Isabel Says "Think Teaching, Young Writer"

Author Joe Quirk's first book tour intersected with Isabel Allende's book tour, where she gave him some interesting advice-

Five minutes before we were due to go on the air, the fawners stepped away to confer.

Ms. Allende seized me by the arm and pulled me into a corner. She spun me around, leaned close, and whispered with desperate urgency as if this was Invasion of the Body Snatchers and we were the only two real humans left alive. I paraphrase her speech from memory:

"You will not make a living, young man."

"I beg your pardon?"

"Nothing beats the feeling of your first novel getting so much attention, but get over it, starting now. You have to start thinking about how to use this. Nobody makes a living from royalties. It's not possible. It's rigged against you. You have to think of your book as a business card you hand to people who will pay you what you're worth. You have to think about speaking tours. You have to think about teaching positions. Get a list of universities, and start calling them now, because your publicist won't. Do you hear me? You have to be savvy. You have to hustle, because you will go under if you rely on book writing. I've seen it happen to talented writers over and over. You can't afford a house, you can't support your spouse, you spent too much of your advance. You seem like a nice young man. I don't want to see it happen to you. Are you listening to me? Do you understand?"

Here's what I didn't say, but thought:

"Excuse me, aren't you ... Isabel Allende? International bestseller? New book every year translated into 18 languages? Hellooooo! Earth to Isabel! You're a megastar! You obviously maintain a much higher standard of living than me, lady, because up until a couple months ago I was a part-time manny. I should have your problems!"


What I really said was: "Yes, ma'am."

Someone poked their head in the room and said, "Ms. Allende, you're on."

"We'll talk later," she said.

We never did.


Click here for the rest of the article.

Good stuff.

Beware The Ides Of Roman Literature

The New York Times has an interesting essay by Mary Beard, comparing the authors of Rome with modern authors. Amazingly, in a sense, very little has changed.

Even though they didn't have printing presses and they had to use slaves to manually copy text from one scroll to another, other traditions from that era have lived on.

All the same, there’s a lot in the Roman literary world that seems quite familiar two millenniums later: money-­making booksellers, exploited and impoverished authors, celebrity book launches and career-making prizes.

...most Roman writers knew that the profits of their writing ended up in the pockets of the booksellers, who often combined retail trade with a copying business — and so were, in effect, publishers and distributors too. At best, the author received only a lump sum from the seller for the rights to copy his work (though once the text was “out,” there was no way of stopping pirated copies).

Good gravy, since the Normans had yet to come into existence, I guess you wouldn't have had an author with the name "Nora Roberts" back then. Correction, "Norma was a druidess during the Roman occupation of England and "Norma" is not the feminine version of "Norman." So what would that be, "Nora Roberticus?" Or would it that be "Nora Rigoberto?"

Note that here we go again with adventures in reading and punctuation-

The books they read were not “books” in our sense but, at least up to the second century, “book rolls” — long strips of papyrus, rolled up on two wooden rods at either end. To read the work in question, you unrolled the papyrus from the left-hand rod, onto the right, leaving a “page” stretched between the two. It was considered the height of bad manners to leave the text on the right- hand rod when you had finished reading, so that the next reader had to rewind back to the beginning to find the title page. Bad manners — but a common fault, no doubt. Some scribes helpfully repeated the title of the book at the very end, with just this problem in mind.

These cumbersome rolls made reading a very different experience than it is with the modern book. Skimming, for example, was much more difficult, as was looking back a few pages to check out that name you had forgotten (as it is on Kindle). Not to mention the fact that at some periods of Roman history, it was the fashion to copy out the text with no breaks between the words, but as a river of letters. In comparison, deciphering the most challenging postmodern text (or “Finnegans Wake,” for that matter) looks easy.

(insert inappropriate joke about a "period" of your choice, right here). The rest of Mary Beard's essay is in its entirety right here.

Rewrite, Regroup, Reuse

There is no crying in writing...

...Ahem, I said, "there is no crying in writing."

So, I have no choice but to harden my exterior...

...maybe I'll torch the old story.

Probably not, I'm happy with the way it is.

That which does not kill us, makes for better stories and thus, better writers.

Hey, what the hell did I just say??? There is no crying in writing, cowboy up!

Have You Ever Given Up On Submitting Stories To A Site?

I do believe that I didn't receive a rejection letter with my first submission to their site. I know they definitely sent me one in response to my second submission and they were polite. They were were also rather prompt.

With the rejection of my third submission, they were prompt and polite. "It's not quite what we're looking for, but please keep trying."

Well stories #4 and #5 didn't make the grade either. Part of story #4's title even got a mention by the editor and she praised the concept. I'm not mad and it's not just because they've been so unfailingly polite...it's not them, it's me.

Honest.

They still haven't found what they're looking for, Bono, though I do know it's not my writing.

My stories? They leave the toilet seat up.

My stories? They snore like a chainsaw revving up inside an echo chamber.

My stories tell inapporpriate jokes at company picnics, in front of company, and in front of the family.

My stories display PDA at the worst times as well. Maybe, you know, it would be better if, uh, they started seeing other authors...I don't know.

I do know that I'm not going to stand outside their window in the rain, holding a boom box playing Peter Gabriel's "In Your Eyes." I'm not going to waste a fortune in flowers and candy. I...I'm not crying, I just have something in my eye...it's the wind, honest. I know all the windows are shut, but it's the wind, I tell you!

Let's face it, they are just not that into my writing.


So enough about my writing, how about you? Have you ever given up on submitting stories to a site?

The Tale Of The Word Pad Thief...

...or doing my own crossword puzzle, the hard way.


I have a laptop, though since the slot for my wireless card broke, I haven't used it much. I don't bring it to work as of late because of security issues there and it doesn't have Microsoft Word, which is my preferred means of writing (it has a bare bones version of Works).

At any rate, I write by hand on occasion, though I write with difficulty. I learned how to use chopsticks before I learned how to write, so I hold my pen like this...



...and that is the chicken scratch that comes out. It's usually not as neat as this either, as my hand has a tendency to cramp up after a few paragraphs.

So my main M.O. is to use a computer at work that has Word Pad only, but Word Pad is all I need to get a basic draft down. If right now you thinking "why doesn't he just use load Word on to his laptop?"

You're using logic.

Stop that this instant.

I'm a writer and am prone to quirks, don't ya know?

So I use Word Pad to type it up during lunch and then I have to get the hell out of there, because then I would have to explain why I'm using the computer. Note, there is no Internet on that connection, just an Intranet if you want to check your pay stub, so it would be safe to assume that I'm not surfing for p*rn.

Only three people from work know that I write and about five people knew that I used to screen write. The point being it's a big secret as to just what I'm up to and if you understand the poisoned culture in my workplace, you'd realize that it does me no good to tell anyone just what I'm up to.

Last week I had a pretty good thing going and I was on a roll. I was over the moon as I went to print it and I was greeted with this...

What...the...f*ck? The worst of it was the way my writing meter times out, the middle is the part of the sentence that I cannot remember for the life of me. So I had to fill in the blanks so to speak, or imagine an esoteric writing crossword puzzle. Now mind you, I obviously know where the story was going, but my problem was getting each and every word right...not so easy.

BTW, the damn printer did it again two days later, the rat bastard machine.

"Dispatched"

Let's change things up here and try something new. I have this story that has literally been sitting in this blog's draft folder for over a year and a half. It's been sitting there so long in fact that I can't really remember just where I was going with this, other than the near destruction of a small Illinois town and that the protagonist was to be a police-dispatcher.

At any rate, take a gander at the thing and give me an idea somewhere just this side of absurd, as to where you think this thing should go. Hell, if you feel like it, grab the reins yourself and turn this thing into a piece of flash fiction-

"Dispatched"

Some say it takes a village to raise a child and in the case of Lodzes, it took the whole village getting burned down and built back up again. The family surname, Lodz is pronounced 'Lüj and it almost sounds like the downhill sled.

Yet as soon as the first Lodzes arrived in Bluff Creek, Illinois back in 1875, they were called Loads and they lived up to the name, only it was the village that left carrying the burden. They didn't take kindly to compliments and they didn't handle their liquor well. As witnessed in 1876 when during a celebration of America's centennial, just two small cups of potato vodka caused Danuta Lodz to mistake a compliment pertaining to her lips for something else altogether. She flung a kerosene lamp at her would-be paramour and the rest was infamy.

In the space of the next thirteen years, the town was built up and burned down again...twice. Neither times were the fault of the Lodzes. The first fire was actually the fault of a carpenter from Wisconsin that fell asleep while smoking and the second was most likely sparked by grain dust. Yet, with the Great Fire of Chicago so fresh in every one's minds, they became the new "O'Learys."

The town was virtually inhospitable to them and the then patriarch, Aleksy, wanted to move the family out, right then, and there. Knowing that they were pariahs, Aleksy knew that no one would offer the family a fair share for the property in town that they owned, nor would they get a decent deal for the family farm. Aleksy and the family had no choice but to tough it out.

Eventually the Lodzes convinced the Janiaks, a small merchant family from Aurora, to set up a general store. This was in response to the Bluff Creek retailers, whom began to charge an exorbitant rate for the most basic stuffs, in an effort to drive the Lodzes away.

Here it was, a new century around the corner and the town was reverting to feudal states. The Poles who didn't want to be associated the Lodz-Janiak faction, bonded with the Germans and Russians as if the three countries were somehow always best of friends. The Lodz-Janiak faction had taken up a small, but equal part of the town and the irony was not lost on the town's lone Black family who had just fled Louisiana over discrimination and Jim Crow laws, for Bluff Creek.

The Janiaks are where I come in. Shunned by Bluff Creek and all the surrounding towns for doing business with the Lodzes, we bonded with and eventually married into that family. A decade later during the waning days of "the war to end all wars" that decimated two-thirds of the town's male population, all was forgiven...by most. My great-great grandfather Filip Janiak married Danuta Lodz's granddaughter, Karol and this new union moved to the outskirts of town.

Karol's mother felt ashamed for what happened and she raised Karol to believe that the Lodz family name was a curse. Filip felt the same, so their offspring and their following generations were polite strangers to the Lodz-Janiak clan. They worshipped together, celebrated a Christmas or Thanksgiving here or there, but with all the warmth and conviction of a neighbor that you visit on occasion...

The Screenwriter Always Rings Twice

You can't trust writers. Anything you say or do is fair game to us. We dress you up in a different gown and use your words and your hair and your eyes and steal your soul.

from "Robbie's Wife" by Russell Hill.

"Robbie's Wife" was a good read, a bit of James M. Cain goes to England if you will, and I mean that in the best possible sense. And while that quote is a little too on the nose and that character literally writes down each and everything that he experiences, it made sense within the plot.

Of course I can't imagine an actual screenwriter (the protagonist's profession) this side of Joe Ezterhas at his most self-indulgent, writing every other thing down in an almost verbatim fashion. So trust me when I say that unlike the police, I will not hold everything you say against you...

...unless it's juicy enough. Then, I'm at least going to change your gender and ethnic origin.

On Wiki-tangents And "Monkey Island"

The beauty of the Internet is that all this information is available to anywhere you have a connection, any time of the day that you need it. The bad part of it is the dilettante aspect where you retrieve just the information you need and only the information that you need, as well as wiki-tangents (Wikipedia + tangents = wiki-tangents).

You know where you study one subject and you click a link to another, and by the end of it, you need to click your Internet history to find out just exactly what it was that you were originally searching for? Yeah, that writing black hole. As an example, I have a good story all written up and the only problem with it is that it doesn't have a middle. It literally has a few sentence fragments and nothing more. So I have to fill those sentences in, while staying clear of the borders of Anachronism Land.

The first wiki-tangent yielded actual useful information, though I wasted a good amount of time because a video of the shell that was Bonnie and Clyde's death car, wouldn't load for shit with my dial-up. Ehi, I had to surrender. The second thing that amazed me was when I was researching orange groves in the San Fernando Valley and I found out about a place back in the day called "Monkey Island." Try to put something up that abysmal today and the PETA people will hound you to the ends of the Earth...where they will torture by feeding you a tofu effigy of yourself and singing really crappy folk songs off-key.

If you click the link, please scroll up and down. You'll find other quotes about the San Fernando Valley by Michael Connelly, Raymond Chandler, Robert Redford, and many others. Now, if only I can figure just what exactly is my fascination with Mulholland Drive, despite never having drove or set foot on it, then I can get some sleep.

There May Be Text On My Phone, But I'm Not Texting

More often than usual at work, I find myself with my cell phone open and right thumb getting a strenuous workout. My coworkers and any strangers who happen by, believe that I am texting to-

A) A friend.
B) The Missus.
C) A mistress.

Before you think that as a writer, I am projecting these thoughts on to them, note that I've heard remarks and wisecracks mentioning just these possibilities. To be honest though, the actual answer is none of the above. I am typing in (thumbing in?) plot points, lines, poems, gags, and whatever else comes to me at that particular moment.

Now mind you, I only log in a few notes here and there. I've never done more than a page or two of actual content, tops. The screen size and 3,000 character limit per "note" tends to hamper any greater aspirations of writing a cell phone novel (keitai shosetsu), like they do in Japan.

Check out the International Herald Tribune's article on the proliferation of these novels and their perceived effect on Japanese culture.

We don't have keitai shosetsu over here and while it has done over $82 million a year in Japan, I'm sure that American publishers have looked into it and rejected it as a viable form for here.

What we do have is Crime Wav.

Seth Harwood came up with the idea of podcasting crime fiction. He teamed up with Aldo Calcagno and Jason Andrews to bring fine crime fiction to your iPod, MP3 player or computer. Next time, instead of having your brain boil over in traffic, on the subway or in what seems like a never ending line...you could be listening to neo-noir.

They even managed to kick off the very first installment with "Must Bite" by Vicki Hendricks, author of the 2008 Edgar Award Nominee "Cruel Poetry."