Gridley Fires

The Change is here

For all the readers of this blog - - 

My time with Typepad is gone now, and I want to thank all of you who visited here regularly. You can follow me - and view my post history from Typepad - on my new Wordpress blog, also entitled Gridley Fires.

Thanks!

For all who downloaded my novella, The Blue Bicycle, yesterday, a most heartfelt thanks for your interest. I hope you're enjoying the read, and please pass along this offer to your reading friends. It's open until 11:59 pm, Pacific Standard Time, October 6th. It's available at this location.

Cereal and Serials

I wasn't aware this sort of publishing opportunity was avalable, but it certainly bears looking into.

With Kindle Serials, Amazon hopes to reinvent a format that already exists. Jeff Bezosdragged out the obligatory Dickens reference at the LA press conference, but serial fiction had a presence online before Amazon (and a presence offline after Dickens: Armistead Maupin’s “Tales of the City” and Candace Bushnell’s “Sex and the City,” for instance). The website Tuesday Serial compiles links to many online serials and offers advice about writing them. Authors likeClaudia Christian and Lyn Thorne-Alder have written online serials for years. And longform journalism site and e-singles publisher Byliner launched Byliner Serials last month.

 

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What's a Writer To Do, Other Than Hope For a Print Book Contract?

I do have a print book soon to be out (honest), with an indie publisher. I really like the publisher - we e-mail back and forth regularly, and I really like our contract terms. Still, I've been exploring other publishing avenues than the traditional, even the increasingly popular, such as Lulu, Amazon's CreateSpace, and others.

image via ebookpublishing-digitalpublishing.blogspot.com

 

One site that's growing in popularity is Smashwords, and their site has a presentation on the growing emergence of e-books. Some of its pertinent points, some of which you may want to take exception to, particularly if you have a distinct love for the print book:

• Traditional publishing practices have ossified (no kidding! If you're a writer, just thumb through your rejection letters and try to find a succinct reason for the rejections)
• While e-books cost significantly less than print books, the author's  percentage on e-books is as little as 30% of the book retail price, as much as 80%. (You'd be lucky to get 15% in a trad contract for a print book.)
• Authors (even well-established trad ones) are in large numbers flocking to self-publishing in order to get books out there quickly. (Time to gain an agent and have him/her begin marketing: 1-3 years. Time to have a book out once it's accepted by a publisher: 1-2 years. So you're looking at 2 to 5 years to see the book in print, once you've completed the manuscript.)
• Between 2009 and 2010, e-books jumped from 3% to 8% of the total books published yearly. (This speaks to the emergence of e-book readers as well as to the growing popularity of e-books - driven, I think, by the lower e-book prices as much as anything else.)
• e-book publishers such as Amazon's  DTP (Digital Text Platform) and Smashwords have the ability to help get your books on numerous book sale sites. 
• Backlists, i.e., older books you've published become more important with e-books (they draw attention to your ability to be more than a one-hit-wonder)

You have to compete for readers' attention in ever-new ways with e-books, but you'd have to do that with a trad pub contract. E-books do seem the wave of the future - the only challenge is marketing them, but that's a whole other subject.

2012 shortlist announced | The Man Booker Prizes

The books shortlisted this year should be encouraging to new novelists and those published by indie presses. Read on:

11 September 2012

The six books were chosen by a panel of judges chaired by Sir Peter Stothard, Editor of the Times Literary Supplement. The shortlisted books were selected from the longlist of 12 announced in July. 

The shortlist is:

Author, Title (Publisher)
Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists (Myrmidon Books)
Deborah Levy, Swimming Home (And Other Stories/Faber & Faber)
Hilary Mantel, Bring up the Bodies (Fourth Estate)
Alison Moore, The Lighthouse (Salt)
Will Self, Umbrella (Bloomsbury)
Jeet Thayil, Narcopolis (Faber & Faber)

ManBookerPrize

 Visit Bob's website here and his FB fan page here.

 

The Writer As Many Characters

image via awpwriter.org

The Writer’s Chronicle, September 2012 Issue

The Writer’s Chronicle is my “go-to” magazine for perspectives that will help me grow as a writer. Simple as that. It’s a university organ, and as such it leans toward the academic approach to creative writing; still, there’s plenty of relevance, for this seat-of-the-pants writer, at least. 

In the interest of time (yours - you’re welcome), I’m only going to spout off on two article/essays that interest me in this issue. One, “Borges as Self - Toward Teaching Creative Writers,” (see what I mean about the academic approach?) by Eric LeMay begins by using the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges as an example of many people inhabiting the creative writer’s psyche, and how to channel those personality complexities into fiction. 

All fiction writers at some point realize they are not the personality when they write that they are when “in real life." According to LeMay, the creative writing instructor’s task is first to make students aware of that personality divide, and then teach them how to accept it and use it. 

A quote from the article:

“When students develop an objective purchase on that part of their identities from which their writing emerges, they become more responsible for, in control of, and reflective about themselves as writers.” (emphasis is Lemay’s)

What the author of the article seems to be saying is that, properly done, creative writing instruction also helps create a more self-aware writer (emphasis mine), hence one not prone to vomit out psychoses on the page in self-indulgent fashion. Hence these writers become better, more responsible persons by becoming better writers.

The other article, “An Epistolary Plea,” by Heather Stanfill, interests me because I use the technique - and it's a way for your many personalities to shine. If you’re not familiar, it’s the use of your characters’ letters (remember writing letters, before e-mail and Facebook?) in a novel to shine a more detailed light on your characters’ makeups. Stanfill doesn’t go into a lot of detail here, but the proper use of the epistolary technique can do in a minimum of words  what it might take volumes more to do through internalization of the characters thoughts and though dialogue and action. 

It’s an old technique, and some have made use of e-mail in recent times to modernize it. Quite rightly, I think, Stanfill writes that for the epistolary technique to work using modern communication techniques will take some doing: these use slang, too-clipped language, and a tumble of data that give little to the reader in the way of characterization. Of course, someone will, sooner or later, make revolutionary use of this old tool in our modern settings.

 

 

 

Balancing Opinion With Perspective

image via mobilism.org

 

Harper’s Magazine, September 2012 Issue

 

As a reader, my affection for Harper’s Magazine continues to grow. That’s not because of its leftward political cant, but because its articles usually contain explanatory substance behind most provocative statements made. That could be because with the U.S.'s current political malaise, the leftward leaners feel a need to explain every step they take, but then that’s an issue for at least a six-pak of someone’s lager. 

But even as I write this, I have to confess to occasional frustration with Harper’s reportage. My frustration is most evident in this month’s centerpiece articles on Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. But some explanatory background:

As with the The Atlantic's reporting previously written about here, there’s a lot of hyperbole concerning what the Prez should have accomplished in his first term. In pursuit of this angst, David Samuels follows Obama from fund raiser to fund raiser, and he gives us as complete a picture of the man’s glaring complexities (the no doubt necessary complexities) anyone must have in order to compete in the Presidential sweepstakes.  

Regarding Romney, Dan Halpern  is less detailed but just as jaundiced in his examination of the challenger. Here, he portrays Romney, not through a personal microscope, but through the montage of perspectives within the wild and wooly Republican base, perspectives Romney must juggle (maybe to make everyone equally unhappy with him?) in order to keep his base corralled. Talk about herding cats - the Republicans are now having to learn how to manage intra-party diversity, as the Dems have always had to do.

What leaves me with a bad taste here is that both Samuels’ and Halpern’s dissatisfaction with their subjects isn’t supported with specific political weaknesses. Both writers are trying damned hard, it seems, to portray some depth, but their reportage is weighed down by their own biases. As a result, Harper’s gives us opinion pieces, not journalism we can use.

I’m also disappointed in a piece of fiction by Stephen King that I’d expected to like. The story, “Batman and Robin Have an Altercation,” concerns two elderly men who, in the midst of a living-in-the-past conversation and interactions with relatives, manage to get under one another’s skin. You would expect King’s writing to be taut, occasionally provocative with a tad of sentiment, and it is. My problem here is one of a genre novelist trying after all these years to write short literary fiction. He has all the writerly chops, but the story leaves me as cold as one by a mediocre MFA grad. Sorry, Stephen - I hate having to leave you with that.

Harper’s has always enthralled with their you-can’t-make-this-stuff-up snippets that speak volumes about life in the U.S. and within the modern world, and they don’t disappoint in this issue. Also, there’s a spectacular photo essay on Africa’s Niger Delta that will take your breath away.

You win some, and you lose some in taking on a magazine issue, but as I’ve written before, being an editor and trying to reach the complete spectrum of a magazine’s readership is a tough job. I’ll keep on reading. Things will be better next month.

 

 

Fall Books Preview: 20 New Releases to Check Out - Eleanor Barkhorn & Ashley Fetters - The Atlantic

The below intro to the article says it all regarding books releases. You might find fault with who's on the list and who isn't (there are more than those on the artwork below), but I suspect you're like me: you'll find two or three here you just can't resist reading:

 

Fall is the most wonderful time of the year for book lovers: Publishers save their best titles for this season in an attempt to get their authors onto year-end best-of lists and holiday gift guides. This year brings a wide range of great books by authors old and new: the last writings of Christopher Hitchens and a debut novel by Emma Straub; the next installment in The Passage trilogy and J.K. Rowling's first novel for adults; Jessica Valenti's thoughts on parenting and Naomi Wolf's reflections on female anatomy; and more. 

 

The Atlantic

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Much Ado About Some Things

The Atlantic, September 2012

 

This is as close to a themed issue as I’ve seen from The Atlantic, and as you might expect, the focus is on this year’s Presidential election. For someone who follows politics, there’s little new here, despite James Fallows’ gaming of the Romney/Obama showdown, a bit on the Latino Vote, and the most talked about article of some time , Ta-Nehisi Coates’ critical evaluation of race in America from the standpoint of the U.S.’s first black president. But back to that in a minute.

One other article sure to put letters in the editor’s box is Hanna Rosin’s sex on campus article. Here, Rosin speaks rather cautiously of the rise of feminist sexual romps on campus, how women are focusing on careers and independence (and that includes sexual) instead of the old saws about catching a husband during those halcyon four years.

An there are two other quirky ones: how tequila does or doesn’t make you crazy and, how the millennial generation is ignoring the old values of home and car ownership - and how that generation’s turn of values might save our economy.

Now to Coates:

Much has been said for years about a need for a national conversation on race, and Coates does his damnedest to begin one, centering on the Obama Presidency. Ignoring the 2008 hype about the U.S. as a post-racial society, Coates also all but ignores the insane charges by his political opponents and centers on Obama’s reaction to all of that. Obama, says Coates, has been more than reticent to amp up race talk, because he (Obama) fully understands the nation hasn’t come very far since Emancipation, even since the racial liberties granted in the ‘sixties. Coates’ object here isn’t to condemn Obama, but to explain his racial reticence in light of the nation’s stalled experiments in equality. And to wish Obama had ventured more bravely into this social and political arena.

Atlantic Fiction:

Emma Donoghue has written a present tense, third person story, that has a first person feel, “Onward.” It’s a pretty ho-hum story until you either realize (if your’e a student of literary history) that it’s about a woman, Caroline Thompson, who was befriended by Charles Dickens,  or are told so by an editorial footnote. Actually, I find the editorial footnote much more interesting than the story, but then that’s me. 

There are other pieces of interest here in you’re a fan of The Atlantic. But I’m becoming a bit dismayed with this mag. Why? For years it’s been one I could look to, not only to set the table when it comes to controversial social and political issues, but to suggest a way to answers and solutions. As much as I admire Coates‘ article, I don’t see a way out of the political darkness in it, nor in Rosin’s sex expose (it’s hardly an expose). Perhaps I’ll have to rely on the millennial article for that and hope for better things in the next issue.

 

Magazine Time - - Comin' Up!

I started to dig into my backlog of magazines and will let you know what I think of them over the next couple of weeks. 

image via zappablamma.com

 

The trouble with opinions on magazines (and I'm always full of opinions) is that they're edited with the general public in mind. Thus, you might find only an article or two in each to address your concerns or push your buttons. In fact, having done a little of this sort of editing in the dimly lighted past, I have to take my hat off to anyone who edits periodicals - its a mighty task!

Having said that, I may sound cranky in some of my opinions on opinionated periodicals, but what will underlie this alleged crankiness of mine will be how I view the substance of what I read.

As always, I value your opinions of my opinions.

See Bob's Web Site here.