Sep
2
Secret Places
September 2, 2010 | Leave a Comment
If you’re unable to just pack it up and go on a roadtrip, one option is to just get totally weird in your own backyard. Pretty much every somewhere has something secret, something eccentric, something unspeakable - and for people who like fiction or like to write it, those sorts of attractions are invaluable brain stimulating machines. For example, San Francisco has the Bureau of Urban Secrets (it also has this), and the united states of the Internet has The Selby and Big Questions Online. The obvious jump here is that of course there are plenty of books available to help you explore the underbelly of our world - and odds are there’s a book corresponding to your own neck of the woods…
In Copenhagen, 11 artists give away their secret places in Copenhagen for The Secret Book of Secret Places.
For vintage saloons and a Hasidic dairy bar, you’ll need to go to New York with City Secrets.
If you care about things like a ‘A rare surviving “sewer venting lamp”‘ then hidden London is for you! See: Secret London: guide to the weird and wonderful secrets of London-town
And then, when it’s just a little mystery you seek and you’re all explored-out for the day, here’s how to make a hollow book in which to keep your very own secrets. You don’t even need to leave the house.
Now, mystery aside, our friends at Booktrix have a new blog post up!
I Tweet iPad: Why technology matters to writers and publishers - are you a publisher or writer? Use iPad yet? More tablets coming that will change how we consume information. What will it mean for creators?
Booktrix.com | Creative Publishing & Marketing Services | Every Trick in the Book
www.booktrix.com
I’m recommending that every writer and publisher should buy an iPad and start exploring the Apple App Store in order to understand why technology matters so much to writing and reading.I’m also recommending that writers and publishers create Twitter accounts and begin to spend some serious time learn… (Click here for the rest.)
Aug
26
Comics. We Want to Read More of Them.
August 26, 2010 | Leave a Comment
Comics. Have they been demoted to coffee break Facebook ephemera, or are they alive and kicking butt out in the Darwinian thunderdome of the litsphere? Regardless, some of the comic fodder found online right now is goddamn brilliant.
For example, check out The Oatmeal. Here’s a teaser (click the banner).
More serious comic book fare would include Estrus Comics by MariNaomi-
“The talented MariNaomi kisses and tells (and does a lot more) in the sixth issue of her self-published ESTRUS COMICS. Don’t be put off by its hand-stamped, do-it-yourself cover, because this San Francisco artist’s stories justify the $5 price. These confessional comics document her flirtations and copulations from boyfriends and assorted flings past, including the car-radio thief who immersed himself in role-playing games (“… and the other day when we were making love, I was imagining we were in one of my maps and you were an elfin princess”). Her cartooning style is deceptively simple — its clean lines and ink-black backgrounds really allow you to focus on the characters’ emotions, which are real and raw. That makes MariNaomi’s work honest, brave and sometimes awfully funny…”
More reviews of visual novels, comics and “zines” from BookGasm are here.
Look for MariNaomi’s graphic memoir, KISS & TELL, published by HarperCollins in April 2011. “In this fresh and offbeat graphic memoir, MariNaomi chronicles her time as a misfit teen and young woman looking for love in San Francisco, while bringing to light issues of identity and sexuality.”
Aug
19
A Book Betrays A Nation?
August 19, 2010 | Leave a Comment
Not only does this case (see the article below) possibly mark the start of a new, international legal trend because it proves that people can be sued across borders, but what are the ramifications for the publishing world?
Is this author guilty of betraying a nation? Are the cultural differences on the two sides of this case so vast that fairness is virtually impossible to discern? Would there be a case at all if this book had not enjoyed massive critical and commercial success?
Bookseller of Kabul takes a novelistic approach to the personal history of a particular family. The key question this case should bring up for authors is: to what extent does privacy take precedence over storytelling? As I endeavor to document my own family’s story right now, this question burns constantly. Whose privacy am I treading upon, and do I “own” this story because I am a part of the family being written about? There are so many questions to be asked when we are dealing with “true” stories and real people, and I certainly do not have these answers. Yet I carry on with my writing task with the hope that no one will be hurt by the truth or by my incessant prodding for sensitive information.
Please add your your thoughts on this matter in our Comments section! Do you have experience writing biographical or autobiographical material, and if so, what issues came up for you as you wrote?
Brought to book: Kabul author guilty of ‘betraying’ a nation (The Guardian)
Writer of bestselling Bookseller of Kabul ordered to pay punitive damages and faces further lawsuits
The author of the publishing sensation The Bookseller of Kabul was found guilty of defamation and “negligent journalistic practices” last week after losing a case brought by a woman who claimed the bestseller depicted her in a humiliating, untruthful way that left her feeling “violated”.
Legal experts say the ruling by Oslo district court will transform the way in which western journalists and authors write about people from poor countries. Åsne Seierstad was ordered to pay more than £26,000 in punitive damages to Suraia Rais, the second wife of bookseller Shah Muhammad Rais, with whose family the Norwegian writer lived for five months while researching her book.
The saga may have some way to go. For yesterday, the rest of the Rais family revealed the full extent of their fury over a book they say is an insult not just to them but to the whole Afghan culture. Now that Suraia’s case has been accepted by the Norwegian judge, seven other members of the family have announced that they too will sue the author. Shah Muhammad Rais, his first wife, his mother, his two sons and his two daughters have already prepared their cases with the same lawyer who secured victory for Suraia. Seierstad and her publishers could find themselves back in the dock in two to three months’ time, facing further claims of up to £250,000…
For the complete article click here.
(Thanks goes to blogger and author Paula Delgado-Kling for bringing this case to my attention. Please check out Paula’s deeply thought-provoking blog Talking About Colombia, here.)
Aug
12
What’s a poor author to do?
August 12, 2010 | Leave a Comment
My idol Mark Morford, deviant journalist and author, and sexy, sexy man, talks up the state of the printed book in the age of iPad/Kindle/eBook at a Las Vegas brain-trust where bookish people convened to grok the concept of saving/reinventing book publishing in a mere 72 hour time slot:
…”I was first sort of amazed to learn just how few of these otherwise smart and well-informed folk had much of an idea how the book business works, from imprints to distribution, contracts to cover art. No one really knew how books get made, who makes which decisions, how little control authors have, what we’re expected to do nowadays, and so on.
So immersed am I in the wicked funhouse of medialand, it struck me that few in the general populace know — or care — how it all works. Not that they should, but still.
No big deal, that. But it ties straight into the second surprise, which was far more troubling, albeit still understandable. For few also seemed to have much sense of just how bad it’s become for books and authors, how much corporate consolidation has occurred, how increasingly extinct is the “undiscovered author” or killer book deal, how few writers can make a living at their craft anymore..”
This week’s Debriefer takes a beady-eyed, legal-eyed look at the emerging world of e-book formats and the related contractual issues they raise… what’s a poor author to do? Plus the usual transatlantic banter between Donna and Peter as they thrash out the business that is book!
Presented by Donna Ballman and Peter Cox. Click here to listen.
P.S. More very smart and bookish podcasts are always updated and ready for you here, on Writerscast.
Aug
5
Get Trashy: How to Commit Wordicide
August 5, 2010 | Leave a Comment
My secret fantasy life this week is to be a travel writer slash sex blogger with an endless budget and lots of really alluring and beautiful clothes. In order to reach my goals I absolutely must publish a bestselling novel and/or have a film treatment produced into a Hollywood blockbuster. The stakes are high! Then and only then shall I have the cash flow to fulfill my dream. But in order to create these writerly gems I must learn how to TRASH THINGS. Not hotel rooms or reputations, but I must learn to throw away words. Words that I really love. Love deeply and honestly like tiny font-ridden pets. You know what I mean. You’ve written closets full of them too, and fed and clothed them and lugged them around with you in giant handbags. The truth is, these word pets are pulling your writing into the soft, warm hell of verbosity. Your manuscripts need to go on a diet. So do mine. Let’s do it together! Read through your stuff and delete, yes DELETE, at least half of the adjectives. Now, delete flamboyant descriptions that don’t drive the chapter forward. Finally, read it all again and take out the remaining fluff that you couldn’t stand to remove the first time. I bet what you are left with is something with a tidy conservation of words, something tighter and more able to defy gravity.
I am in the process of revisiting an unfinished novel I started in college. It’s a scary thing to do, drag something kicking and screaming from your past out into the light. And with the intention of forming this thing into a presentable, grammatically correct, unsentimental, mature piece of work for actual reader consumption. Talk about intimidating. I had major doubts. Writers block knocked me on my ass. Then I saw it - my task: Those late night gallon bottles of bad whiskey-fueled paragraphs must now be parsed into palatable shots of fine bourbon. Entire pages, no, entire chapters, must be DELETED. Yeah, it’s sort of like killing your youth in a way, looking back into your brain of Christmas past and judging it too florid for present day modern, sleek, grown-up existence. But DELETE I did, over and over, and suddenly the project felt light, doable, invigorated. The manuscript is about 180% better already and I’ve just begun this process. What was at first a troubling act of word violence, now seems satisfying. If I can do it, you can.
Hey, I am likely one of the most verbose writers on the planet so I know how hard this is to kill those beloved phrases. However, when I was a manuscript reader at a literary agency, I read a lot of work. I learned on that side of the lens that over-written stuff is bad. It’s that simple. So do yourself a favor and get trashy.
Now, here’s a thought: Do you think I would have bothered writing in college if I knew that my future self was going to trash so much of it? Probably not. So, the big footnote here is that when you do write it’s important not to chop it to bits right away. Just write a while, and realize that it’s ok if a lot of what you’re writing is going to be trashed upon a future reading. That’s how gold is found in the pan - the grit is filtered out. You can’t start with a pan full of gold.
See Writing Coach Marla’s related piece at The Relaxed Writer:
Writing Lesson from Photographers: The “10,000 + 1 Principle”
Welcome to the “Writing Lessons from Photographers” series. Today’s lesson is a powerful antidote for anyone who struggles with an overactive inner critic. Enjoy!…
Click here to read Marla’s incredibly helpful post.
Jul
29
Super Good Awesome Great New Book
July 29, 2010 | Leave a Comment
We intellectual types and artistic folk (please note that I am rolling my eyes as I type that) focus on appreciating good art so much of the time, but what about the bad art? Ok, so reading a bad book wastes a lot of our precious time so let’s not bother with that if we can help it, but looking at a bad painting just takes a second. Shouldn’t we be honing our ability to discern between what’s bad and good, if only for the sake of our own writing? Let’s be frank, if we can’t tell if that line we just wrote is fantastic or terrible, then, well, then what? *Shiver*
To further develop this important skill, let’s consider looking at some “bad” art as a sort of control:
“…making art is too important to be left only to art professionals” - The Museum of Fred (Excellent bad art by some regular people no one knows.)
When it comes to books, thankfully we have the New York Times and other opinion tanks that serve us a little insight before we bother to read a book ourselves - for example, I have not read the book Super Sad True Love Story but I think I just may do so because “Books of The Times” gives it glowing praise. Plus, I cannot resist any book, good or bad (I love “bad” sci-fi) that takes place in the future and also takes a darkly satirical tone. Sounds “good” to me!
Books of The Times
Love Found Amid Ruins of Empire
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Gary Shteyngart’s wonderful new novel, “Super Sad True Love Story,” is a supersad, superfunny, superaffecting performance — a book that not only showcases the ebullient satiric gifts he demonstrated in his entertaining 2002 debut, “The Russian Debutante’s Handbook,” but that also uncovers his abilities to write deeply and movingly about love and loss and mortality. It’s a novel that gives us a cutting comic portrait of a futuristic America, nearly ungovernable and perched on the abyss of fiscal collapse, and at the same time it is a novel that chronicles a sweetly real love affair as it blossoms from its awkward, improbable beginnings…
For the complete review please click here.
Jul
22
My Mother and The Hippy Mafia
July 22, 2010 | Leave a Comment
What’s your mother reading this summer? My mom happens to be reading the book Orange Sunshine - a book about the LSD culture in the ’60s and a group of smugglers and hippy-philosophers called the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, of which Timothy Leary was an integral part. This choice of summer reading may seem out of sorts for a mother, but not for mine. My mom was one of the young hippy chicks, mostly runaways from conservative Orange County families, that the author talks about in the book. These girls were taken under the wings of the mafia-like dudes of the Brotherhood, initiated into the scene as counterculture groupies, young wives, and mothers of wayward kiddos roaming the beaches, kids who were known to sometimes be dosed on LSD as young as seven or eight years old. My mom can’t stop talking about this book, not only because she was there, but because it tells such an intense (true) story and covers some seriously interesting history. My dad was involved in this infamous Brotherhood too - a poet smuggler and an associate of these psychedelic surfer criminals, all crammed into a beautiful paradise in Laguna canyon that they called “Dodge City”…and this is where my own childhood begins. Hey, maybe I should write a book…
From Book Soup (the blog) - here’s a brief review of Orange Sunshine:
…Orange Sunshine tells the story of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, a band of surfers in Laguna Beach who became the world’s biggest acid and hashish smugglers and dealers in the 1960s. When Sandoz Labs acid was increasingly hard to come by, the Brotherhood synthesized “Orange Sunshine,” the most potent acid of the time. Apparently they dropped thousands of hits of this LSD from an airplane onto a crowd of 25,000 in a three-day Laguna Beach celebration. The occasion? An apocalyptic birthday party for Jesus Christ. They also wanted to buy a tropical island and install Timothy Leary as the high priest of a new spiritual Utopian society.
For an excerpt from the book click here.
Here’s a video interview with one of the guys from the Brotherhood. A documentary is in the making, based on the book.
There is something Kafka-esque about 1960’s counterculture, so it’s fitting to end with this bit of book news:
An Israeli judge has ruled that Kafka’s unpublished writings, along with manuscripts, letters and journals by his friend and fellow author Max Brod, are to be made public. The literary world awaits! For more on this, click here.
P.S. Summer is not over! Publisher’s Weekly makes some delicious suggestions for summer reading, here. And another thing: Check out this interview with Bob Stein, co-founder of The Institute for the Future of the Book, here.
Jul
15
WikiUniversity?
July 15, 2010 | Leave a Comment
Music went digital, books are going digital, and now, your kid’s college education is going digital?
…Since 2001, a growing movement — from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford, and hundreds of other universities worldwide to insurgent bloggers and entrepreneurs barely out of school themselves — is looking to social media to transform higher education. They’re releasing educational content for free to the world and enlisting computers as tutors. Google has scanned and digitized 7 million books. Wikipedia users have created the world’s largest encyclopedia. YouTube Edu and iTunes U have made video and audio lectures by the best professors in the country available for free… (from the article The Virtual University, by Anya Kamenetz - also, don’t miss Anna’s author podcast on WritersCast, here.)
This does seem timely. Most educated people I know are in at least some resentment that they are in their 30’s and are still paying off inflated American-sized college loans - and a lot of them are presently looking for a second, more useful career that has nothing to do with their shiny degree. Yesterday, sending your child to college was a life goal and a source of family pride - the American Dream! - but recently I found myself in conversation with my husband about our daughter (now only three), and the oddest thing happened. We both realized that we really don’t care if she goes to college or not. (We also don’t think that going into debt for life to “own” a home is really that dreamy, though it sure is American!) Anyway, we seem to be much more concerned with our daughter’s overall happiness and her development of practical skills. Will her career keep her employed even in a bad economy? How can we keep her from being saddled with overwhelming stomach-churning debt for most of her life? So then, a literature degree from Bennington College and a big-ass load of debt dumped on her head at 22 isn’t really what I am wishing for her - that’s my life, and I don’t want it to be hers. Send the kid to plumber’s school, get her trained for a ballet company, learn her how to frame art or prescribe eyeglasses, you get what I mean. I sense a paradigm shift. And I like it.
Speaking of digital stuff, etc., here’s Mark Morford’s review of the iPad, complete with a little smack-talk about the Kindle.
Jul
8
“The Poetry Revolution is Now”
July 8, 2010 | Leave a Comment
“The Poetry Revolution is Now”
Those are words I heard spoken on NPR this morning as I was driving my daughter to preschool. And I agree, although I have no idea by what dark magic poetry manages to remain alive. So many people would love to see it dead on the curb, a victim of multiple hit and runs. Yet there it was, wiggling and whispering, screaming and looming, some very nice poetry being read on the radio, at commuting hour no less, by poets whose work is actually published on real paper inside books. One such poet is Rebecca Foust, author of “All That Gorgeous, Pitiless Song and God, Seed” published by Many Mountains Moving. Thank you oh lords and lordesses of the written word for allowing to exist small poetry friendly presses such as Many Mountains Moving. Because of these brave and no doubt penniless entitites, poetry continues to cling to life like a stubborn barnacle.
Even though there are other avenues these days for spreading a poetry meme, such as the Direct Message with a link to a poem that I received this morning from a poet slinging her wares in the tweetscape (props to her for being tenacious), the printed page is where poems live well, like plump little goldfish in aerated tanks with nice clean glass. Feel free to disagree with me, comments welcome, but poetry looks and sounds its best when it’s on paper. This is why, when I write poetry on my laptop (which I do now because, well, I work on my laptop and poetry is a great procrastination tool), I tend to print poems out on paper in order to edit them via ink pen, and then to read them aloud to myself. To me, this particular type of word sculpture belongs in tangible space, constructed from molecules, not just photons, and then sometimes read aloud by voices at a good pace.
A poem of Foust’s from her website:
(Maybe you’ll print it out? It’s worth the sheet of paper, really, just to hold it in your hand as you read it…and maybe you will read it again a little later, when you find the paper has been left on the kitchen table, and you’ll find something new in it.)
Sorry that my boy birthed himself
too early, took up so much room
in your prenatal nursery
with his two pounds, two ounces
and did not oblige your nurses
with easy veins.
Sorry we were such pains in your ass
asking you to answer our night calls like that,
and that he did everything so backwards:
lost weight, gained fluid
blew up like a human balloon
then shriveled.
Sorry about how he defied your prognoses,
skyrocketed premiums, weighted the costs
in your cost-benefit analyses,
skewed bell-curve predictions
into one long, straight line;
sorry he took so much of your time
being so determined to live. He spent
today saving hopeless-case nymph moths
trapped in the porchlight, one matrix-dot
at a time, and now he’s asleep; blue wingbeat
pulse fluttering his left temple—there,
there again. Just like it did then.
by Rebecca Foust
Jul
1
Ephemera is transitory written and printed matter not intended to be retained or preserved
July 1, 2010 | Leave a Comment
[Ephemera is transitory written and printed matter not intended to be retained or preserved…]
Need to jump start your muse? Have a hankering for some bright ideas? Need some fuel to spark your creativity drive? It’s summer now and high time we sit on a lounge chair by the pool with our notebooks (or iPads, scratchpads, legal pads, etc.) coming up with great lines for our novel while everyone else is swimming. Here are a few links to ignite things for you:
The Image Dive (The Rumpus)
Author Tao Lin’s Blog
Tabloid Mags: Low-Culture Musings for a Technicolor World
If you’re reading this, why not share your own muse-laden spaces? Send a trackback to this blog and leave a comment below so we can share the inspiration.