Why Authors Need You to Buy Lots & Lots of Books
or,
Why Most of Us Don't Quit Our Day Jobs,
or,
What is this Thing Called Royalties?

a most Excellent Explanation & Analysis by Mr. Barry Lyga, which I urge everyone who wants to understand the publishing business to read.

We finally watched MILK (as in "Harvey") this weekend. Very moving and well-done. It made me want to revisit - and share with you - this long & thoughtful post by libba_bray, written back in May 2009 after California's sad & terrible vote upholding Prop. 8. Libba begins:

I was raised by a gay father. My dad came of age in the 1940’s in the Deep South. Being gay was more than just not okay then; it was downright dangerous. . . . When my father came out to our family, I was fourteen, and it was explained to me that we had to keep it a secret because my father would lose his job and might be attacked physically. The message conveyed was one of fear and shame which trickled down to all of us . . . .

"Our fathers used to say that the railway had killed the understanding of towns, that men came to them hurriedly, arrived by the back-door, left hurriedly, and had no sense of approach, fruition or farewell. They said - quite rightly - that the road and the river were the two proper entries to any town, any town of tradition and lineage, any town that had grown up through the millioned intercourse of men.

"But the railway did not do as much harm as the automobile has done . . . . [T]oday Saulieu is but an episode on one of the most obvious of modern trajectories, and one where when men stop they stop only to eat. They come to it in a flash, not knowing through what they came; and to go on through that landscape which is crammed with history . . . is only another flash: all over in an hour, and nothing seen." -- Hilaire Belloc, "Saulieu of the Morvan" [a town in French Burgundy], from the series "The Tuileries Brochures, published bi-monthly by Ludowici-Celadon Company, Makers of Ludowici Tile, for distribution among the members of the architectural profession" Vol. IV, no. 1, January 1932


Also of interest are passages like: "...the automobile runs in crowds - or ran when people had money - through the place. For the rich coming from Britain to the Riviera found Saulieu on their way, and it was a convenient place to stop for food " and later: "They cook (or did cook when the rich still passed through, as they may pass again)...well.."

I haven't even finished the no doubt excellent new Salon article by Laura Miller on "the kickass young heroines of urban fantasy fiction" but this had me seeing red:

"...the term "urban fantasy" (meaning fantasies set in the contemporary world) was first applied to the work of such writers as Neil Gaiman and John Crowley, whose aspirations are more literary. . . . "

Oh, the giantness of this GIANT FAIL!!!!!

Of course it's only 2 male authors who are cited - probably the only fantasists who she can even think of with "literary aspirations" . . . . .

. . . and quoted Cynthia Heimel: "Don't listen to anybody, don't copy anything. Go after that twisted, deranged core of your being, wrench it into the light, and you will make one million dollars." (--an old essay in the Village Voice, reprinted in her collection A Girl's Guide to Chaos)

Now Louise Marley is singing the same song, in the key of Wise: http://lmarley.livejournal.com/84992.html

My Post-Apocalyptic Barter Skill - can you guess? Guess, then click on this delicious compilation by Liz Gorinsky for Tor.com (which includes a KGB report) and let her know yours.

Why isn't my website as clear & gorgeous as Michelle Shocked's?

$50,000 fourth novel prize for works published Jan 08-July 09, juried by Michael Chabon et al! Deadline July 1, so hurry up.

4 days left to listen to BBC's radio drama Darger and the Detective: "A play drawing on the writings of reclusive artist Henry Darger, imagining his inner life....Recorded in Chicago by actors from the Steppenwolf Theatre Company" by my radio pal Judith Kampfner!

MythPunk Army shirt from Zazzle by Cathrynne Valente (want! want!!)

My love for the Israeli writer David Grossman is great. Ever since I discovered his novel See Under: Love, I have considered him a personal pet of mine - even though I have not read enough of his other work. (Kelly Link did give me a copy of his YA novel The ZigZag Kid, which is terrific.) My love is renewed as I read his essay about Bruno Schultz in a recent New Yorker, and came upon this (a reflection on being a first novelist - or, as we say in the specfic field, a "young writer"):

A new writer is sometimes like a new baby in the family. He arrives from the unknown, and his family has to find a way to connect with him, to make him a little less "dangerous" in his newness and mystery. The relatives lean over the infant's crib, peer at him closely, and say, "Look, look, he has Uncle Jacob's nose! His chin is exactly like Aunt Malka's! Something similar happens when you first become an author. Everyone rushes to tell you who has influenced you, from whom you have learned, and, of course, from whom you have stolen.

I like this post by Neil Gaiman (in answer to a reader question - just skip the stuff at the top!) - it's been bruited about as a stern rebuttal to "Reader Entitlement," but the real meat of it, to me, is on what it takes to live a writer's life - the necessity of both living and writing - and the time it all takes!

We went last week - or was it the week before? or sometime before that...? - to the Irish Repertory Theater to see The Yeats Project, which 2-night spree deliasherman has brilliantly summarized here and here.

I was not as moved by The Countess Cathleen as Delia was - until they got to the final lines, which utterly break my heart:

Tell them who walk upon the floor of peace
That I would die and go to her I love;
The years like great black oxen tread the world,
And God the herdsman goads them on behind,
And I am broken by their passing feet.

Particularly poignant that they are spoken by Cathleen's foster mother (nursemaid). (I had meant to put this up for Mother's Day, but forgot in the weekend's flurry.)

I wonder if Dylan Thomas loved them, too?
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower . . . .

Really, we'd be watching these OK plays - listening, really, as they're solid verse without much action - and every few minutes a full, gorgeous unknown bit of Yeatsian glory would pop out......

Well, as T.S. Eliot said, "Yeats had nobody; we had Yeats."

An anonymous someone is handing out million dollar checks for scholarships for women & minorities, mostly to state schools. One check came with this note:

“It is hoped that this will make a substantial difference to your students during these challenging times, enabling a more confident, sharper focus on their studies with improved career and life prospects.” -- NYTimes, 4/25/09

Oh, my, yes. That's it.

British poet Ruth Padel's grandmother, Nora Barlow, was Charles Darwin's granddaughter and edited his letters. Barlow lived to 104, and Padel visited her often:

“I was looking after her one rainy Cambridge summer when she was pushing 100,” Ms. Padel said of her grandmother. “She had lost her short-term memory, but her long-term memory was very keen. She politely asked me what I was working on, which at the time was my Ph.D. thesis at Oxford, about images of emotion in Greek poetry. ‘That’s very interesting,’ she said, and then started talking about Darwin’s book about the expression of emotion in man and animals. Five minutes later she’d ask me again and she’d have a completely different association with Darwin. It was like talking to a highly intelligent drunken ghost." -- NYTimes, 4/18/09

I now want to write a story about talking to a highly intelligent drunken ghost. Thank you, Ruth Padel, for reminding us that inspiration for fantastical fiction is always waiting for us in the wonders and grit of everyday life.

I used to be this person:

It afflicts normal-looking people who function well in other facets of their lives. The symptoms include failing to file tax returns for years on end and squirreling away unopened letters that carry the return address of the Internal Revenue Service. Take a taxpayer (using the word loosely) whom we’ll call Mr. V. . . . . (NYTimes, 4/12/09)

In fear of penalties, I would send a ridiculous check to the IRS every year, hoping to have heard the last of it. But those scary letters kept coming (and remaining unopened) . . . . Eventually, I put every piece of paper I had in a big box, and took it to a woman in Boston who did a lot of taxes for artists, especially members of the Boston Ballet. "You can't imagine," she said. "They tour, they stuff things in envelopes, they lose them.... You're not so bad."

I've been a reformed character ever since.

If you've gotten your taxes in already, Yay, you! If you're working on it til midnight tonight, good luck, good coffee, and don't forget the chocolate!

Here's a photo!

Also, did you see the NTimes profile on Michelle O's cousin the Rabbi? Capers Funnye is in the "Hebrew Israelite" movement - a fascinating chapter of African-American history & culture all by itself - and also studied at a mainstream Jewish Spertus Institute. He leads a Hebrew Israelite congregation in Chicago. My favorite bit from the terrific article by Zev Chafets:
On one of the days I was there, in early February, I was the only white Jew in the shul, and an old guy in front of me kept turning around and showing me the right page. There’s a nudnik like him in every shul I’ve ever been to.

I forgave him, though, during the Torah service, when a young man faltered over the blessings and looked mortified. “Not your fault, young man,” the nudnik said. “The fire of the Torah burns so hot to where sometimes it just confuses your mind.”

Oh, yeah!

Delia & I are home now, and realizing we were so focused on getting my Mom's house Pesadikhe, we totally forgot to make sure we had any food when we got home! Shopping lists have now been made, and recipes dug out. We are doing half-measures (don't ask, Mom!) but trying to be strict about what we're eating for the remaining 6 days. It's an annual Spiritual and Physical Discipline I like to practice. Almost everything has to be prepared from scratch, from a limited set of ingredients. If I lived like this year-round, I'd surely weigh less and be healthier, too. I always watch what I eat (and don't have much of a sweet tooth), but I'm a big Grazer, and my Passover snacking options are limited to Fruit & Nuts.... Every year I think I should at least make a stab at it. But it's Work, and I never can. At least this is an 8-day period when I am supremely Conscious of what I eat, and that carries a little.

It also means I get to tell my favorite Matzah joke again! (Just consider me the annoying uncle who asks each year if you've heard this one, and ignores you if you say, YES!):

So (famous blind musician) Ray Charles goes to a Passover Seder, and they hand him a big square piece of matzah. He holds onto it for a moment . . . .
. . . and then exclaims,
"Who wrote this shit?"

Rivendell in Switzerland?
(gakked from maskmaker Shane Odom (a.k.a. wildwose's FaceBook page)

isabelswift's Washington cherry trees.

Old friends are The Best. Many hours spent last night with "Isabel, who listened & ironed" (isabelswift) when I was trying to write Swordspoint. (I'll never forget stomping through Central Park with her on a pretty day, worrying about how the novel should start, and she talked about the beginnings of operas: "'Carmen, Carmen, oh, that Carmen -- Why look, here she comes!'" It worked.) She fed me chicken on gorgeous Italian pottery plates. We made pomegranate syrup & Pellegrino fizz. We talked about her projects, and we talked about mine. We talked about the Washington Post's "Date Lab" column, and how to kindly say you won't quote on a novel unless you're really blown away by it, even if it's by a person you like a lot . . . I looked at her and said urgently, "Could you please go back 20 years and tell me that now I never go on another blind date, and instead have to worry about fighting off people wanting me to blurb their books?"

I'm once again stuck on a novel opening - the voice, this time - and also working on 2 stories & a script simultaneously. Out came the Boyfriend similes: "You can date them all, but in the end, figure out which one will really be there for you for the long run." Turns out she's never read libba_bray's divinely wonderful (and accurate) piece, Writing a Novel: a Love Story - so, as I was looking it up to send her, I've linked to it here, in case you haven't either.

Gay couples trying to marry in China, while dad goes PFLAG.

A guy is writing & posting a song for every chapter in Moby Dick.

Possible new portrait of Shakespeare identified!!!!! (thanks, krismcd59!)

Aging Lesbian Separatists seek younger members for "womyn only" community: "the younger generation has not had to go through what we went through . . . In 20 to 25 years, we could be extinct."

BEST FOR LAST:
Writers' rooms. (I always knew I loved Jane Gardam.)

I've loved the work of Damon Runyon for years - maybe even before I saw Guys & Dolls (5 times) at summer camp. I cited his Broadway underworld characters as an influence on Swordspoint, which only made sense to a few (are you one of them?). Some years ago I pulled out my battered old copy (my dad's originally) of Runyon short stories for Delia, and she was so enchanted that she read me nearly all of them aloud. I know. You haven't lived til you've heard her Nicely-Nicely Jones. So much did she love that guy that she put him in her nice little kid novel, Changeling: the Producer of Broadway is, in fact, a (magical) Runyon character.

Now that Broadway's reviving Guys & Dolls, the New Yorker's published a terrific piece by Adam Gopnik on him, which neatly nails both Runyon's appeal and his technique - which has almost everything to do with language: "Like Wodehouse, whom he in some ways resembles, Runyon inherited a comedy of morals and turned it into a comedy of sounds, language playing for its own sake." The narrator of my coming-out-any-year-now story, "The Duke of Riverside," is my attempt to do a Riverside Runyon voice: "the unchanging, perpetually nameless and anxious-eager Narrator, with his warily formal diction and his cautious good manners.... The Narrator is, crucially, one of the lowest-status figures in Runyon’s bicameral world, where the petty hustlers and horseplayers who haunt Lindy’s by day are set against their sinister opposites, hit men and gangsters, who mostly hail from Brooklyn and Harlem and arrive at night." (and now that I've read this article, I'm not at all sure I succeeded, and it is taking all my strength - and Delia's iron advice - not to demand that Ellen Datlow give me the ms. back so I can rewrite it....).

Also: don't miss Delia's more than somewhat excellent post on pitching your novel to editors (or, I would add, not boring someone silly when they politely ask you what your book's about. Just sayin').

The New York Times offers a recipe for Red Hot Ale made with a hot poker. God, I miss my wood stove (and associated tools!). It caramelizes the sugar in the ale. Burnt Caramel is my favorite flavor (well, top 3, anyway). (If you don't want to sign up for the NYTimes, it's also here.)

Remember the 23-yr-old recent Bryn Mawr grad who mysteriously disappeared from her apt in NYC on August 28th? She was found drifting in New York Harbor on Sept. 16th, and just gave a fascinating interview to the NYTimes: she was suffering from dissociative fugue, a rare form of amnesia that causes people to forget their identity, suddenly and without warning, and can last from a few hours to years. “It’s weird,” Ms. Upp said. . . .“How do you feel guilty for something you didn’t even know you did? It’s not your fault, but it’s still somehow you. So it’s definitely made me reconsider everything. Who was I before? Who was I then — is that part of me? Who am I now?”

Our Boston friend, artist Tabitha Vevers, has a show up at the DeCordova (Lincoln, MA) right now. It just got a great review in the Boston Globe. The mermaid picture in the first paragraph is in fact owned by us; we lent it for the show. Very cool; someone from an art shipping firm came to our house to crate it up. There are 7 more images of her work up online here.

My dad sent me the link to this "This I Believe" essay, I like it enough to pass it on to you.

"Always go to the funeral" means that I have to do the right thing when I really, really don't feel like it. I have to remind myself of it when I could make some small gesture, but I don't really have to and I definitely don't want to. I'm talking about those things that represent only inconvenience to me, but the world to the other guy . . . .

Trust me, you don't want to miss this article from the NYTimes Magazine on scientific research on women's desire. Headline quotes: No matter what their self-proclaimed sexual orientation, women in the study, unlike men, showed strong and swift genital arousal when the screen offered men with men, women with women and women with men. . . .[ADD:] for women on average, desire often emerges so compellingly from emotional closeness that innate orientations can be overridden. " Women’s desire is not relational, it’s narcissistic — it is dominated by the yearnings of “self-love,” by the wish to be the object of erotic admiration and sexual need. . . . . In comparison with men, women’s erotic fantasies center less on giving pleasure and more on getting it.

I'm not saying they're accurate, but it gives you an idea of the range of the piece. Read it for details.

* * *

Also, thanks to all who responded to the previous post on LitMags - I'm really enjoying the comments, and learning a lot!