Category Archives: Writers

San Francisco, Writers, All, Bay Area, Books, Writing, Publishing, Publishing:

We Lost A San Francisco Legend Today:RIP Kathi Kamen Goldmark

It is perhaps odd for me to write a eulogy for Kathi Kamen Goldmark because in truth I Kathi Kamen Goldmarkbarely knew her. I can say this: she always volunteered to speak or answer questions for the NCBPMA, and because of her friendliness and approachability she was one of the first local producers I knew by name. She was one of those vivacious people that seems to be everywhere, and always smiling to boot. Being a producer is a tough job, and yet she never hesitated to answer a question or offer an explanation about why a certain guest would or wouldn’t be a fit for her show. She somehow managed to do this job while writing books and performing in the literary group the Rock Bottom Remainders.

As I’ve embarked on this journey in the Bay Area publishing world, I always imagined the day when Kathi and I would be friends. Not because she was some milestone of important authors (though she was!) but because she had that kind of warmth that made me think I could do this, that the writing and publishing scene isn’t a clique, but a community.

In the coming weeks there will be numerous posts from people who knew her well, that will explain better than I ever can why the loss of this luminary light will affect the Bay Area forever. I only wish to contribute this to make it known how many lives she touched, even among her acquaintances. It breaks my heart to know that I will never be able to tell her what a role model she was for me, and for so many others. But perhaps if you are reading this now, it will remind you of all the lives you may touch, and the special place you may find if you keep following your dreams. A space that is all your own—like Kathi, whose presence in the literary world is irreplaceable. Kathi Kamen Goldmark, you are missed.

 

All, Books, Writing, Publishing, Writers

RIP Maurice Sendak, Author of Where the Wild Things Are

A Fan Letter So Good The Child Up and Ate It
If you were born in the 80s or any time thereafter, you probably loved Where the Wild Things Are when you were a child. Which means today is a sad day for you. Did you know Maurice Sendak was gay? And snarky? Is the “Wild Rumpus” a euphemism for sex? Check out this interview Stephen Colbert did with Maurice Sendak.
Books, Writing, Publishing, Writers, Writing

Writing the First Chapter of A Novel

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Caesar fighting ninjas (from How I Met Your Mother)

Two Chapter Ones

Novelling never seems to go as planned. When I started this novel, I told myself I would spend as much time on the later chapters as on the opening ones. Everyone spends forever writing their first chapter, of course because it is the first thing people read. I’ve also discovered that writing the first chapter is one of the hardest things to write. Why? Because what the reader wants is exactly the opposite of what the author wants. The writer wants to introduce you to their world: who these characters are, where they live, what they’re in search of. The reader hasn’t decided yet whether she cares about any of those things. The reader wants to know what happened: what’s the story? What’s the conflict? Where is this going? Complicating things further, the reader really does need some of that background information. Well into the novel, they know what the characters look like, where they live, what kind of world the story inhabits. So the author has this challenge: they must get the reader involved in the story right away while sneaking in little details that give the reader something to picture. When my reading group first looked over my story, I realized they didn’t know diving in whether the world was going to be suburban or fantasy, if it takes place today or fifty years ago. Thus every detail in chapter one matters, because the readers is starting from nothing. Not only do you have to sneak them in, you have to give just the right details in just the right order. 

 

The other challenge of first chapters is that they often a depict the world before the adventure began. Even Indiana Jones, as exciting as his life is, begins his story teaching at his university. Or take The Goonies: that action-packed story begins at home. Why even show the part before the kids discover the treasure map? Why not begin the story in the middle of the action, when they sneak into the cafe? The answer is that we want to know who these kids are, how they are like us, so we feel like this adventure could happen to us too. The problem comes in that many (most?) writers get lost in this set-up, taking too long in the introductions. 

 

Naturally, I’ve been tweaking Chapter 1 all along, but today I finished my first total rewrite. I don’t know about you, but I don’t like rewriting chapters. I already did the work, I’d rather revise than start from scratch. But I finally found the hook I needed. The main problem I had was that I wanted to start the story with the lead character waking up from a dream, which limits the options for the scene. In trying to imagine how to make the scene more exciting, I kept imagining her awakening somewhere strange, like in the back of truck. But I couldn’t make that work. I know that mortal peril is the best hook to interest the readers, but how could I put my character in mortal peril when she’s just awoken in the safety of her room? 

 

I also asked myself what exactly I needed to convey in this scene, for the reasons above. The main thing I wanted to get across was that the protagonist is depressed, but her boyfriend is even more so. I thought I had shown this, but it didn’t seem to me like the readers were getting it, not to the extent that I needed. And the answer to the question: “How can I show that this guy is really unwell?” also gave me the answer to the question “How can I endanger the characters and hook the reader right away?” 

 

Then I went through the old chapter one and I highlighted all the stuff that I thought I wanted to keep in the first chapter. Despite having whittled the chapter down to what I thought were the “essentials,” it was surprising when I did this how little I highlighted. I may keep some of the other content for later chapters. I stuffed most of the keeper-stuff into the beginning, and then rewrote the chapter without so much as a glance at what I had before.

 

Are you curious?

 

 

 

I’d love your feedback, especially if you like the old chapter one better.
Writers

Why Authors Need Twitter

I wrote an article for Opportunities Planeet on why artists, authors, or anyone who needs to market a product should be on Twitter.

For Anyone Looking to Market a Product, Twitter Can Be Even More Important Than Facebook

Twitter birdie Twitter is the second-most popular social network in the world, and the ninth most-most popular website worldwide. But I believe for marketing, Twitter is the most important social media account to have. First let me say I’m comparing Twitter to Facebook not because they are the most similar, or because I think you should neglect to promote yourself on Facebook. I compare Twitter to Facebook because most people see Facebook as an important part of their marketing strategy, while neglecting the little blue bird. Sure, Facebook is the second-most popular website in the world. But most of the people who use it expect it to be a personal space. Facebook is where people share photos of their vacation and videos of kittens. You are expected to have one profile for all the different “hats” you wear, encompassing what you do at work, how you spend your free time, what music enjoy and what stories you’ve been reading…the whole kit and caboodle. Twitter allows you to brand yourself. You can have a multitude of Twitter profiles and no one frowns upon it as they would if you had a variety of Facebook personae. This means if you’ve written the book Zombies With Guns you can have a Twitter feed that focuses exclusively on weapons, ammo, and surviving the zombie apocalypse. On Facebook, your friends and family would be irritated by your constant stream of zombie and gun info, because they are not your target audience. On Twitter, your account is specifically for that purpose, so all of your followers would be people interested in that kind of content. Sure, you can get fifty of your friends to like your company on Facebook, but on Twitter those followers are not your pals but potential customers. Facebook has created a number of ways to compete with this advantage. They created groups, then changed, them, and are now getting rid of them. They created company pages. But in my experience, it is harder to gain followers of a Facebook company page than a Twitter page, even though many more people are on Facebook! That’s because people go to Facebook to talk to people they already know in real life. People go to Twitter to find out what’s going on in the world and to receive updates on their favorite subjects.

Read the rest of the article
at Opportunities Planet

Posted via email from Future is Fiction

All, Books, Writing, Publishing, Writers, Writing

Fun With the Freelance Calculator

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Hourly-work-goals-for-freelanc

I've known for a while that Freelance Switch offers this super-nifty calculator that will help you determine how much money you should charge per hour based on your cost of living and quantity worked. I hadn't really taken advantage of it yet, because when you first get started as a freelancer there's about a million and one things on your to-do list that don't make money directly, and this was nowhere near the top of the list. But last night I made up for it by running the calculator several times, and recording the output. Putting the data I pulled from the calculator, I made three separate charts: the first was based on bare-bones survival (no eating out, no health insurance, etc.), the second was based on a decent living (hiring a bookeeper, budgeting for retirement) and the third was for "making it' (budgeting for concerts, higher rent, decent Christmas gifts). Considering each chart, I plugged in different combinations of potential hours worked per day (my hours are on the low side because I'd like to devote a few hours daily to my blog or novel). This gave me hard numbers for how much I need to work to survive/succeed as a freelancer. Or conversely, how much I need to charge to work the hours I want to work. I think this will help motivate me to either work harder or negotiate harder for more pay. It may also allow me to not stress out and work 24/7 because I know when I'm making a living wage. 

I thought I'd share this as it is a way of using the freelance calculator that maybe you haven't thought about. 

Posted via email from Paperback Pusher

Books, Writing, Publishing, Writers

TODAY IS TOWEL DAY!

Image thanks to http://markbult.com/2007/05/towel-day/

But why a towel? Because, as the Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy informs us:

A towel, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitch hiker can have. Partly it has great practical value:

you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta;

you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours;

you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon;

use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth;

wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat;

wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal,
it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you — daft as a bush, but very ravenous);

you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course

dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc.

Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have “lost”. What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth f the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

via havecoffeewillwrite.com but actually a quote from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Posted via email from Future is Fiction

Writers, Capitalism, Economics, Books, Writing, Publishing, Gotta Hear This Music, Publishing:, Tech

Some Predictions About Books By Way of Some Predictions About Music

There’s been a lot of talk lately about the “future of publishing.” After all, books have never had as much cash to spare as the recording industry, and look at the mess they’re in. Already it is not so difficult for a self-published manuscript to sell itself on Amazon.com. What will happen when everything goes digital? The suggestion is that there will be an opening of the gates, and the latest best-seller will stand on the same virtual shelf with thirty self-published manuscripts. The optimists claim that this is where the great unpublished books will be discovered and pessimists point to the unleashed masses of poorly thought-out, half-written tomes filled with spelling errors. But it doesn’t matter if fantastic self-published books are available if they’re drowned out by countless other books vying for the consumer’s attention.
I’m thinking of this issue again because Chuck Wendig just wrote a post on this very subject. I must requote a quote that he included in his piece from a Salon.com article (“When Anyone Can Be A Published Author“)

Furthermore, as observers like Chris Anderson (in “The Long Tail”) and social scientists like Sheena Iyengar (in her new book “The Art of Choosing”) have pointed out, when confronted with an overwhelming array of choices, most people do not graze more widely. Instead, if they aren’t utterly paralyzed by the prospect, their decisions become even more conservative, zeroing in on what everyone else is buying and grabbing for recognizable brands because making a fully informed decision is just too difficult and time-consuming. As a result, introducing massive amounts of consumer choice leads to situations in which the 10 most popular items command the vast majority of the market share, while thousands of lesser alternatives must divide the leftovers into many tiny portions.

Chuck says in response, ” that doesn’t sound like what will happen when the FUTURE OF PUBLISHING is made manifest. It sounds like what happens right bloody now.”
As it is, there are about 100,000 brand new titles published and printed every year, and it is fair to say that even the most devoted readers may touch 1/100th of that. If you include self-published books, the number of books published is 600,000 to a million. That doesn’t take into account the thousands of reprints of absolute classics that exist. I am pretty sure that if I devoted my entire life to reading I would not get through every book on my imaginary wish list before I breathe my last breath. Now imagine compounding this with an onslaught of unpublished manuscripts, from gorgeous to garbage, that would land on the market place if the result of this revolution were a totally leveled playing field. What would happen?
Continue reading Some Predictions About Books By Way of Some Predictions About Music →

Writers, Writing

Overcoming Writers Block: Tickling the Muse II

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In last year’s TED Talk speech the author of Eat, Pray, Love explains how she is able to handle the terrible pressure to make something genius after having a huge breakout bestseller. Her solution is to do as folks did before the Age of Reason, and think of your genius as something outside of yourself (the bonus is a great Tom Waits story).

This has been unbelievably helpful for me lately. If you are a creative person who has been haunted any kind of creative block, I highly recommend you watch it.

Don’t worry, the rest of my post will still be waiting below…

Elizabeth Gilbert’s TED Talk on Finding Your Genius

To open in a new tab: Elizabeth Gilbert’s TED talk on Personifying Your Genius

Finding Your Genius

In short, she suggests that artists need a way to “create a safe distance” between ourselves and the anxiety we feel about our work. Thinking of genius as some kind of separate entity frees us from our fears that our brilliance won’t match our expectations.

It also means I get to have a new imaginary friend, a Puckish deity that hops like an invisible monkey around my computer desk, taunting me with unfinished sentences and half-baked ideas.

After I began to think of my own creativity as this impish being it assumed a greater importance in my life. My art and my creative space was no longer a task to be mastered or even a puzzle to be solved. It was demigod as revered as Dionysus (I suspect they’re cousins). It was also my oldest and dearest friend. In both cases, the measure of time and respect I had to give to the creative process increased dramatically, as it would if the Macy’s window mannequin came to life and offered to be your sweetheart.

So I would like to take a moment to speak to you about your demiurge, the fiery creative beast who lives in your belly, showers you with presents, abandons you for another woman, only to wake you from a dream as if she’d never left.

You know you, your muse. Let’s talk about her.

Have you been treating her right? Or have you been resentful? Avoiding her calls? Talking trash about her to your friends? Putting off quality time so you can watch telly, play Spades, or other trivial nonsense where she’s clearly not invited? Do you really think a Goddess, no matter how lonely, wants to hang out while you update your Facebook page? And if she did, you’d likely be annoyed that she showed up at such an inopportune moment.

Remember, time devoted to your genius need not be a two-way street: she is a demigod, and under no obligation to hang out with the likes of you in the first place. Know that there are many whose shrines to her greatness far surpass yours, that there are those who have devoted whole temples to her—and so many of these devotees with their trinkets and their affirmations have only seen the brightest glimpse of her visage. She owes you nothing, wretch.

Is your shrine tidy and free of cobwebs? Do you offer her gifts? Do you meditate daily on her awesomeness? If you hesitate (as I do!) to offer anything but a resounding “Yes!” to these queries, consider yourself lucky, chump. Lucky that she comes to you at all. Considering your petulance, she probably has a thing for you.

Don’t make that face, I’m sure you’ve had your suspicions. You wouldn’t have gotten into this whole creation thing in the first place if you hadn’t suspected the Muse pays more attention to you. Admit it, she makes you feel special. All those nights facing off with the keyboard to create something that will likely never put a penny in your pocket or a lover between your sheets were only fun when she was there.  And when she didn’t show up you resented her. Who the hell was she, besides a Goddess, besides the very thing that makes humans beautiful and inspirational, who the hell was she besides the reason we have libraries and museums and video games and Cathedrals—so what to all that, you could have gone drinking with your friends, both of them.

No matter that when you’re swilling Cosmos at cocktail parties you slur that her creative spark is your goddamned reason for living.

Here’s what I believe: you like her; she likes you. When you are ready to settle down and put her first in your life, she will be there for you. When you are a monk in your devotion and a lover in your ardor, when each day begins with an act of devotion to your creative urge, she will reward you with all the brilliance of your ego’s fantasies. You know, and I know, she will be waiting.

Writing, Writers

Better Than A Rubick’s Cube

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On Tickling the Muse

[Part I]

pieces of the Grand Canyon

I enjoy writing. Sometimes I write a blog comment on some random blog because I am looking forward to stringing the words together. Connecting ideas like a Lego castle. I have to remind myself of this when my novel is broken down into chunks that look a great deal like homework assignments.

When you have writers block, it’s about not being able to find the words to match your ego. Unfortunately, you need a hefty ego to write a novel. It’s a huge fucking task and you need the possibility of greatness as a carrot on the end of the stick. The problem becomes that we let the ego frame the questions we’re asking. Instead of just telling a story or writing a sentence, we ask the pen to produce the most brilliant and witty thing ever written. No wonder we spend so much time staring at blank paper.

I have to remind myself that this is all just a game and I write the rules. The game is not “write the most amazing thing ever” because that would be a sucky boring game full of disappointment and everyone knows it. Instead I must see what little dance I can get the words to do. A much more fun game would be “Let’s see if we can make the rhythm and cadence of the paragraph match the intensity of the characters’ current emotional state” or “Let’s see if we can make a really off the wall pop culture metaphor.” How’s about: “Let’s see if we can find a way to make an allusion to Jorge Luis Borges.” It’s a puzzle with a practically infinite number of solutions. You can always solve it one way and come up with a more elegant solution later.

Of course this is easier said than done.

I have a lot of “talking head” scenes, where I’ve come up with the dialogue but the descriptions are *weak. I would edit such a scene and it felt like playing “fill in the blanks” with description. This stifled my creativity as I had a preconceived notion about the length of each passage. I was asking myself the least creative questions (“What does the furniture look like?”), thinking inside the box.

And when I am producing this kind of blanks and boxes drivel, it helps to remind myself of the game. I do this—I write—for fun. Despite any bitching about “writer’s block” in some ways I can’t help but play this game.  If I’m going to write a sentence, I’m usually going to take the extra time to think of the best possible way to say it. I will not hesitate to ask myself if there’s some way I can throw in a joke, a bold visual,a  fresh metaphor—yay, even a pun. It may even be second nature, but I’d hate to say so because I know I lose points for allowing a cliché. Every tweet, every grocery list, every note in the margins will be scrutinized and scored, as fast and sure as any Yatzee roll.

From here on out, I’m not allowing myself to think of writing as a chore. Sodoku is a chore. Farmville is a chore. Word search? A chore. Character, story, dialogue: Not chores—challenges. Some things to wrap my mind around. If some beauty happens, so much the better.

Pieces of the Grand Canyon

Something I’ve been listening to: Just Jack – Writer’s Block

*which is weird because when I was young I always prided myself on writing descriptions but felt very insecure about my dialogue.

Books, Writing, Publishing, Culture, Publishing:, Writers, Capitalism, Economics

We Burn Books

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Burning the library in slow motion: how copyright extension has banished millions of books to the scrapheap of history Boing Boing.

I came across this nice article by Cory Doctorow on Boing Boing wherein he makes some interesting points on how current copyright laws have censored the majority of books.

the legal changes introduced in the years after Fahrenheit 451 did more than just extend terms. Congress eliminated the benign practice of the renewal requirement (which had guaranteed that 85% of works and 93% of books entered the public domain after 28 years because the authors and publishers simply didn’t want or need a second copyright term.) And copyright, which had been an opt-in system (you had to comply with some very minor formalities to get a copyright) became an opt out system (you got a copyright automatically when you “fixed” the work in material form, whether you wanted it or not.) Suddenly the entire world of informal and non commercial culture — from home movies that provide a wonderful lens into the private life of an era, to essays, posters, locally produced teaching materials — was swept into copyright. And kept there for the life of the author plus 70 years. The effects were culturally catastrophic.

This issue brings to mind the hardest part, for me, of working in publishing—seeing how many books are destroyed and being powerless to stop it. You would think that out-of-print books are worth more, since the moment it is declared out of print it is limited edition, i.e. those that exist now may be the only copies left in the world. The book industry in the only one where retailers are allowed to return the product if it doesn’t sell. But if they hold onto the book after it is out of print, the publisher will refuse the returns. Thus as soon as a book has been declared out-of-print book sellers nationwide box up every last company and return them to the publisher, who, having nowhere to sell them, has them demolished.

Naturally, you are wondering why they don’t just donante the books to libraries or other book-hungry institutions. The problem is again returns: they assume that a certain percentage of these would find their way back to the bookstores,  who will return it for full price. On each of these books the publisher, author and distributor are then paying the bookstore for the book and making zero profit—a risk they’re not willing to take.

So every time a book goes out of print, it is also removed from the shelves and incinerated. Yay, capitalism!