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Archive for October 2009
Welcome to this week’s Free Book Friday, wherein we give you the best titles in indie publishing for the low low price of nothing. Congrats to last week’s winner Ginny Martyn for scoring a copy of The Ant King and Other Stories by Benjamin Rosenbaum.
This week, we are giving away a copy of Awkward One by Awkward Press. Be prepared to tumble headfirst into a collection of five imaginative fiction pieces by Clay McLeod Chapman, Jeffrey Dinsmore, Kyle Jarrow, Honor Rovai, and Michael Cipra. During your trip through the salty brambles of Awkward One, you’ll meet such characters as: Mrs. Havermeyer, a woman whose son gets up to some very naughty business; Beatrice Throop, a girl on the verge of womanhood whose mother suffers from a thoroughly obnoxious malady; James Fitzgerald, a young man with a knack for turning trash into art; Jeff and Janie, a honeymooning couple who are about to experience a profound shift in consciousness; and Caroline, a grieving mother with a deadly secret. Read more »
 There’s a lot of talk on the internet right now about the writing workshop, so I thought I’d put in my two cents.
People are talking about what it means for someone else to tell you that your writing sucks (see here, here, and here). Well, this never happens in any of my graduate writing workshops. Even the ones I was in during high school, a time when people are notoriously mean to each other, no one ever told me or anyone else “your writing sucks.”
I know, I know, I’m taking these bloggers too literally, but still, I feel compelled to respond to the sentiment behind these posts: Read more »
 I wore his shirt – crisp and fresh from the laundry basket as I hung my own rain-soaked clothes to dry. The conversation was sparse but the air was gravid with an intangible emotion. By the end of the day, we had not touched once and he saw me off at the door, wearing my own clothes again.
He was merely an acquaintance but years after that moment he still represents the most romantic day of my life. Those who know me know that I have trouble accepting traditional notions of romance and the labeling of anything as “romantic” is kind of a big deal for me. Guys I’ve dated can tell you that I have wrinkled my nose at their many attempts to be romantic. Guys I’ve dated can also tell you that my response to the first “I love you” is usually shoving something in my mouth that takes a really long time to chew. It’s something that I’ve always felt really bad about – especially as a writer. Falling in love is such a common theme in storytelling that the Anti-Romantic can really feel left out.
Over coffee with a friend earlier this week, we discussed the impracticality and inconvenience of falling in love. Science has found falling in love akin to mental illness so… yikes – what do I need that for? My friend and I conceded to the fact that like any common virus, lovesickness will find its way to us one day regardless of how ready we are for it. He added that the only thing we really have to fear regarding falling in love is if it were unrequited. Read more »
 Since starting Lit Drift, I’ve gotten used to reading a lot of doom-and-gloom opinion pieces about the death of the publishing industry. I’ve read predictions that the paperbound book will be totally replaced by digital books within the decade, or that we’ll all stop buying books and forget how to read, and so on. Most of it I’ve taken with a grain brick of salt, because I think at this point in our current techno-literary revolution it is far too early to tell where we’ll be in five–let alone ten–years.
Still, I can’t shake my anxiety after reading this recent article from The Guardian, in which Philip Roth–one of my favorite writers–says that the novel will be a “cult minority” in 25 years. He attributes the decline of the novel to the popularity of film, TV, and computers. It’s not the first time I’ve heard claims like this. But it’s unnerving to hear it from Roth.
He continues:
“The book can’t compete with the screen. It couldn’t compete [in the] beginning with the movie screen. It couldn’t compete with the television screen, and it can’t compete with the computer screen,” Roth said. “Now we have all those screens, so against all those screens a book couldn’t measure up.”
Maybe I’ve been living in a happy non-reality for the last two decades, but I don’t think that’s entirely true. So as much as I love Philip Roth, I have to respectfully disagree. Read more »
A professor for one of my graduate writing classes is an acquisitions editor at a major publishing house. He’s worked with some pretty big-name authors. Last week we took the entire class time for a Q&A session about the publishing industry. We’re all in this great program, focusing on our writing and how to make it better, but no one is really talking about how to market our ideas, what to do once we’ve got something good.
Many interesting questions came up during the two-hour session (Should one use a pen name if they want to write something commercial before writing something literary? Can a successful author switch genres mid-career? How do you find an agent who really gets you?) until someone finally broke the ice: ”What kind of advances do authors get paid these days?”
A weight was lifted off everyone’s shoulders. After frankly stating that very very few authors will get the big advances of the last ten years, our professor told us a story about Junot Diaz, author of Drown and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Apparently two publishers had a bidding war over Diaz’s first book, until finally, Riverhead Books (a division of Penguin), offered Diaz a $150,000 advance for two books, guaranteeing themselves first rights to whatever he ended up writing next. The other publisher gave up at that point, not being able to outbid such a high figure. Well, they probably regret their decision now given how wildly successful Diaz’s two books have been.
Most of us aren’t going to have such a high-stakes bidding war for our first book, let alone any bidding war at all. Diaz is a pretty lucky (and talented) guy. Given all this, it was refreshing to find his recent admission that even he — a Pulitzer Prize-winning author — has had problems churning out good work. So even if he’s successful on the whole making-money-off-your-writing thing, he still struggles with the whole actually-doing-the-writing part: Read more »
 I have a special fondness in my heart for bad poetry. Partly because I’m a terrible poet myself so I can’t help but identify with fellow terrible poets. And also partly because, as I’ve discussed before, I think there’s a lot to be gained by disregarding the rules of “good” writing–how else are you supposed to further your craft if you’re not willing to take risks?
So in the spirit of taking risks, and of totally missing the mark, there’s Very Bad Poetry, an online journal featuring such gems as these: Read more »
Welcome to this week’s Free Book Friday, wherein we give you the best titles in indie publishing for the low low price of nothing. Congrats to last week’s winner Paul Ketchum for scoring a copy of Couch by Benjamin Parzybok.
This week, we are giving away a copy of The Ant King and Other Stories by Benjamin Rosenbaum. The Ant King and Other Stories is a dazzling, postmodern debut collection of pulp and surreal fictions: a writer of alternate histories defends his patron’s zeppelin against assassins and pirates; a woman transforms into hundreds of gumballs; an emancipated children’s collective goes house hunting. (Ed. Note: also one of my favorite books. The book is CC-licensed so you can also read the book for free online. I definitely recommend giving “The Orange” and “Other Cities” a read. Actually, you know what, just read the whole thing.) Read more »
 How do you turn a ten sentence book into a 94 minute movie? So, at this point I’m sure that many of you have checked out Spike Jonzes’ Where The Wild Things Are. While this film has certainly polarized audiences, I hope that at least one thing we can all agree on is that adapting a ten-sentence book into a feature length film would be incredibly hard. And while I think that the team of David Eggers and Spike Jones ultimately did a good job in preserving the feel of the original Where the Wild Things Are, their movie got me thinking about the challenges implicit in turning unconventional books into successful films. Here are, in my mind, some successful adaptations of incredibly challenging source material:
Read more »
 Fry finally finds the words to express himself to Leela via conversation heart In my first semester of college, Facebook was known as The Facebook and was restricted to only a handful of universities. It had yet to include any of the schools my friends attended and was not at all the Facebook that we know today. There were no status updates, no photos, no wall and looking back now – I wonder how we made any use of it at all.
Because of this, my high school friends and I were forced to keep in touch via what is now kind of the old-fashioned way – mass email. I would come home from a full day of class to find a couple new emails in my inbox and I’d sit there scrolling through them one by one. Though I was filled with the frenetic energy that comes with that first year of freedom, these emails were soothing in its familiarity. My high school friends were almost all writers and/or actors so they had no trouble eloquently expressing themselves with their own distinct voices. I never really had to look at the email address or signature to know whose email I was reading.
However, there was one very extreme exception to the rule. One of these friends (let’s call him Frank) was our token quiet kid. Among the boisterous theatre geeks, he stood out with his reserved, buttoned-up demeanor. Frank spoke only when spoken to and he replied with the maximum of three squeaky words at a time. Strangely enough, Frank’s emails were solid pages of witty, lyrical compositions. Read more »
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Some lawyers have canceled a Harry Potter-themed dinner for children.
