When recent doesn’t mean recent

I appreciate that maintaining websites isn’t necessarily a priority when it involves slow-moving information, but I was bemused when I read this British Council Contemporary Author page on Lesley Glaister. Here’s the second half of the second paragraph:

Her most recent novel is Now You See Me (2001), the story of the unlikely relationship between Lamb, a former patient in a psychiatric ward, and Doggo, a fugitive on the run from the police. Her latest novel is As Far as You Can Go (2004), a psychological drama, in which a young couple, Graham and Cassie, travel to a remote part of Australia to take up a caretaking job, only to be drawn into the dark secrets of their mysterious employers. Her latest novel is Nina Todd Has Gone (2007).

Mentally, I’m seeing a chain of Post-It notes….

Editing and publicizing: part of the writing process?

Bookslut (all hail) posted a link to an interview with Helen DeWitt, who’s selling her most recent book in e-form through her own website.

The problem is, though, that seeing a book into print takes up a lot of time and energy that could be spent writing other books. Normally an advance gives one something to live on while one writes the next book; if one doesn’t have that, one is using up one’s own money, that could otherwise be used to buy time to finish a new book, to see one already written into print.

What’s confusing me here is the perspective. If we’re looking book-by-book, then yes, book B is going to take longer if you have to edit and publicize book A. (See Bookends’ post about not futzing and getting on with the next book, by the way. Very useful.)

But in order to sell book A and build your career, surely you have to take the time to edit it – sometimes drastically – and go through all your proofs to make sure no typos slipped in, and make sure your copyeditor hasn’t boofed up, and do publicity-related stuff. Otherwise, the audience for book B isn’t going to be much bigger than that for book A, and if book A isn’t edited well you might lose otherwise loyal readers.

Also, without an advance, most of us only have ‘our own money’ from non-writing jobs. And those take up an annoying amount of time, don’t you think? (I just got a call from my temp agency this morning, as it happens.) But if book A sells, then in a perfect world you not only have your advance – possibly a bigger one, since the sales numbers are increasing – but, if you get really lucky, royalties.

We don’t live in the best of all possible worlds, of course, and I know more than one author who’s gone the e-publishing route in large part because of frustration at traditional publishing channels. But if my book needs editing – which means, suggested edits that I believe will help improve the book (as opposed to ‘rewrite it in the way someone else would prefer to see the story’) – then that’s not only going to improve book A, but improve books B and beyond.

And for me, that’s time and energy worth spending.

[ETA: Helen DeWitt left a comment which clarifies what she meant when she discussed advances.]

Blurb blurb blurb

One of those words that very easily looks All Wrong if you type it too many times.

Anyway, the New York Times Book Review has an article on book blurbs – which is interesting, though it must have been filed a couple of weeks ago, because there’s no sign of the Sherry Jones situation (which could headline a section on ‘blurb horror stories’).

Speaking of that situation, it’s gotten me more hits over the last two days than anything I’ve written since I started blogging. Hello new readers! Hope you find the blog interesting.

Plagiarism or homage?

Obviously, there are some forms of plagiarism that are 100% Bad and Wrong. For instance: directly lifting someone else’s writing, smacking it into your own, and whistling innocently. Or taking an essay out of the communal printer and handing it in under your name. Both of these examples (and many, many more) work on the assumption that it’s okay to commit outright theft.

But things get murkier when there is creativity involved. If I deliberately include a phrase from another writer, but I intend it to be there and am cheerfully willing to admit that I borrowed it and it’s an homage to their work which I have always admired, that’s different. And then we get to sound all literary by tossing around terms like ‘intertextuality’ (here, let me save you the trouble of typing it in yourself).

What if it’s even more complex than that? What if, say, two writers shack up together for a time and one of them writes something and claims the other one ’sucked, bled, squeezed, plucked, picked, grabbed, dipped, sliced, carved, lifted the body of my work’? But the other one (or, rather, the head of his fan club) claims it was an homage and anyway he’d been using those themes for a while already?

Meet Robert Graves and Laura Riding Jackson.

I’ll be interested to read Dr Mark Jacobs’s book; this article doesn’t give enough evidence for me to decide one way or another. It will also be another interesting example of gender relations within literature. For all I know, Jackson may have been the better poet.

Sorry, no conclusions or great thoughts here. As you were.

Libraries and black holes and books, oh my

The Chicago Sun-Times says ’squee!’ about the Chicago Public Library’s new online thingie. One of the advantages to this, according to the CST?: no more ‘hefty fines’!

Hefty? Dudes, please. CPL library fines for anything other than DVDs and museum passports are – hang on, this is going to shock you – ten cents a day. Yep, one measly dime. Even if you forget to renew for an entire week, that’s still barely the price of a Hershey bar. Me, I consider library fines a donation to the library (and a wake-up call to start marking my day planner with the next batch’s due dates). They let me take books home and don’t charge me for them! I think I can give them a few dimes.

Meanwhile, Alison Bechdel’s lament for the lack of time in which to perform fun reading really spoke to me. Yes, I was the geeky kid reading at a fifth-grade level in kindergarten; yes, my dad had to persuade me to stop rereading old favorites. (One of the ways he did this was to hand me a copy of the Complete Sherlock Holmes and say, ‘read this.’ Which I did – all 4 novels and 56 stories. Good thing Dad liked Conan Doyle himself, because I spent the next five years dragging him to local Sherlockian meetings.)

I do still read for fun – but I personally find a book list helpful. It keeps me from forgetting books I want to read but can’t because a) I am overloaded with reading material at the moment or b) the library doesn’t have them yet (see ‘books for free’ supra) or c) it only exists in the Library of Congress so I have to wait until my next trip to Washington DC. (Which is next month. Yes, I will be spending plenty of time in the Thomas Jefferson Building.)

And, finally, your lost e-mails go into black holes. Now you know.

Computer-related links (and one book)

Michael Agger at Slate questions how we read online. I definitely structure my blog entries differently – shorter paragraphs, mainly – and I have always adhered to the ‘avoid MySpace’ philosophy, but I tend not to use bold that often. Maybe I should.

I did once meet someone who thought that perhaps humans were going to adapt to read things that were written on vertical surfaces, rather than horizontal ones, but I think that’s stretching it.

As for blogs not having sustainable value – well, I do this primarily for my own amusement, and most of my hits are a) a few friends who regularly read this or b) random web searches.

Meanwhile, Nicholas Carr at the Atlantic wonders whether Google is making us stupid, but I didn’t read it ’cause he used long paragraphs and no bolded words. *grin*

Oh, and a book – namely, Passing the Word: Writers on their Mentors, edited by Jeffrey Skinner and Lee Martin. The book is a hybrid in that it’s partly a series of essays by writers talking about their mentors, and partly examples of their writing. I’m not sure that worked for me, because while it was interesting to see the writing if it had been mentioned in the essay (or was about the mentor), in other cases, random pieces of writing didn’t seem to have much relationship to anything else.

But I very much appreciated the advice given by John L’Heureux, in Erin McGraw’s essay ‘Complicate. Simplify.’ As she puts it:

“Every scene needs to build, to move the action forward,” he said, and then added advice he often gave in class: “Complicate the motive. Simplify the action.”

I suspect my actions are pretty simple already (and not always in a good way), but that first bit really made me want to reread my manuscript and see how I can add depth.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, McGraw’s story was my favorite piece in the collection.

Link soup for writers

Too much work – both the writing kind and, alas, the ‘keeping-body-and-soul-together’ 9-to-5 slog – to think of anything interesting, so have some links.

Celebs who write children’s books. No analysis here, just a list. Are any of these books any good? Any readers who have children who wish to be guinea pigs? Let me know in a comment.

Alanis Morissette’s writing is apparently an outlet for her anger. Um, and ‘You Oughta Know’ was a tender reminiscence?

One of those stories about a writer who didn’t have to query 1000000 agents before getting signed. But Stephanie Kuehnert only had to give pages to one, so that frees up the other 999999 for the rest of us. (Why the story’s lead talks about publishers, I don’t know.) Why isn’t the agent named, I wonder? The Caren Johnson Literary Agency sounds perfectly respectable.

And, finally, lots of expensive computer programs that claim to help you write your novel more easily. Look, I’m just happy that I don’t have to squint at the mistyped ‘teh’ while dabbing at it with a Liquid Paper brush. I think the brand name ‘StoryMill’ says it all.

The new mental hospitals?

From Sally: Hanif Kureishi at the Hay festival called creative writing courses (at the university level) ‘the new mental hospitals.’

Leaving aside the fact that he’s extrapolating from one event, or maybe a few (the Virginia Tech killer had been in a creative writing class but I can’t think of other examples), I’m not really sure what his point is. I knew of Rhodes Scholars who were certified as insane, but that doesn’t mean the entire institution is a haven for the mentally unwell. So is he going back to the old ‘creativity connected to madness’ issue – which has been rehashed as much as ‘do creative writing degrees actually teach you anything’?

I completely understand his point about giving all his students the same grade. One professor I worked with made his undergraduate class pass/fail, partly in an attempt to dissuade students from clawing each other’s work to shreds because they thought that was the way to get a better grade. I just wonder what happens when his students compare notes in the pub and realize they all got a 71% (which in Britain is an A – to translate, shift the American grading scale down 25-30 points).

I spent a year in an MFA program and left for reasons mostly unconnected to the program itself – namely, I got a better offer from somewhere else and the scholarship ran out – but the gains to my writing came almost solely through the individual work I did with the actively-writing teachers, rather than the workshop experience. I still wouldn’t call MFA programs mental hospitals, though, but then, unlike Kureishi, I don’t go to my writing desk and contemplate suicide.

The downside of fame is that everyone wants you to be famous

The Nobel Prize in Literature. The pinnacle of international success. The best thing that could ever happen to a writer. Right?

Doris Lessing disagrees.

Nobel Prize-winning author Doris Lessing has said winning the prestigious award in 2007 had been a “bloody disaster”. The increased media interest in her has meant that writing a full novel was next to impossible, she told Radio 4’s Front Row. Lessing, 88, also said she would probably now be giving up writing novels altogether. [...] Since her Nobel win she has been constantly in demand, she said. “All I do is give interviews and spend time being photographed.”

Admittedly, she also cites her age as contributing to her slowdown, but still, constant media attention is not conducive to sitting alone for long hours, staring at the computer screen.

Also, why the hell are they giving it to her for being an ‘epicist of the female experience’? Why was Saul Bellow allowed to be awarded it for ‘human understanding’? Oh, right, male experiene = universal. Grumble.

Demonstrating that agents are not, in fact, morons (except the ones who reject ME, who obviously are)

I didn’t have a blog when this story broke, but I just found the article and I need something to rant about, so here’s the belated response.

The gist is: this guy submitted the opening chapters of Jane Austen novels to publishers and literary agencies, then decided that no one agreeing to publish/represent the work meant that no one recognized the genius of Jane Austen. Here’s a pdf of an article in Regency News. The guy claims that of 15 returned submissions, only one – Alex Bowler, an assistant editor at Jonathan Cape (guy deserves a mention by name) – wrote back with an acknowledgement that the author might want to revise and maybe this time check his copy of P&P.

All the rest? They failed to recognize genius! Alas, poor Jane!!1!1!

Except…no. There’s an incredibly big logical fallacy here. Like, gaping hole-sized. Go ahead and read the article and see if you can figure it out for yourself. I’ll wait.

*plays hold music*

Back? You found it? Congratulations!

Anyway, so, Thundercat actually did catch a mouse the other day, and I texted a friend to say that Minnie had phoned looking for her husband, but –

Oh.

Here’s the thing. Agents are smart. They are also busy. Check out any of the agent websites listed in my sidebar (under ‘Nuts, Bolts, and Agents’) and have a scroll through their entries. Most if not all will indicate every so often just how many queries stream in through the inbox and the mailbox. HUNDREDS AND THOUSANDS. Only a tiny percentage will even be followed up to the tune of partials, much less fulls and representation. Therefore, most agents (or editors, who are also smart and busy) who recognize plagiarism are not going to send you an e-mail saying that ‘gosh, this is totally the opening of a Jane Austen novel’ because they do not have the time to waste on you.

Also, let’s say that you are not some snarky guy trying to see how Jane Austen would have fared in today’s publishing climate – leaving aside any sense of historical context, of course – and decides as a result (I extrapolate the next bit from the ‘my unpublished novel was not recognized for its genius, woe’ aspect) that you are going to be a champion for downtrodden, unpublished authors and prove that the publishing industry is dumb/a closed market/only likes you if you’re in the in crowd etc.

Alternately, let’s say that you are genuinely stupid, or clueless, or Cassie Edwards, and you actually in all seriousness type up the first pages of Mansfield Park and submit them.

What do you expect an agent to do about it? TELL you that you’re stupid/clueless/Cassie Edwards? See the point above about agents being busy people, and also smart. Someone so idiotic to try and pass off great literature as their own is not going to be a person they want to open a dialogue with. What they want is to ensure that you will never, ever contact them again, whether with a barrage of follow-up e-mails or a poisoned cake.

Also, please note that many publishing houses have Unpaid Interns ™, and I’d guess that a lot of those interns have degrees in English Literature, and those interns are the ones making some initial passes through the manuscripts. If THEY can’t recognize Austen they have to give their BAs back.

Does this mean that every one of those 15 responses did, in fact, recognize that ‘Alison Laydee’ was someone either really messed up, or trying to mess with them? No, that sadly can’t be proved.

What this does prove is that claims that ‘only one person recognised the material for what it was – classic literature written by one of the greatest writers that has ever lived’ and that ‘it seems a fair assumption that if Jane Austen’s reputation had not already been secure, she would have struggled even to find an agent to represent her, let alone have any of her novels published’ are hogwash.

Hats off to Alex Bowler, though, for being willing to write back.

And a search turns up a very sensible Grauniad response.