Sometimes I think I (and perhaps others) persist in writing fiction for the sheer irresponsibility of it. Fiction writing is for daredevils. The likelihood that you will find a net waiting for you when you land is negligible.
Today on Google+, I’m of two minds about my book sales.
By now, I think we’re all familiar with ‘the kind of boost’ books can get from Amazon rankings. And, unlike hardcovers, ebooks are cheap and easy to store, bringing the sort of list manipulation once worthy of investigative journalism (!) to the masses. Which perhaps raises an ethical dilemma but most definitely leads to the first ever ‘Plus Ça Change’ poll.
Today on Google+, is it okay to buy your own book on Amazon?
In the past—say, the 1990s—writers were rare enough that the presence of one or several could be used as bait to lure curiosity-seekers into dusty, mould-ridden enclosures known as bookstores, where they would listen to these hothouse flowers read words aloud from printed pages. This was paralytically boring, of course, but writers were exotic creatures. It seemed worthwhile to hang around and hear them explain how they “came up with their ideas” and dispense advice to “young writers, just starting out.” Then, before you knew it, you were speaking to a writer in person and watching him or her scratch your actual name into the front of a book, which you then had to buy because it was ruined. You had fallen for it again. Writers. They could not be resisted.
Today on Google+, “A Disruptive Approach to Literary Readings.” You can subscribe to “Plus Ça Change” — my daily G+ column — via email by signing up here.
I also finished Jim Hanas’s collection Why They Cried, which abounded with the mixture of well-drawn characters and mild surrealism that hits my proverbial sweet spot.
Kind words for Why They Cried from Tobias Carroll, TONY-certified bachelor and nerd Jeopardy hustler. (Google Alerts failed to deliver this to me. It appeared a few weeks ago.)
I created a story-by-story Spotify playlist to go with my short story collection Why They Cried. Here are the tracks:
For a full explanation, check out today’s column on Google+.
The best book I was required to read in high school was The Sun Also Rises, although I didn’t know that at the time. How could I? I was 16. I had little responsibility and no expenses. My pining was biologic and urgent, yes, but it was also vague and temporary–or so it seemed.
InDigest magazine asked me — and a bunch of other people — about our favorite required reading. I picked The Sun Also Rises (although I cannot recommend it for teenagers.)
It’s frightening to think that the Internet now has a history. Not just a technical history, but a cultural history. I wasn’t fully prepared for that. There were CB radios, then BBSes, and then grunge, then the Internet, and then I guess I thought there would be something else. Nudism or something. But the Internet, it turns out, is forever (as far as all present are concerned). It is a macro-development, not a micro-trend, and as such, it even has a literary history.
Today on Google+, I consider the Golden Age of Online Writing. (Hint: We’re not in it.)
First, the New Vastness is really just the old vastness made visible (which sounds like a Heideggerian horror film in itself). It used to be incredibly hard to go from making private work to public work. There were a lot of contenders and few outlets. However, the poor odds were largely concealed, leaving lots of room for ‘the dream.’ The dream was nice, but now we’re waking up, which can be very disappointing.
Today on Google+, I talk about the New Vastness. Next week, I’m going to name this daily column thing I’m doing on G+. You can read even without a G+ account, but if you want to comment and need an invite, send me an email.
In the 1950s, Network screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky said that ‘television, the scorned stepchild of drama, may well be the basic theater of our century.’ Might this be true of reality TV in the 21st century? Sometimes reality TV surfaces ‘characters’ who may well belong in a future American canon, along with Gregor Samsa and Holden Caulfield. Don’t believe me? Here are three real-life characters I wish I’d made up.
In today’s G+ column, I consider three reality show characters that make me wonder, “Is fiction still necessary?”
I once heard Richard Nash say that making e-book devices simulate the turning of pages was like making ‘cars that shit.’ When moving from one technology to another, the point is to keep (or improve on) the features of the earlier technology while squashing its bugs. Flipping pages, like horse shit, is a bug.
My Google+ dispatch for today is about book signings.
So of course I have to try everything new in digital publishing. Here is a pic of Evan Jacobs holding the” autograph” I sent him via his Kindlegraph e-book signing system, which you may have read about.
Kindlegraph seems to be at the proof-of-concept stage, but it is dead simple, and there’s something about its scrappiness that I liked compared to the other systems I’ve seen demonstrated. The prime drawbacks are that you can’t determine the font of the inscription and—in my case—that isn’t really even my signature. I accidentally picked a canned one and I can’t change it. Evan says fixes for both are in the works.
That said, if you want to test it out, as is, you can request my Kindlegraph. You’ll just need a Twitter account and the e-mail address for your Kindle.
(Another flaw, in case you were wondering, is that you don’t have to actually own the book the request a signature, although I’m thinking your Kindle will look pretty silly with my Kindlegraph in it without my book.)
It was a time when Ernest Hemingway traded punches with Wallace Stevens on a Key West dock after Wallace had humiliated Hemingway’s sister at a party.
Where Have All The Good Literary Feuds Gone? | The Outlet: the Blog of Electric Literature
I just like thinking about this fight.
Brilliant book cover designer David Gee—he designed the cover for Why They Cried—is sharing some rejected design comps (like the one above) with all identifying copy removed. Sublime. (via The Second Pass.)
Flannery O’Connor was a cartoonist in college. (via Super I.T.C.H » The Cartooning of Flannery O’Connor). Collection on the way from Fantagraphics. Hat tip to Carlos Yu.
To publish a definitive collection of short stories in one’s late 60s seems to me, as an American writer, a traditional and a dignified occasion, eclipsed in no way by the fact that a great many of the stories in my current collection were written in my underwear.
John Cheever, quoted over at Flavorwire
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