for survival, and to wonder whether we ourselves would have the chops to do what this man did <i>in extremis</i>.<br />
<br />
So why did the feature film <i>127 Hours, </i>which tells this story, fall so flat for me?<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
<div class="p1"><span class="s1">I think it’s because writer-director Danny Boyle’s script fails to build a lasting connection between Ralston and his audience.</span><br />
<span class="s1"><br />
</span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">We spend most of the movie in close visual proximity to Ralston (played well by James Franco), watching him suffer in close-up. We sympathize, but the film never achieves the sense of intimacy required to go beyond sympathy. In this story we look upon the hero from afar, as we do upon a spectacle: a striptease or a freak show or an ugly car crash. There but for the grace of God go we, perhaps, but we pass by — with only a brief pause and without deep reflection.</span><br />
<span class="s1"><br />
</span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">As told by Boyle, all that carries this story forward is our anticipation of the act of self-inflicted violence that we know will come, the gory act upon which, ultimately, most of us look with eyes averted, the act that sets Aron Ralston apart from the herd.</span><br />
<span class="s1"><br />
</span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">But that’s the problem. He’s not one of us; he’s an oddball, the perpetrator of an admirable (or, at least, amazing) act, but one with little resonance. <i>127 Hours</i> moves us in shallow ways, as witnesses to pain, isolation, and abandonment to the elements, which lead in turn to acts of progressive desperation. But we don't <i>feel</i> these acts </span>— we're just watching.<br />
<span class="s1"><br />
</span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">How do we manage to stay so detached from a script derived from an experience that — when told live in a room — moves people to great admiration?</span><br />
<span class="s1"><br />
</span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">I think the film never rises above spectacle because it delves into no human relationships beyond the most casual connections between Ralston and his family, between Ralston and the wife he’s yet to meet, between Ralston and two strangers with whom he went for a swim hours before the accident. None of these people becomes a rounded person in this story because none but Ralston is seen making decisions that reveal character.</span><br />
<span class="s1"><br />
</span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">The movie lacks human relationships almost entirely and therefore ultimately lacks the human insights that Aron Ralston presumably delivers in person during motivational speaking engagements.</span><br />
<span class="s1"><br />
</span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">As a writer, this movie has me thinking of the distinction between sympathy and empathy, which is the distinction between shallowness and depth, between telling and showing, between spectacle and art.</span><br />
<span class="s1"><br />
</span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">There’s so little for our hearts to grab onto in <i>127 Hours</i>, nothing beyond our pre-programmed species affiliation. Does the fact that we’re fellow humans conjure sympathy? Sure. But sympathy (from the Greek: “with feeling”) is never deeply earned. It always comes cheap because we bestow it from a distance.</span><br />
<span class="s1"><br />
</span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">Many of us know individuals who demonstrate sympathy — perhaps reaching for the checkbook when they hear a sad story or making the obligatory condolence call or even crying their pro forma tears. Yet these same people never come to understand why others make different choices than they or arrive at different sets of values.</span><br />
<span class="s1"><br />
</span></div><div class="p2"><span class="s1"></span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">Empathy (“in feeling”) presents another matter because it touches us not just on the surface but <i>within</i>.</span><br />
<span class="s1"><br />
</span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">Whose job is it to help people turn their sympathy to empathy? It is the job of the artist, of course, because empathy is the great project of all art. Art, when it succeeds, carries us beyond pity to insights that change our way of looking at ourselves and other human beings.</span><br />
<span class="s1"><br />
</span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">In her memoir, <i>Just Kids</i>, Patti Smith puts the artist's distinction well. Writing of her friend and lover, the great photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, she says: “Robert trusted in the law of empathy, by which he could, by his will, transfer himself into an object or a work of art, and thus influence the outer world.”</span><br />
<span class="s1"><br />
</span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">It’s that influence over the outside world that <i>127 Hours</i> fails to achieve.</span><br />
<span class="s1"><br />
</span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">Perhaps Ralston, admittedly self-absorbed, really doesn’t have relationships with fellow human beings that would evince an empathetic response from an audience sitting in a cinema. But I doubt that.</span><br />
<span class="s1"><br />
</span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">More likely, Boyle latched onto the wrong thing here, the easy thing. The hook was always there for this story — the hook any publicist would see — but the barb is missing, the part that sticks with you, the part it's the artist's job to provide.</span><br />
<span class="s1"><br />
</span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">So for all his talent this writer-director inadvertently demonstrates to other creators a basic element of story craft: </span>exactly what might have happened in real life matters less than how you tell it.</div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10993993618743862343noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6148903653460870082.post-3985439813221054402010-11-03T11:54:00.003-04:002010-11-04T10:05:33.297-04:00Saved at Birth<style type="text/css">
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<div class="p1"><span class="s1">It always begins this way.</span></div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">An idea intrudes, insists that I give it attention, finally settles upon me. It’s exciting — a promise to oneself that makes the hair stand on end. And, of course, because it resides in the mind, not on the page, there’s a certain perfection to it.</span></div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">Oh, I know it’s not really perfect. It’s incomplete, in fact, not fully formed. But there’s thrust behind the thing. So even if the blade isn’t sharp, the subject has been engaged.</span></div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">Then comes a moment when the only way to move the idea forward is to think more deeply, to hone the details. This represents a profound psychological shift. It’s the difference between a pitcher knowing he has a start scheduled for next Saturday and undertaking the stretches for that start in an hour hence. With preparation comes trepidation.</span><br />
<a name='more'></a></div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">I was there last week with <i>Iniquity</i>, my next novel, staring at the blank page. I wasn’t planning to start writing, just to start planning. Why does it scare me so?</span></div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">Because a thousand decisions lie ahead, that’s why. Because those decisions are all interdependent, like the components of an ecosystem — get one or two wrong and the ecosystem becomes unbalanced or chokes off its own oxygen supply or spins into useless pieces. And because, even in success, with each decision a million possibilities die.</span></div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">It is human nature to become anxious when faced by too many choices. Studies have been done in supermarkets, particularly in the jam and jelly section, the sweetest part of the store. We think we want more choices, but we don’t really. In fact, people given too much choice often flee the store without buying anything at all.</span></div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">Thus the act of artistic creation requires a great leap of courage, the will to battle through this natural anxiety, to sacrifice possibilities on the altar of the greater idea.</span></div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">The decisions may be wrong or they may be less than ideal, but one must remind oneself that they are rarely fatal. Why? Because they can be changed, revised.</span></div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">And that’s the thing that allows me to move forward ultimately, I think. Because inherent in the magic of creation is resuscitation of the very possibilities one may originally have killed off.</span></div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">Thus every work, until it is truly finished, presents its imperfect author with the opportunity for salvation.</span></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10993993618743862343noreply@blogger.com