I’ll be raising a glass of Jesus Juice tonight. L.A. Times is reporting that Michael Jackson is dead at the ago of 50.
He had charisma. In the early part of his career, he made compelling, exciting pop music. Then he turned into a complete wreck.
I’m not sorry he’s gone. Honestly, I’m a little glad. It’s an ugly thing to say, but there it is.
Boring! What you need is an action scene! a webcomic about writing. :)
Why I read Savage Love. (Link NSFW, in case you didn’t realize. Check out the first letter). It’s not for the advice which is sometimes so-so but is absolutely perfect for that letter. It’s because those letters are a window into people’s private lives that I would never see otherwise–especially the crazy, twisted thought processes they go through.
Mother fails to recover custody of her children when she showed up for a psych evaluation with 13 beers in her. Apparently, the psychologist did not put much weight behind her claim that it was no big deal since she could “drink like a fish” and therefore wasn’t drunk.
Book Marketing 101: an introduction by Andrew Wheeler. A book marketer talks about his trade. It’s the first in a series, and I plan to follow them closely.
Huh. I appear to have left out the “stuff.”
Now I have to buy myself a duck-handled umbrella!
This absolutely fantastic piece of kid lit history courtesy of bookslut.
My self-directed training to learn to be insufferably condescending continues today, and the variety of texts to choose from is astounding. Thank you, internet!
For instance: A woman who has apparently never heard of slash fiction writes an article about m/m romance novels targeted at women readers. I knew I was sitting at the feet of a master when the lede began “The romance novel, a static and predictable genre…” but it was the quote in the subject header above that really taught me the most.
I must say that I share Ms. Harris’s bemusment over the appeal of this subgenre. As a hetero male with an internet connection, I had no idea a person could thrill to same-sex carnal urges of their opposite gender. How baffling!
I don’t talk very much about writing here, except to whine about how hard Man Bites World is kicking my ass, but I’m going to make an exception, considering.
There is certainly more than one way to succeed as a writer. You can start early or late in life. You can hit the best seller list with your first attempt, or struggle for years to find a groove. Whatever.
But for every way there is to succeed, there are a thousand more ways to fail. You can never start, never finish, never revise, never submit. You can act like a crazy person on your blog, or send query letters that give off such a creepy vibe that the paper might as well have a watermark that reads “Stalker.”
Or you can be convinced that your setbacks are someone else’s fault.
You can see this attitude at various places around the web, especially someplace like the comments at Writer, Rejected (no link, sorry–life’s too short). Other message boards and blogs do their best to squelch this stuff as soon as it pops up, but there’s just no killing it.
I decided a long time ago that I would never blame a rejection on anyone but myself. If my query was dinged, it was because I needed a stronger query. Never because the rejecter was having a bad day, or was a fool who couldn’t recognize my genius, or could recognize quality but only wanted something that would be a bestseller.
That attitude is poison. I wanted to be published, and I wanted readers. Blaming other people for my rejections was never going to get me on the bookshelf, because the only thing I could change was myself.
So I pretended that hard work was the only thing that mattered. I know it’s not really true–there’s also luck, and the changing markets, and talent–but hard work is the the only thing I can actually control. I was determined to improve, and the only way to do that was to find fault with myself.
So my book will be coming out in a little more than three months. If it flops, I will not be blaming readers. I will not be blaming cover art, or publicity, or the recession, or another writer who released a new book at the same time. As far as I’m concerned, the real cause will be that I didn’t write a book readers wanted to recommend to their friends.
If the book does not flop? If it’s a success? Still, I will be looking for flaws in my work. I’ll be working hard to get better, and any setbacks I face will have one remedy: the book I’m currently writing. This is a promise I make to myself. It’s not for anyone else, just me, because anyone, at any time, can find themselves stranded and struggling. And when that happens, an egotistical conviction that my problems are caused by other people will ruin me.
(Taken at the Barnes & Noble)
Please respond appropriately.
Back in April, I posted about and linked to Mary W. Walters, the writer who couldn’t find an agent and considered them all horse-riding snakes who were ruining publishing for everyone else.
Well, last night I upgraded to WordPress 2.8, and it promptly pinged her website. She posted in the comments, putting up her query pitch and first chapter for my comments.
Maybe it was the shock of seeing an actual comment on my website (as opposed to my LJ), but I thought I’d give it a swing.
I don’t write this note because I want folks to rush over and give her advice. She asked me, specifically, and while I suspect it was as much of a “let’s see what you’ve got” request as “how could this be better” I hope I was useful. If you want to post a comment disagreeing with something I said, that’s great (in fact, I really really want people to disagree with me–if we can be polite to each other, I may learn a little something). But please don’t offer a crit unless the author specifically requests one.
No, I write this note because damn, that took a long time, and I didn’t even clean up the crit after I wrote it. I keep forgetting how much energy those take. I don’t think I’m going to be doing a lot of that in the future.
“Creative-writing programs are designed on the theory that students who have never published a poem can teach other students who have never published a poem how to write a publishable poem. The fruit of the theory is the writing workshop, a combination of ritual scarring and twelve-on-one group therapy where aspiring writers offer their views of the efforts of other aspiring writers.”
and
“The workshop is a process, an unscripted performance space, a regime for forcing people to do two things that are fundamentally contrary to human nature: actually write stuff (as opposed to planning to write stuff very, very soon), and then sit there while strangers tear it apart. There is one person in the room, the instructor, who has (usually) published a poem. But workshop protocol requires the instructor to shepherd the discussion, not to lead it…”
both from a New Yorker piece by Louis Menand. I wish I had time to read the whole thing.
For fuck’s sake, people. I’m supposed to be working on my book right now, but Qwest made it super easy to log on to the Internet from Starbucks, so I did and I read my f-list and now I’m pissed off.
Via Making Light.
Talking Points Memo lays it out.
You can follow the link to the Making Light post if you want a summary, but here’s an writeup that’s even more brief: Tom Tancredo has recently called Sonia Sotomayor a racist, and said she belonged to a “Latino KKK”. One of Tom Tancredo’s people, Marcus Epstein, the executive director of Team America PAC (“A Political Action Committee Dedicated to Securing Our Nation’s Border”), was drunk on the street and karate-chopped a passing black woman on the head and called her a nigger. This isn’t just an accusation; Epstein has already plead guilty to the charge.
If you think that would prompt Tancredo to fire him, well, aren’t you adorable. In fact, the current plan is that he’s going to continue running Tancredo’s PAC until he leaves for law school in the fall.
Bay Buchanan has written an essay defending the man. No, I’m not going to link to it, but you can find it easily enough at one of the links above. In her essay, Buchanan describes Epstein’s battle with alcohol and depression, and I wish him the best in that, once he’s paid his debt for his crime.
But then she calls the media attention he’s received a lynching.
For Christ’s sake, people, “People are saying mean things about me on the internet” is not the same as being dragged out of your bed at night, hanged and set on fire.
I just… I don’t understand how people could be so narcissistic and so ignorant of history. The whole thing makes me sick.
Yeah, I’ll be jumping right back into my book now, no freaking problem.
NY Times columnist and Pulitzer-winning economist Paul Krugman praises Charles Stross’s novels.
I hope this brings him a couple thousand new readers.