"I hate my job," she began, "and I go to work every day and I can't bear it, and it's just . . ." she pointed down at the piece of paper on her desk. "This is what I want to do. And I feel like I look at all of these writers and painters that we read and talk about and they're famous and they have piles of money and sure, it's possible for them . . . but can someone like me really be a writer?"
Links of the week December 9 2019 (50)
Our new feature links to interesting blogs or articles posted online, which will help keep you up to date with what's going on in the book world:
16 December 2019
In fact, the very act of enrolling in this introductory class was her attempt to quell that voice that had so long said she couldn't do it. But then, within that classroom, spending 75 minutes twice a week parsing the styles and techniques of the people who had succeeded at doing what she had only just convinced herself might be possible, or at least worth a shot, she was starting to reckon with that same feeling that the world of art, and a life in service of it, was not for people like her.
You know them as bodice rippers. The kind of books where a damsel in distress waits around for a hero to come rescue her and then they live happily ever after. But during the last 10 or so years, that perception has started to shift, thanks to the nuanced, fiercely feminist, and yes, sexy stories that have emerged.
"Often people hear romance novel and have a very specific picture in their minds: maybe a historical novel, perhaps with a specific cover model, and lots of fuchsia and teal and flowing hair," says Sarah Wendell, founder of the website Smart Bitches, Trashy Books and co-author of Beyond Heaving Bosoms. "They may also think of recent blockbuster erotic novels, or variations of the same. And much as there are more space movies than Star Wars, there are so many different, wonderful novels that could be classified as romance fiction."
The stereotypical picture Wendell is describing is, in fact, a bodice ripper: the first contemporary iteration of romance novels that were published in the early 1970s to the mid 1980s. After Kathleen E. Woodiwiss's The Flame and the Flower was published in 1972-the problematic love story between the innocent Heather Simmons and lusty adventurer Captain Brandon Birmingham-a new generation of sexually explicit, pulp-y romances exploded onto the market. And while bodice rippers birthed our modern era of romance novels, over time these stories have evolved beyond their '70s origins. As with any other form of entertainment, they've caught up with the times.
Today's post is by regular contributor Peter Selgin, the award-winning author of Your First Page. He offers first-page critiques to show just how much useful critical commentary and helpful feedback can be extracted from a single page-the first page-of a work-in-progress.
When I met with my mentor in his Greenwich Village duplex, we'd sit side by side at his dining room table walled in by hundreds of books. Armed with his trusty Mont Blanc, Don Newlove slashed through my sentences, slathering them with ink, making me read my version first, then his, and tell him why his was better!
For about eight months we did this, until I bridled at my mentor's "improvements." By then it hardly mattered, since I'd learned most of what Don had to teach me, which boiled down to this: Never let a dead, droopy, or sawdusty sentence-a sentence not worth reading once, let alone twice-stand. In those eighteen months, thanks to Don I became the next best thing to a poet: a stylist.
As the deadline looms, we ask former winner Jane Davis what success in our awards for self-publishing meant to them
With only just over two weeks to go for authors who have self-published an adult fiction or children's book in 2019 to submit their work for the next Selfies Awards, we contacted the 2019 winner, Jane Davis, whose exceptional novel Smash all the Windows recounts the emotional fall out after a miscarriage of justice is corrected.
"I am a great advocate of entering competitions", said Davis. "Ten years ago, a competition win enabled me to give up full-time work to dedicate more time to writing, and prize money has paid for all of my self-publishing endeavours to date. My books may not be huge sellers compared with genre fiction, but the pressure of not having to worry about making individual books 'pay for themselves' means that I can focus on quality and produce a legacy of work that I am proud of.
Part of what makes VanderMeer's weirdness so striking is his ability to create believably strange natural worlds from a place of granular fascination. He's often credited this to his time living in tropical locales, especially Florida. VanderMeer has described images in Annihilation inspired by the state as "ecstatically beautiful," though others may find them startling. His outlook is one that's familiar to me. Growing up in South Florida, I remember seeing the state's overwhelming abundance of swarming, growing, dying, consuming creatures as quotidian: gators and buzzards threatening to snatch small dogs, all the leathery flattened toads in the road with their innards artfully askew.
VanderMeer has always cared about bringing an understanding of animal behavior and biology to his work while knowing his limitations. If it's impossible to fully understand how another human thinks, it's even harder to extrapolate how an animal's mind works. The animals in Dead Astronauts, though, have all been messed with by humans, and adapted into something that more resembles human consciousness. "That gives me the kind of narrow pathway to still try to do something that goes beyond the human, but has a certain amount of plausibility to it," VanderMeer said.
Even the greenest of graduate students have heard "publish or perish," but rarely are they instructed on exactly how to accomplish that or even where to start. The world of publishing can feel intimidating to those who've already pumped out a few books, let alone the uninitiated.
To find your way into this world, you must gain access to the gatekeepers - that is, get your idea in front of book editors. How you do that depends on whether you are approaching an academic press or a commercial "trade" publisher. I'll focus here on university and other scholarly presses because that is the most common path to publication for Ph.D.s.
While first contact with a trade-press editor comes via an agent, academic publishers are a whole lot more democratic. Anyone with a book idea can pitch to a scholarly press editor and get a fair hearing. But, as with anything, if you hope to convince a book editor, you have to make it easy for them to say yes.
Galley Beggar Press, the tiny literary publisher behind acclaimed novels including the Booker-shortlisted Ducks, Newburyport and women's prize for fiction winner A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, has been forced to make a public appeal for support after the Book People's fall into administration left it with a £40,000 hole in its finances.
Galley Beggar's co-director Eloise Millar turned to crowdfunding on Wednesday to ask for urgent help from readers as it faces "the biggest crisis in its seven-year history". The publisher entered into a partnership with the discount retailer earlier this year when Lucy Ellmann's novel was shortlisted for the Booker. Galley Beggar produced 8,000 special editions of the novel, costing it around £40,000.
Less than an hour after the fundraiser launched, Galley Beggar had raised more than the £15,000 it initially asked for. It subsequently raised the goal to £40,000 with funds quickly exceeding £30,000. Fellow publishers, authors and booksellers are rallying behind the Norwich-based publisher, with donors including the National Centre for Writing and Arts Council England's literature director Sarah Crown.
In the fall of 2012, Ken Liu received an intriguing offer from a Chinese company with a blandly bureaucratic name: China Educational Publications Import and Export Corporation, Ltd. It was seeking an English-language translator for a trippy science-fiction novel titled "The Three-Body Problem." Liu - an American computer programmer turned corporate lawyer turned science-fiction writer - was a natural choice: fluent in Mandarin, familiar with Chinese sci-fi tropes and culture and a rising star in the genre. Liu had only translated short fiction at the time, though, and capturing the novel in all its complexity seemed daunting.
The success of "The Three-Body Problem" not only turned Liu Cixin into a global literary star; it opened the floodgates for new translations of Chinese science fiction. This, in turn, has made Ken Liu a critical conduit for Chinese writers seeking Western audiences, a literary brand as sought-after as the best-selling authors he translates. (Among Chinese sci-fi authors and fans, he is often referred to affectionately as Xiao Liu, Little Liu, to distinguish him from Liu Cixin, who is known as Da Liu, Big Liu.) Liu's translations have reshaped the global science-fiction landscape, which has long been dominated by American and British authors. Over the past decade, he has translated five novels and more than 50 works of short fiction by dozens of Chinese authors, many of whom he has discovered and championed himself.
The richest literary prize in India - the JCB Prize for Literature, which confers ₹25 lakh on a writer of fiction, in English or translation-has already been announced. But there is still much to look forward to in the country's literary prize calendar, with the winner of the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature to be declared in Nepal on 16 December, followed by the Crossword Book Award in January. This is also a good time to look back on the year gone by and take stock of some of the bizarre twists and turns prize cultures have taken, globally, of 2019.
The most notorious example of misappropriation of such power this year is in the co-awarding of the Booker Prize to Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo. By brazenly flouting the rules of the prize, which stipulates that the jury pick only one winner, the judges unleashed a torrent of criticism. The move was deemed especially preposterous because one of the jury members defended the choice of awarding Atwood by praising her stunning body of work, in direct contravention of the rules. The Booker Prize is conferred on a writer on the basis of one book of singular merit, not on a lifetime's achievements. While the prize committee denied any such motivation, the damage had been done, and irreversibly so.
9 December 2019
For a while we were told that books were going to be a thing of the past. A new century had dawned, our lives were being digitised and surely there was no longer any reason to lug the pressed pulp of dead trees around. And yet, over the past decade, it seems clear that the death of the book has been greatly exaggerated. As we move into the 2020s there are plenty of reasons to celebrate the resurgence of the book - while also acknowledging that other avenues for storytelling are opening not only in the marketplace but in readers' minds. The fact that we spend more and more time online may mean that we are increasingly distracted from reading... but it can also mean that readers have more avenues to find the stories they want and need.
And readers are finding new ways into text. No one can have missed the dramatic rise in the sales of audiobooks. Audible, the audiobook retailer and publisher, saw its revenue in the UK rise by 38 per cent in 2018: the year before, the company posted a 47 per cent sales increase. Research suggests that, in the UK, audiobook sales will overtake sales of ebooks in 2020. Listening to a book can be a fascinating complementary experience even if it was one you loved reading.
Suppose you've been asked to write a science-fiction story. You might start by contemplating the future. You could research anticipated developments in science, technology, and society and ask how they will play out. Telepresence, mind-uploading, an aging population: an elderly couple live far from their daughter and grandchildren; one day, the pair knock on her door as robots. They've uploaded their minds to a cloud-based data bank and can now visit telepresently, forever. A philosophical question arises: What is a family when it never ends? A story flowers where prospective trends meet.
This method is quite common in science fiction. It's not the one employed by William Gibson, the writer who, for four decades, has imagined the near future more convincingly than anyone else. Gibson doesn't have a name for his method; he knows only that it isn't about prediction. It proceeds, instead, from a deep engagement with the present. When Gibson was starting to write, in the late nineteen-seventies, he watched kids playing games in video arcades and noticed how they ducked and twisted, as though they were on the other side of the screen. The Sony Walkman had just been introduced, so he bought one; he lived in Vancouver, and when he explored the city at night, listening to Joy Division, he felt as though the music were being transmitted directly into his brain, where it could merge with his perceptions of skyscrapers and slums.
My grandmother read one novel in her life. She told me that fact on more than one occasion and I rather suspect that she enjoyed shocking me with it. Imagine: one single book in 88 years! The much-honored volume was Colleen McCullough's The Thorn Birds, consumed in the wake of Richard Chamberlain doing his conflicted-man-of-the-cloth bit in the 1980s mini-series.
Dorothy enjoyed it, she said it was a good book, but didn't feel any inclination to try another one. Her tone of voice dictated the matter closed-and none of us ever dared mention having glimpsed that copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover behind the jam jars in her pantry. When pushed, Dorothy would quote her own grandmother, who was seemingly regularly given to pronouncing that, "People who read books have dirty houses."
In my early childhood memories, Mum is at an old click-clack typewriter, there's a smell of Tippex and cigarettes, and there are notebooks all over the floor. She would spend the next 30 years periodically polishing-up a single manuscript, cosseting it, refining, updating. As far as I'm aware, she had just one brief flurry of submitting it to publishers, got as far as an acquisition meeting, chalked up a near-miss, and then it became just a private project. She never stopped writing, but now it was a quiet, solitary pleasure.
Fern Michaels is women's fiction royalty and a publishing legend. The author of the wildly popular Sisterhood series, Michaels has written more than 150 books, more than half of which have been New York Times and USA Today bestsellers. She has 75 million books in print, and her work has been translated into 20 languages.
Above all, Sisterhood books are about inspiring, powerful female characters. These qualities stem from Michaels herself, who took control of her life to become the successful writer she is today. "Back when I first started to write," she says, "I was a wife and a mother of five kids, with no time to do anything for myself. When my youngest went off to kindergarten, I was literally lost. Suddenly I had time to read, and boy did I read!"
Michaels spent a lot of time at the library and recalls reading three pages of a book and immediately figuring out the entire plot. "I told myself I could have written it better," she says. In the end, that's just what she did. While her first novels weren't published, she kept at it. "My mantra was: if you persevere you will prevail," she says. And in 1995, she joined the Kensington roster with Dear Emily, beginning the long and fruitful relationship that, a few years later, would lead to the Sisterhood.
When our writing resists us - when it refuses to do as we hope - we often respond with ever more force, pushing it to bend to our will. We ask a friend to tell us which "darlings" to murder. We go through with a red pencil, slashing words.
But what if we looked at our early drafts differently? What if, instead of seeing them as adversaries to be wrestled into submission, or even as inchoate versions of our to-be-realized visions, we learned to read them as a kind of roadmap, reflective of the unspoken needs and confusions of our writing selves? What if the moments of resistance we encounter in our drafts-and in our drafting process-were trailheads, capable of leading us deeper into the work?
In the creative writing community, there's lots of talk about writing that outsmarts the writer, about not trying to fully understand our own work. I appreciate mysticism as much as the next person (or more), but I don't think our writing's "intelligence"-its expression of meanings, impulses, and desires outside our control-is especially mystical. Like other areas of life we don't fully control (i.e., all of it), the writing we produce can become a key to deeper self-knowledge, if only we learn to step back and read it that way. And, rather than persist with "solutions" that paper over or dismiss the quirks and deviations we experience as "problems," we might instead embrace these moments of insubordination, approaching them as pathways to fuller expression of our visions and ourselves.
The business school at the Chinese University of Hong Kong
has not perhaps inspired many poets. But when Mary Jean Chan describes her journey to becoming one of the world's most promising and admired young writers, she names her decision to leave the business school as a pivotal moment.
"It was desperation really," she says. "I was in a very bad place bordering on depression. My parents saw that and knew something had to change."
Talking to 29-year-old Chan a decade later, in her adopted home city of London, it's hard to believe she enrolled in the first place. Sensitive and thoughtful, she seems the antithesis of a hardbitten banker or financier. "I always knew I didn't have a talent for numbers. Maths was my worst subject. My parents were taken aback [by her decision to leave]. My teachers wanted to talk about it."
Written over several years, the poems in Flèche allow these fluctuating tensions to play out, without any need for resolution. When I mention how accessible and clear her writing is, Chan suggests it reflects the insecurity of the non-native English speaker. "The first goal of learning a language is being able to convey yourself in ways that others can understand. The last thing I want is to befuddle people, in a way. Not because I don't believe in intellectual befuddlement, but because I don't want you to think my English isn't good enough. I want you to hear me."
As children, our minds are filled with magic. With all of the information we absorb at a young age, there is no wonder that being a children's author can be very rewarding. Speaking of rewards, a children's author can start off small but eventually make a serious living! Adults that once read their favorite children's book to sleep will eventually read it to their child.
This makes children authors' works last forever to be discovered over and over again! Thus, long-lasting stories that children will ask their parents to read forever have made these 10 individuals the richest children's authors of all time!
A net worth of over $100 million will definitely land you on this list of the richest children's authors of all time. That is why Jeff Kinney is next up! This amazing cartoonist has written the ever so hilarious Diary of a Wimpy Kid series. This series features 13 extremely versatile and funny tales of a kid going through obstacles in life. As a cartoonist, he also features great illustrations in his books that engage children first, encouraging them to read within. With a new book added into the series just last month, there is no question that Jeff will be making some substantial income from these publications.