25th October 2013
One thing I am learning about posting blogs is that you should be very careful with titles. A blog I posted a few weeks ago entitled, "Literary Bleeding Hearts," apparently created a big stir within the vampire community and I was getting all kinds of hits from their websites. They must have been very disappointed to find out I was simply waxing lyrical about metaphorical blood from the existential wounds of writers. A more recent post called "Pretty Faces," was inundated by porn sites, and in that case I was actually happy to have wasted their time, because all I was going on about was how little writers make in general and even in Hollywood, because nothing says blockbuster to the moguls in Tinsel Town like a pretty face. From now on I will try to have blog titles with less flair, and then maybe I will go back to the small but steady stream of readers who are actually in tune with the theme of this blog, which is how, from the author's point of view, a book gets from here to over there in the publishing houses and onto the shelves. It is not intended to be a how-to, because I have been pretty unadventurous in the whole scheme, but it is a record of how it happened to me, for what that is worth.
Oh, it's a long and drawn out business.
John Steinbeck (who in case someone hasn't gathered yet, I have a particular fondness for) says it's "a real horse's ass business." It is, and just as when you stand at the back of a horse, you are sometimes marvelling at the grandeur of the beast, sometimes standing down-wind of a lot of hot air and sometimes being outright kicked.
Stephen King in his fantastic little book "On Writing," says, "Writing isn't about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it's about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own as well. It's about getting up, getting well and getting over."
To paraphrase him a little further, it's about getting over yourself. Steinbeck says about writing, "The mountain labors and groans and strains and the tiniest rodent comes out. And the greatest foolishness of all lies in the fact that to do it at all, the writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion, even when he knows it is not true."
Not only that, but the pay is lousy.
People tell me from time to time that they have pre-ordered my book, but there seems no way of telling how sales are doing generally. I have a special "author's portal" into the Simon and Schuster website, but, as my agent tells me, you don't know anything about sales until you get your first paycheck, and that presumably won't be until I have paid off my advance. Wouldn't it be nice to pay off your advance just in pre-sales? The way it goes, I will only make about a dollar per book (more on e-book sales - more, but not a whole lot more, as it should be), so I would have to sell something close to ten thousand books ahead of time to pay off my advance before March of next year.
But, as King says, writing books is not about making money (how can he say that - he's sold so many books he has lost count?) He can say that because there was a time when Stephen King's telephone was cut off because he didn't have enough money to pay the bill, and yet he kept on writing. As in all other areas of achievement, it seems that perseverance is the key factor. To quote Rockefeller, the richest man in history, "I do not think that there is any other quality so essential to success of any kind as the quality of perseverance. It overcomes almost everything, even nature."
That means that talent isn't even key. There is no simple equation between talent and success. Stephen King's first book Carrie was rejected thirty times. JK Rowling's first Harry Potter book was rejected twelve times and then she was told by her publisher to get a day job because there is no money in children's books! Einstein, who didn't speak until he was four and didn't read until he was eleven, was thought by his parents and teachers to be mentally handicapped. Vincent Van Gogh painted eight hundred pieces in his lifetime and sold one - to a friend.
Old Japanese proverb say: Fall down seven times. Get up eight.
That's the story of writing and publishing in a nutshell: Keep getting back up!
Friday, October 25, 2013
Friday, October 18, 2013
One woman. Two worlds. And a love that knows no bounds.
October 18th, 2013
All the buzz this week has been about judging a book by its cover - I got a draft of the close-to-final copy for the back cover in which my story is tailored for the best market. The tagline on the front cover reads: One Woman. Two Worlds. And a Love that Knows no Bounds. I can almost hear the ultra-deep voice-over: In a World where love knows no bounds...
That's how they sell books these days, and I will be very glad if they sell mine in heaps! Selling your soul to the devil be damned - I'm walking with him right into his fiery lair. You want Romance? You got romance - you got a love that knows no bounds, because that, I guess, is what we have to believe in. You got Mary Shelley who kept her husband's heart wrapped in a cloth in the top drawer of her desk (gruesome!) You got WB Yeats pining away most of his life for love of Maude Gonne. You have Robert Browning losing his heart (but not literally this time) to Elizabeth Barrett (even though she looked like a man in drag); you have Abelard for young Heloise, who had him by the goolies until the goolies went missing one night, and then you had a monk pining for a nun. There's Simon De Beauvoir pining for Jean Paul Sartre, a five foot toad with a large cranium (who says size doesn't matter?) but possibly the worst teeth in all of literary history. Love is blind. And so, presumably are most readers readers, who will read anything so long as it has as its theme endless love.
My readers will in large part be female (so I am told repeatedly - well, they make up 62% of fiction readers - 91% of Romance), and I am tempted to call all women out on the need for tales of endless love and order them to stand on their own two feet. Love like this might exist, but it ain't going to make you feel any better about yourself if you don't already. But I like love stories, too, and I sorely miss them when they are absent. I don't care for that celibate protagonist Langdon from Dan Brown's books. I decry gratuitous sex in books, but I keep wanting Langdon to forget himself and run his hand up Sophie Neveu or Vittoria Vetra's leg. It's the mix of spices, isn't it? I don't care for bland saltless food, and no more can I take a depiction of life without sex. It feels limp (so to speak) and lacking somehow. So, I am the perfect author to be writing tales of love that knows no bounds. I suppose even the most vigilant of us are looking for our happy-ever-after. Slap it on the front cover then: this author wants immortal love and she hopes you do, too.
They want a photo of me now, too, for the back cover. I sent one, but it didn't have enough pixies in it. I don't have enough pixies in me, that's for sure, otherwise I would never sink into those morose moments (or longer than moments) that writers are famous for. The question is how glamorous to appear in a back cover photo, how young? It inevitably happens that you go along to a book reading only to find that something like twenty years separates the person in front of you from the one you saw and liked so much on the back cover of their book. But what can you do - we live in a culture of youth, though the youth know nothing, and wisdom is housed in bags of saggy wrinkles. Writers, like everyone else, must be eternally young and ensconced in immortal love. So the pictures aren't exactly telling a lie, but they ain't telling the truth either. I can do nothing about my wrinkles unless I go and have them surgically removed, which would offend my deep literary ethics. Because in books women, even old women, are always beautiful.
All the buzz this week has been about judging a book by its cover - I got a draft of the close-to-final copy for the back cover in which my story is tailored for the best market. The tagline on the front cover reads: One Woman. Two Worlds. And a Love that Knows no Bounds. I can almost hear the ultra-deep voice-over: In a World where love knows no bounds...
That's how they sell books these days, and I will be very glad if they sell mine in heaps! Selling your soul to the devil be damned - I'm walking with him right into his fiery lair. You want Romance? You got romance - you got a love that knows no bounds, because that, I guess, is what we have to believe in. You got Mary Shelley who kept her husband's heart wrapped in a cloth in the top drawer of her desk (gruesome!) You got WB Yeats pining away most of his life for love of Maude Gonne. You have Robert Browning losing his heart (but not literally this time) to Elizabeth Barrett (even though she looked like a man in drag); you have Abelard for young Heloise, who had him by the goolies until the goolies went missing one night, and then you had a monk pining for a nun. There's Simon De Beauvoir pining for Jean Paul Sartre, a five foot toad with a large cranium (who says size doesn't matter?) but possibly the worst teeth in all of literary history. Love is blind. And so, presumably are most readers readers, who will read anything so long as it has as its theme endless love.
My readers will in large part be female (so I am told repeatedly - well, they make up 62% of fiction readers - 91% of Romance), and I am tempted to call all women out on the need for tales of endless love and order them to stand on their own two feet. Love like this might exist, but it ain't going to make you feel any better about yourself if you don't already. But I like love stories, too, and I sorely miss them when they are absent. I don't care for that celibate protagonist Langdon from Dan Brown's books. I decry gratuitous sex in books, but I keep wanting Langdon to forget himself and run his hand up Sophie Neveu or Vittoria Vetra's leg. It's the mix of spices, isn't it? I don't care for bland saltless food, and no more can I take a depiction of life without sex. It feels limp (so to speak) and lacking somehow. So, I am the perfect author to be writing tales of love that knows no bounds. I suppose even the most vigilant of us are looking for our happy-ever-after. Slap it on the front cover then: this author wants immortal love and she hopes you do, too.
They want a photo of me now, too, for the back cover. I sent one, but it didn't have enough pixies in it. I don't have enough pixies in me, that's for sure, otherwise I would never sink into those morose moments (or longer than moments) that writers are famous for. The question is how glamorous to appear in a back cover photo, how young? It inevitably happens that you go along to a book reading only to find that something like twenty years separates the person in front of you from the one you saw and liked so much on the back cover of their book. But what can you do - we live in a culture of youth, though the youth know nothing, and wisdom is housed in bags of saggy wrinkles. Writers, like everyone else, must be eternally young and ensconced in immortal love. So the pictures aren't exactly telling a lie, but they ain't telling the truth either. I can do nothing about my wrinkles unless I go and have them surgically removed, which would offend my deep literary ethics. Because in books women, even old women, are always beautiful.
Friday, October 11, 2013
Pretty Faces
11th October, 2013
Lots of excitement this week! I got back from that dog walk with which I ended last week's blog to find a box of bound galleys of Veil Of Time waiting at my doorstep. I wasn't expecting them, and I haven't got teary yet about the whole publishing deal, but I have to say that as I lifted the first of sixteen of my books out of the cardboard box, my adam's apple did seem all of a sudden awfully large. The book runs to about 395 pages, and seems quite thick, but then the font isn't small. It's a classy looking book, for all that it is not a hardcover, with the stark black background and the scene of the wilds across the naked back of the girl.
There is nothing like holding in your hand the first copy of your book. As long as you are passing computer files back and forth with your agent and then your editor, and even after you have seen a printed copy, the process still feels a bit like one of those polaraoid instant pictures waiting to take shape in your hand. There is something magical about holding any book you are about to read for the first time, like having a ticket to a fantastical destination in your pocket. But it is all the more sweet when you are the creator. It's a moment of feeling like God. Just a moment. Just a nano second.
The bound galley version is what gets sent out to possible reviewers. It was taken from the script before I made the last editing pass (so not much will change.) I have sent a copy off to Anthony Peake in England because of his interest in the connection between epilepsy and time travel (from a theoretical physicist's point of view) and to local writer Scott Lasser (who has four books by Norton to his name.)
I sat across a table with Scott in the Main St. Bakery a couple of days ago, just as twenty years ago we sat across the table from each other in the local writer's group. We had differences in our literary taste back then and still do, but it was a poignant moment that found two would-be writers transported forward twenty years into their active literary careers. He makes money writing for Hollywood these days. He seems a tad jaded by the publishing business, and maybe I'll feel that way, too, after four books. For now, I'm still cheerfully optimistic and that is my prerogative as a bushy-tailed writer pulling her first bound galley out of its casing. At any rate, I handed Scott my book across the table - he looked through it and went "mmm," and "mmm." He said, "Impressive." His last book was titled, "Say Nice Things About Detroit." I asked him to say nice things about me.
My editor, Abby, is busy on the marketing trail selecting would-be reviewers (or "blurbers" as they say in the industry) mainly from the kind of genres that she thinks the audience is most likely to appreciate - mainly romance or historical fiction. I have taken my hands off that particular juggernaut because I don't have a heavy vehicle license and wouldn't know how to drive one anyway. Meanwhile, my agent is busy finding me blurbers from his agency's stable.
I have to say that this is where traditional publishing really comes into its own from a writer's point of view - I wouldn't know where to start if I were at this stage in self-publishing and needed some endorsements. But then I'm not that enterprising. Like Scott, I will undoubtedly get to the point of complaining about the small revenues a writer manages to squeeze out of a book's profits. But is Hollywood any better? It's not, when you think of the salary of those who write film scripts against those who star in them. This is not a culture that honours creative genius like it does a good song and dance routine. Greece had its sportsmen and we have our pretty faces. Go put on your make-up. Go figure.
Lots of excitement this week! I got back from that dog walk with which I ended last week's blog to find a box of bound galleys of Veil Of Time waiting at my doorstep. I wasn't expecting them, and I haven't got teary yet about the whole publishing deal, but I have to say that as I lifted the first of sixteen of my books out of the cardboard box, my adam's apple did seem all of a sudden awfully large. The book runs to about 395 pages, and seems quite thick, but then the font isn't small. It's a classy looking book, for all that it is not a hardcover, with the stark black background and the scene of the wilds across the naked back of the girl.
There is nothing like holding in your hand the first copy of your book. As long as you are passing computer files back and forth with your agent and then your editor, and even after you have seen a printed copy, the process still feels a bit like one of those polaraoid instant pictures waiting to take shape in your hand. There is something magical about holding any book you are about to read for the first time, like having a ticket to a fantastical destination in your pocket. But it is all the more sweet when you are the creator. It's a moment of feeling like God. Just a moment. Just a nano second.
The bound galley version is what gets sent out to possible reviewers. It was taken from the script before I made the last editing pass (so not much will change.) I have sent a copy off to Anthony Peake in England because of his interest in the connection between epilepsy and time travel (from a theoretical physicist's point of view) and to local writer Scott Lasser (who has four books by Norton to his name.)
I sat across a table with Scott in the Main St. Bakery a couple of days ago, just as twenty years ago we sat across the table from each other in the local writer's group. We had differences in our literary taste back then and still do, but it was a poignant moment that found two would-be writers transported forward twenty years into their active literary careers. He makes money writing for Hollywood these days. He seems a tad jaded by the publishing business, and maybe I'll feel that way, too, after four books. For now, I'm still cheerfully optimistic and that is my prerogative as a bushy-tailed writer pulling her first bound galley out of its casing. At any rate, I handed Scott my book across the table - he looked through it and went "mmm," and "mmm." He said, "Impressive." His last book was titled, "Say Nice Things About Detroit." I asked him to say nice things about me.
My editor, Abby, is busy on the marketing trail selecting would-be reviewers (or "blurbers" as they say in the industry) mainly from the kind of genres that she thinks the audience is most likely to appreciate - mainly romance or historical fiction. I have taken my hands off that particular juggernaut because I don't have a heavy vehicle license and wouldn't know how to drive one anyway. Meanwhile, my agent is busy finding me blurbers from his agency's stable.
I have to say that this is where traditional publishing really comes into its own from a writer's point of view - I wouldn't know where to start if I were at this stage in self-publishing and needed some endorsements. But then I'm not that enterprising. Like Scott, I will undoubtedly get to the point of complaining about the small revenues a writer manages to squeeze out of a book's profits. But is Hollywood any better? It's not, when you think of the salary of those who write film scripts against those who star in them. This is not a culture that honours creative genius like it does a good song and dance routine. Greece had its sportsmen and we have our pretty faces. Go put on your make-up. Go figure.
Friday, October 4, 2013
Praise Be
4th October 2013
Time passes. Now that we have hit October, it is only five months until the publication of Veil Of Time! The thing about time is, it waits for no man. Nor woman. The point is, it takes no hostages, male or female. The blink of an eye, and you are dead in the water. And before I resort to any more cliches, let's move on. That's the publication part of the blog.
Here's the real topic of this week's blog: Writing. And a few praises.
Praise be to Gandhi who was born 144 years ago this week in India and who is an example to us all and without whom India would still be in bondage to England as Scotland still is, but that's another story.
I have attended many writers' groups and classes over my career (now that I am about to be published in five months, I can talk about the length of my career and how it started when I was twelve. My career has spanned many years, too many to mention. I am middle aged - that's as far as I'll go. It's more than twenty. It's actually more than thirty. That's really as far as I'll go.)
Point is, there is so much standard advice out in the writing milieu: Show, don't tell; kill your darlings; leave out most adjectives; leave out all the adverbs; leave out anything but "said" in dialogue; no rambling sentences, and no dangling anything, male or female.
But once in a while, you hear something that puts a new spin on all of this rhetoric and gets to the heart of the matter. So, praise be to author Ron Carlson in whose class I sat one summer (along with someone else who is currently doing well in the publishing world, Linda Lafferty - in her acknowledgements to "The Drowning Guard," she offers thanks to dear old Ron for a pithy piece of advise which actually wasn't on my list of Carlson pithy sayings, but we'll get to that one, too.) I am going to name three Carlsonisms, because they really are good and have stuck with me (and not much does.) I don't know where he got them. It could have been Wikipedia for all I know, except that this was before wiki leaks of any kind.
The first is: THE TRUTH IS IN THE BODY, NOT IN THE CREDO.
I might be more susceptible to this flaw than most. Ask anyone who knows me - I am always on my bully pulpit, I am the original proseltyser, and I always have an opinion. (I am also a very bad speller.) So I should have been a politician, except that if that had been in America I would currently be out of work (cf. government shutdown.) Everyone has their little hobby horses, and they like to ride them, but Carlson's point is, you don't ride them onto the page. A piece of writing has to breathe, not sputter in truisms. Literature (and especially poetry, you eejits!) buckles and sighs under the weight of ideas. Your story is about people, all the nitty gritty and the quirks and the failings. Get past your ideas if you are going to be a writer. That's not where writing comes from. (This is fast becoming my blog refrain.)
Number two: CHARACTERS ARE NEVER STILL POINTS, BUT VECTORS.
I feel the truth of this statement so keenly, but the mathematical reference throws me into panic. I didn't understand vectors when I was on my way to failing O'Level maths, and I still don't (Lines don't move, silly, they are drawings! Would you have passed me?) I think what he means is similar to the first saying: don't cut your characters out of cardboard. They have to have a life of their own, and they have to be their own force in your story.
Number three: This one is the best, and I carry it around with me in my chest (which is also not a vector.) THE STORY IS THE MOTOR, BUT NOT THE FREIGHT. THE FREIGHT IS THE HUMAN HEART.
So there, Dan Brown and all you plot-driven novelists. No, I take that back - the freight of Dan Brown's books is ultimately the human heart - the loss of the sacred feminine, yes, all doing human heart work. Well, it's something to bear in mind, a reason to quiet the editor in your mind who wants to keep the plot moving at the expense of everything else. That's what makes me cringe about the industry idea of "the hook." The hook has a place in a story, of course, but it is not the freight! It is only the faint rumbling of an engine starting, not even the motor itself. The freight is the human heart - make your work bleed. Who said that you should be able to open a book on any page and catch it bleeding? Good god, I think it was Ron Carlson! Someone canonise that man, will you?
And so to the saying that Linda Lafferty took away from that class - it was the advice to Stay in the room. Writers, STAY IN THE ROOM! Live with a scene, a character, an exchange, and listen to the sound of it breathing. Yes, kill your darlings if need be, hide them behind the couch and mop up the blood stain, but stay in the room and let us join you.
Right now I am going to leave you there, living, breathing, pondering the human heart. You stay - I am going to walk my dogs.
Time passes. Now that we have hit October, it is only five months until the publication of Veil Of Time! The thing about time is, it waits for no man. Nor woman. The point is, it takes no hostages, male or female. The blink of an eye, and you are dead in the water. And before I resort to any more cliches, let's move on. That's the publication part of the blog.
Here's the real topic of this week's blog: Writing. And a few praises.
Praise be to Gandhi who was born 144 years ago this week in India and who is an example to us all and without whom India would still be in bondage to England as Scotland still is, but that's another story.
I have attended many writers' groups and classes over my career (now that I am about to be published in five months, I can talk about the length of my career and how it started when I was twelve. My career has spanned many years, too many to mention. I am middle aged - that's as far as I'll go. It's more than twenty. It's actually more than thirty. That's really as far as I'll go.)
Point is, there is so much standard advice out in the writing milieu: Show, don't tell; kill your darlings; leave out most adjectives; leave out all the adverbs; leave out anything but "said" in dialogue; no rambling sentences, and no dangling anything, male or female.
But once in a while, you hear something that puts a new spin on all of this rhetoric and gets to the heart of the matter. So, praise be to author Ron Carlson in whose class I sat one summer (along with someone else who is currently doing well in the publishing world, Linda Lafferty - in her acknowledgements to "The Drowning Guard," she offers thanks to dear old Ron for a pithy piece of advise which actually wasn't on my list of Carlson pithy sayings, but we'll get to that one, too.) I am going to name three Carlsonisms, because they really are good and have stuck with me (and not much does.) I don't know where he got them. It could have been Wikipedia for all I know, except that this was before wiki leaks of any kind.
The first is: THE TRUTH IS IN THE BODY, NOT IN THE CREDO.
I might be more susceptible to this flaw than most. Ask anyone who knows me - I am always on my bully pulpit, I am the original proseltyser, and I always have an opinion. (I am also a very bad speller.) So I should have been a politician, except that if that had been in America I would currently be out of work (cf. government shutdown.) Everyone has their little hobby horses, and they like to ride them, but Carlson's point is, you don't ride them onto the page. A piece of writing has to breathe, not sputter in truisms. Literature (and especially poetry, you eejits!) buckles and sighs under the weight of ideas. Your story is about people, all the nitty gritty and the quirks and the failings. Get past your ideas if you are going to be a writer. That's not where writing comes from. (This is fast becoming my blog refrain.)
Number two: CHARACTERS ARE NEVER STILL POINTS, BUT VECTORS.
I feel the truth of this statement so keenly, but the mathematical reference throws me into panic. I didn't understand vectors when I was on my way to failing O'Level maths, and I still don't (Lines don't move, silly, they are drawings! Would you have passed me?) I think what he means is similar to the first saying: don't cut your characters out of cardboard. They have to have a life of their own, and they have to be their own force in your story.
Number three: This one is the best, and I carry it around with me in my chest (which is also not a vector.) THE STORY IS THE MOTOR, BUT NOT THE FREIGHT. THE FREIGHT IS THE HUMAN HEART.
So there, Dan Brown and all you plot-driven novelists. No, I take that back - the freight of Dan Brown's books is ultimately the human heart - the loss of the sacred feminine, yes, all doing human heart work. Well, it's something to bear in mind, a reason to quiet the editor in your mind who wants to keep the plot moving at the expense of everything else. That's what makes me cringe about the industry idea of "the hook." The hook has a place in a story, of course, but it is not the freight! It is only the faint rumbling of an engine starting, not even the motor itself. The freight is the human heart - make your work bleed. Who said that you should be able to open a book on any page and catch it bleeding? Good god, I think it was Ron Carlson! Someone canonise that man, will you?
And so to the saying that Linda Lafferty took away from that class - it was the advice to Stay in the room. Writers, STAY IN THE ROOM! Live with a scene, a character, an exchange, and listen to the sound of it breathing. Yes, kill your darlings if need be, hide them behind the couch and mop up the blood stain, but stay in the room and let us join you.
Right now I am going to leave you there, living, breathing, pondering the human heart. You stay - I am going to walk my dogs.
Friday, September 27, 2013
Attention Fixation Disorder
27th Friday 2013
I went to a book launch recently where the writer disclosed that the only place she could write was in bed. I used to write in a closet (a useful Freudian metaphor) because there was no other space for my computer. I wrote a few novels in that closet. DH Lawrence liked putting his desk under a tree, some writers prefer hotel rooms, and others trains. I am so attached to my brown leather office chair, that I couldn't imagine being able to write at some writers' retreat or anywhere else. My desk is up against a wall, but I do have a view of trees from the sliding glass doors if I turn my head. Mostly, however, I am staring into a hovering middle distance which is where novels and poems and things artistic hang waiting to be picked. It's the kind of space in which alarms can go off, people can talk and babies can cry, but you hear none of it. You have stepped out of your framework of time and space and you are wandering, listening in on conversations that may never have been spoken, but probably have in one go-round or another. It's a sort of meditative trance and writers, for one, spend much of their time there. Between trance and tapping away on a keyboard, hours go by unobserved.
This might be a mental illness for which the experts currently have no name or way of diagnosing. It is sort of the opposite of Attention Deficit Disorder, but ought to have a similar kind of name: Attention Fixation Disorder. AFD. I have AFD. I have episodes daily, and not only while sitting in my chair at my desk. If someone were to make a film of one of my days, there would be multiple times when the picture would dissolve to squiggly lines and I would be off catching letters and words and making them into sentences like the little boy Michael after a spoon full of sugar in Mary Poppins.
I was watching a documentary about Bipolar disorder. It is apparently quite hard to diagnose this disorder, except that it seems to have an underlying connection to creativity. They listed just about every artist that ever lived as a sufferer, and why am I not surprised? "Intense feelings" seem to be one of the criteria for diagnosis. Moodiness. Swings between happiness and sadness. Do I sound like I am describing a writer yet? Ask my husband.
Well, Beethoven might have been bipolar, but thank God on high he was. It all comes down to the question posed by Peter Shaffer in his brilliant play "Equus." Should you normalize someone who is sometimes in pain but at other times in ecstasy? Do you take away the pain and lose the passion? Does it just make us more comfortable to homogenize human feelings as though a person were a vat of milk? I don't know what the answer to this is. It might just be some people's lot in life to be wringing genius out of their torture. It's just hard to be a spectator on it, that's all.
So galleys went back to the publisher and I was assured that I was not the only one proof-reading the thing. At least two others ("cold readers" I am informed, meaning, I assume, that they have not set eyes on the manuscript before) have been rifling through my words and sentences looking for errors. But I think it might get passed back to me one more time - it seems that what I corrected was the "first pass" and the "second pass" should be coming my way in a few weeks. But I don't want to clap eyes on the thing again. I am so close to finishing the sequel and want to keep going. Get someone else to read the damn thing. I'm going into my closet to catch fairies.
I went to a book launch recently where the writer disclosed that the only place she could write was in bed. I used to write in a closet (a useful Freudian metaphor) because there was no other space for my computer. I wrote a few novels in that closet. DH Lawrence liked putting his desk under a tree, some writers prefer hotel rooms, and others trains. I am so attached to my brown leather office chair, that I couldn't imagine being able to write at some writers' retreat or anywhere else. My desk is up against a wall, but I do have a view of trees from the sliding glass doors if I turn my head. Mostly, however, I am staring into a hovering middle distance which is where novels and poems and things artistic hang waiting to be picked. It's the kind of space in which alarms can go off, people can talk and babies can cry, but you hear none of it. You have stepped out of your framework of time and space and you are wandering, listening in on conversations that may never have been spoken, but probably have in one go-round or another. It's a sort of meditative trance and writers, for one, spend much of their time there. Between trance and tapping away on a keyboard, hours go by unobserved.
This might be a mental illness for which the experts currently have no name or way of diagnosing. It is sort of the opposite of Attention Deficit Disorder, but ought to have a similar kind of name: Attention Fixation Disorder. AFD. I have AFD. I have episodes daily, and not only while sitting in my chair at my desk. If someone were to make a film of one of my days, there would be multiple times when the picture would dissolve to squiggly lines and I would be off catching letters and words and making them into sentences like the little boy Michael after a spoon full of sugar in Mary Poppins.
I was watching a documentary about Bipolar disorder. It is apparently quite hard to diagnose this disorder, except that it seems to have an underlying connection to creativity. They listed just about every artist that ever lived as a sufferer, and why am I not surprised? "Intense feelings" seem to be one of the criteria for diagnosis. Moodiness. Swings between happiness and sadness. Do I sound like I am describing a writer yet? Ask my husband.
Well, Beethoven might have been bipolar, but thank God on high he was. It all comes down to the question posed by Peter Shaffer in his brilliant play "Equus." Should you normalize someone who is sometimes in pain but at other times in ecstasy? Do you take away the pain and lose the passion? Does it just make us more comfortable to homogenize human feelings as though a person were a vat of milk? I don't know what the answer to this is. It might just be some people's lot in life to be wringing genius out of their torture. It's just hard to be a spectator on it, that's all.
So galleys went back to the publisher and I was assured that I was not the only one proof-reading the thing. At least two others ("cold readers" I am informed, meaning, I assume, that they have not set eyes on the manuscript before) have been rifling through my words and sentences looking for errors. But I think it might get passed back to me one more time - it seems that what I corrected was the "first pass" and the "second pass" should be coming my way in a few weeks. But I don't want to clap eyes on the thing again. I am so close to finishing the sequel and want to keep going. Get someone else to read the damn thing. I'm going into my closet to catch fairies.
Friday, September 20, 2013
Literary Bleeding Hearts
20th September 2013
I'm sending my galley proofs back to the publisher today. I do hope others are proof reading it, because I caught quite a lot of errors and there must be more that I didn't see.
Now I can devote my day to reading Pulitzer prize winner Paul Harding's new book "Enon." Like Steinbeck and Hemmingway, he might one day be discussed as one of the big names in American literature, and so it is exciting to watch his career unfold. He got a three-book deal (everyone seems to, except me!) from Random House and so he is under obligation to churn a couple more out. A lot of pressure, which is not conducive to the production of any good art. Art demands space, and that's why I decided to write a canon of five books before sending the first out. Writing is a gossamer art - reach for it too hard and it slips between your fingers.
After much resistance, I am now tweeting once a day. (@kilmartin1978) Twitter's strength and its weakness is its word limit. Half the time you're referencing other people. No room for theses or even half-formed ideas. The good thing is, no one is going to waste your time for long. It's a funny little virtual world, opening up a space for people to matter, if only for just a sentence or two, as they always did in our pre-industrial revolution communities. Once money became the benchmark for the value of people, a person was only as good as their labour. We have been on a de-humanising track for many centuries, but the pendulum is swinging, as it always does, and we have created this cloud-space for the significance of individuals. I believe in the Gaia principle which holds that the universe is intelligent and will redress imbalance within itself. Humanity has become a limping wounded spectacle, and perhaps our race-course to the end of the technological venture is simply all about this: finding out again who we are. In the immortal words of a bard named Eliot, "The end of all our searching will be to arrive where we started and know that place for the first time."
So, if we get to that place, presumably a place without pain, will there be room for art? Or does art necessarily spring from bleeding hearts? If Hermann Hesse is right that art is the great universalizing mirror, then surely not. Ode to Joy is as much art as Sartre's Nausea. It is just that for a long time we have approached reality with a gnawing sense of dyspepsia, with the existential angst that has perpetrated much of writing and the other arts for a long time now. But perhaps as the pendulum swings and we find ourselves back at the beginning seeing ourselves again for the first time, literature and music and the visual arts will evolve back into vessels of celebration. What has been subverted into sentimentalism will break out into a grand Hallelujah. And now I am sounding like Martin Luther King. I have a dream....
The rain that has been pouring on Colorado and breaking records and washing away houses has settled into a cold drizzle that last night left its first covering of snow in the high country. I can see snow-capped mountains from my office window, and I am fine with it, just as long as it stays up there for now. I don't mind if the water-logged leaves stay green and the fields refuse to give up hay. I don't mind the mushrooms and moss and the days spent beneath low cloud. I am not a child of the high country nor even of this continent. My ancestors lived in the mulching ground and slept on beds of damp moss. My ancestors never breathed in a gulp of dry air in their short lives. And so it comes down through the DNA, this ease with rain. Leave me out in it. I might even grow roots.
I'm sending my galley proofs back to the publisher today. I do hope others are proof reading it, because I caught quite a lot of errors and there must be more that I didn't see.
Now I can devote my day to reading Pulitzer prize winner Paul Harding's new book "Enon." Like Steinbeck and Hemmingway, he might one day be discussed as one of the big names in American literature, and so it is exciting to watch his career unfold. He got a three-book deal (everyone seems to, except me!) from Random House and so he is under obligation to churn a couple more out. A lot of pressure, which is not conducive to the production of any good art. Art demands space, and that's why I decided to write a canon of five books before sending the first out. Writing is a gossamer art - reach for it too hard and it slips between your fingers.
After much resistance, I am now tweeting once a day. (@kilmartin1978) Twitter's strength and its weakness is its word limit. Half the time you're referencing other people. No room for theses or even half-formed ideas. The good thing is, no one is going to waste your time for long. It's a funny little virtual world, opening up a space for people to matter, if only for just a sentence or two, as they always did in our pre-industrial revolution communities. Once money became the benchmark for the value of people, a person was only as good as their labour. We have been on a de-humanising track for many centuries, but the pendulum is swinging, as it always does, and we have created this cloud-space for the significance of individuals. I believe in the Gaia principle which holds that the universe is intelligent and will redress imbalance within itself. Humanity has become a limping wounded spectacle, and perhaps our race-course to the end of the technological venture is simply all about this: finding out again who we are. In the immortal words of a bard named Eliot, "The end of all our searching will be to arrive where we started and know that place for the first time."
So, if we get to that place, presumably a place without pain, will there be room for art? Or does art necessarily spring from bleeding hearts? If Hermann Hesse is right that art is the great universalizing mirror, then surely not. Ode to Joy is as much art as Sartre's Nausea. It is just that for a long time we have approached reality with a gnawing sense of dyspepsia, with the existential angst that has perpetrated much of writing and the other arts for a long time now. But perhaps as the pendulum swings and we find ourselves back at the beginning seeing ourselves again for the first time, literature and music and the visual arts will evolve back into vessels of celebration. What has been subverted into sentimentalism will break out into a grand Hallelujah. And now I am sounding like Martin Luther King. I have a dream....
The rain that has been pouring on Colorado and breaking records and washing away houses has settled into a cold drizzle that last night left its first covering of snow in the high country. I can see snow-capped mountains from my office window, and I am fine with it, just as long as it stays up there for now. I don't mind if the water-logged leaves stay green and the fields refuse to give up hay. I don't mind the mushrooms and moss and the days spent beneath low cloud. I am not a child of the high country nor even of this continent. My ancestors lived in the mulching ground and slept on beds of damp moss. My ancestors never breathed in a gulp of dry air in their short lives. And so it comes down through the DNA, this ease with rain. Leave me out in it. I might even grow roots.
Friday, September 13, 2013
Neanderthal Fiction
13th September 2013
I am up to my ears in galleys - two, to be precise, because the first they sent (second-day air UPS) didn't have my Gaelic words and phrases italicised. The new copy was sent overnight UPS, and they both arrived on my doorstep at the same time. The publisher caught the error, not me. I have to read through the galley and send it back by 25th September. They sent me a special green erasable pencil to mark any errors, and they sent me a key so I would know which sign to put for which errors. For instance, if I need to insert a space between two words, I put a line between the words and in the margin put a hashtag #. I'm a bit nervous about doing the wrong thing, and I don't know if my editorial skills are suddenly sharpened but I am finding lots of things I need to change. For example, although I have read this text over many times before, I caught the fact this time that I called the drystone bridge at the location of my story Gothic. Well, it isn't really Gothic, which would be more of a vaulted apex. So I took a minute to google different types of arches and found the one I had in mind most closely resembled a Roman arch. So, I took my green pencil and put a line through Gothic, stuck a little arrow at the end of the space, and in the margin I wrote "Roman." Then, it suddenly dawned on me that I had throughout the text mis-spelled "Sassanach," all with a's as it turns out and not with any e's. If any of the Gaelic is mis-spelled, I'm not going to catch it, because my knowledge of Gaelic is only elementary, my Dear Watson.
My editor and I are trying to put together a plot synopsis for the back cover, but so far haven't agreed on what should go there. I say, please no handsome highlanders or Celtic warriors or noble Scots. She says, yes, but we're trying to sell this to readers of commercial fiction. Yes, I think, but there's my integrity to think of. I keep imagining published writer friends of mine reading the back cover and rolling their eyes. I keep thinking of the sister who hates me hating me even more for writing drivel. It's not drivel, of course; that's not what it is at all. But I don't want to give anyone an excuse for rolling their eyes at me. I was once describing the storyline of my book to a poet with a shock of white hair and noble features.
He said, "What, you mean a children's book?"
No, it is not a children's book, and I have a chip on my shoulder about being a writer of literary fiction. Well, I am, but that's not to say that I must be excluded from writing a book about a woman travelling back to ancient Scotland. Can it not be imaginative and literary, too? Must literary fiction be populated only by the kinds of characters that fill their pockets with stones and walk into ponds, for the dreadful weight of existence? My protagonist, Maggie, is a weighty character: she is just coming out of a divorce, her daughter has just died, and she is trying to finish a post-graduate thesis on the medieval witch burnings. How heavy can you get? It's just that she falls in love with a figment of her imagination called Fergus McBridghe, who just also happens to be a handsome Celtic warrior from the Dark Ages, and he might not be a figment, after all. He might just belong to another reality, as if we ever know what reality is to start with.
As if we ever know what history is to start with. I was just watching a NOVA programme on my new IPad (from that splendid PBS App) about ground-breaking research on Neanderthals. Didn't history portray Neanderthals as dim-witted hairy cavemen, and isn't that still the popular conception? New research says, No, these hairy folks, if they were hairy, and how the hell do we know, had language, made art and buried their dead with religious objects. More than that, it turns out that Neanderthals weren't outmatched by brainy little Homo Sapiens and driven into extinction, but actually brainy little Homo Sapiens couldn't keep his hands off hairy Neanderthal woman (take that, all ye leg-dilapitating, armpit shaving moderners!) Neanderthals weren't driven to extinction but were outbred. African people have little to no Neanderthal DNA, Asians have very little. Neanderthals encountered humans in Europe and that's where they left their trace. It's the Europeans writing literary fiction that have significant amounts of the stuff.
Just saying....
I am up to my ears in galleys - two, to be precise, because the first they sent (second-day air UPS) didn't have my Gaelic words and phrases italicised. The new copy was sent overnight UPS, and they both arrived on my doorstep at the same time. The publisher caught the error, not me. I have to read through the galley and send it back by 25th September. They sent me a special green erasable pencil to mark any errors, and they sent me a key so I would know which sign to put for which errors. For instance, if I need to insert a space between two words, I put a line between the words and in the margin put a hashtag #. I'm a bit nervous about doing the wrong thing, and I don't know if my editorial skills are suddenly sharpened but I am finding lots of things I need to change. For example, although I have read this text over many times before, I caught the fact this time that I called the drystone bridge at the location of my story Gothic. Well, it isn't really Gothic, which would be more of a vaulted apex. So I took a minute to google different types of arches and found the one I had in mind most closely resembled a Roman arch. So, I took my green pencil and put a line through Gothic, stuck a little arrow at the end of the space, and in the margin I wrote "Roman." Then, it suddenly dawned on me that I had throughout the text mis-spelled "Sassanach," all with a's as it turns out and not with any e's. If any of the Gaelic is mis-spelled, I'm not going to catch it, because my knowledge of Gaelic is only elementary, my Dear Watson.
My editor and I are trying to put together a plot synopsis for the back cover, but so far haven't agreed on what should go there. I say, please no handsome highlanders or Celtic warriors or noble Scots. She says, yes, but we're trying to sell this to readers of commercial fiction. Yes, I think, but there's my integrity to think of. I keep imagining published writer friends of mine reading the back cover and rolling their eyes. I keep thinking of the sister who hates me hating me even more for writing drivel. It's not drivel, of course; that's not what it is at all. But I don't want to give anyone an excuse for rolling their eyes at me. I was once describing the storyline of my book to a poet with a shock of white hair and noble features.
He said, "What, you mean a children's book?"
No, it is not a children's book, and I have a chip on my shoulder about being a writer of literary fiction. Well, I am, but that's not to say that I must be excluded from writing a book about a woman travelling back to ancient Scotland. Can it not be imaginative and literary, too? Must literary fiction be populated only by the kinds of characters that fill their pockets with stones and walk into ponds, for the dreadful weight of existence? My protagonist, Maggie, is a weighty character: she is just coming out of a divorce, her daughter has just died, and she is trying to finish a post-graduate thesis on the medieval witch burnings. How heavy can you get? It's just that she falls in love with a figment of her imagination called Fergus McBridghe, who just also happens to be a handsome Celtic warrior from the Dark Ages, and he might not be a figment, after all. He might just belong to another reality, as if we ever know what reality is to start with.
As if we ever know what history is to start with. I was just watching a NOVA programme on my new IPad (from that splendid PBS App) about ground-breaking research on Neanderthals. Didn't history portray Neanderthals as dim-witted hairy cavemen, and isn't that still the popular conception? New research says, No, these hairy folks, if they were hairy, and how the hell do we know, had language, made art and buried their dead with religious objects. More than that, it turns out that Neanderthals weren't outmatched by brainy little Homo Sapiens and driven into extinction, but actually brainy little Homo Sapiens couldn't keep his hands off hairy Neanderthal woman (take that, all ye leg-dilapitating, armpit shaving moderners!) Neanderthals weren't driven to extinction but were outbred. African people have little to no Neanderthal DNA, Asians have very little. Neanderthals encountered humans in Europe and that's where they left their trace. It's the Europeans writing literary fiction that have significant amounts of the stuff.
Just saying....
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