![The Swivet [Colleen Lindsay]](http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_ydq3peK34xU/S6mKLbLIBzI/AAAAAAAAAWc/nSRAcSuIQ9U/S760/swivet+blue+header.jpg)
Confident writers work within the system, even though the system is flawed.And:
Delusional writers work outside of the system, even though they long to work within the system.
Would you rather be paid or be praised?
Confident writers know the best form of praise is a royalty check.
For Tolkien, the function of his fantasy fiction is 'consolation'. If you read his essay 'On Fairy Tales' you find that, for him, central to fantasy is 'the consolation of the happy ending'. He pretends that such a happy ending is something that occurs 'miraculously', 'never to be counted on to recur'. But that pretence of contingency is idiotic, in that immediately previously he claims that 'all complete fairy stories must have it [the happy ending]. It is its highest function.' In other words, far from 'never being counted to recur', the writer and reader know that to qualify as fantasy, a 'consolatory' happy ending will recur in every story, and you have a theory of fantasy in which 'consolation' is a matter of policy. It's no surprise that this kind of fantasy is conservative. Tolkien's essay is as close as it gets to most modern fantasy's charter, and he's defined fantasy as literature which mollycoddles the reader rather than challenging them.And over at the Tor.com blog, Kate Nepveu has been systematically re-reading and writing fascinating commentary on every chapter of the The Lord of the Rings, one chapter at a time.
In Tolkien, the reader is intended to be consoled by the idea that systemic problems come from outside agitators, and that decent people happy with the way things were will win in the end. This is fantasy as literary comfort food. Unfortunately, a lot of Tolkien's heirs--who may not share his politics at all--have taken on many tropes that embed a lot of those notions in their fantasy.
1. You own your information. Facebook does not. This includes your photos and all other content.
2. Facebook doesn't claim rights to any of your photos or other content. We need a license in order to help you share information with your friends, but we don't claim to own your information.
3. We won't use the information you share on Facebook for anything you haven't asked us to. We realize our current terms are too broad here and they make it seem like we might share information in ways you don't want, but this isn't what we're doing.
4. We will not share your information with anyone if you deactivate your account. If you've already sent a friend a message, they'll still have that message. However, when you deactivate your account, all of your photos and other content are removed.
5. We apologize for the confusion around these issues. We never intended to claim ownership over people's content even though that's what it seems like to many people. This was a mistake and we apologize for the confusion.
You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof. You represent and warrant that you have all rights and permissions to grant the foregoing licenses.The most disturbing sentence in the paragraph above is this one: "with the right to sublicense". Which essentially is Facebook telling their users that they can sell the subrights to any posted content on Facebook. This includes your personal information, any notes you import as RSS feeds and your personal photos. And theoretically, the way this is written, if you're an author who posts portions of your work-in-progress on your Facebook account, those portions belong to Facebook. Forever.
Query #1: Writer spends six paragraph telling me about his previously published book, not the one he's querying about. Reject.
Query #2: 1st paragraph talks only about the multiple themes in the book. There is no second paragraph. Reject.
Query #3: Great opening paragraph, strong hook. Unfortunately, writer didn't follow sub guidelines. Ask her to re-query with pages & synop.
Query #4: Also did not follow sub guidelines. First paragraph talks about writer's self-published book. No pitch at all. Reject.
Query #5: Followed sub guidelines. Good first paragraph. Writing sample badly over-written. Reject.
Query #6: Didn't follow sub guidelines. Misspelled my name. No pages. Reject.
Query #7: Followed sub guidelines. Good pitch, great hook. Not a genre I'm interested in, however. Refer to colleague at FinePrint.
Query #8: Great query, but book is too similar to something I already represent. Personalized rejection, ask to see other work.
Query #9: Didn't follow sub guidelines, doesn't tell me what the book is about, spends four paragraphs on his Army career. Reject.
Query #10: No salutation. Two paragraphs about theme and philosophy of book. No actual plot, however. And no pages. Reject.
Query #11: One meandering paragraph, each sentence separated by ellipses. Reject.
Query #12: No salutation (again). No actual query, either. Just the first three pages from the book. Reject.
Query #13: YA fantasy, 175,000 words. Reject with educational note about word counts.
Query #14: Query for illustrated children's book, which I don't handle. Submission guidelines would have told him this. Reject.
Query #15: Query for Christian fiction, which I don't handle. Again, my submission guidelines would have saved her the trouble. Reject.
Query #16: This query was cc'd to multiple agents. Reject. You just shot yourself in the foot, dude.
Query #17: Unsolicited attachment. Delete without reading further. This one won't event get the courtesy of a rejection.
Query #18: No salutation. (Sensing a theme here.) Text is formatted in multiple colors and font sizes. Hurt my eyes. Reject.
Query #19: Another unsolicited attachment. Another query deleted without being read.
Query #20: Loves me. Loves my blog. Has MFA. Won contest I've never heard of. Three paragraphs in and it's still not a query letter. Reject.
Do I Hafta? – A New Novelist on Book PromotionMarisha's new book The Rose Variations came out on February 1st from the extraordinary Soho Press.
by Marisha Chamberlain
As I write this, my first novel, The Rose Variations, has been out for just a few weeks, and the buzz has been terrific. This is partly due to the efforts of an outstanding agent (Stephany Evans) and a remarkable publicist (Sarah Reidy) at Soho Press. But I’m working hard at it, too, and I started without a clear model to follow about how to promote your own book.
Social psychologist, Carol Dweck from Stanford University, in her book, Mindset: a New Psychology of Success, published startling findings that show that talent and high intelligence (which many writers possess) can actually undermine success. Why? Because of an unexamined conviction that if one is required to make an effort, it means one might not be supremely talented. Could that be at work in some of these lackluster fiction events by novelists whose work is sublime on the page? I suspect so. Dweck shows us in study after study that effort equals success. Artistic success plus marketing success—that’s what we writers want. No matter how terrific the writing is, if it doesn’t reach readers, what’s the point?
So let’s say a strong effort to market is intrinsic to the writing life. If we accept that, maybe we can face the numbers. Such as: a first novel must achieve hardcover sales to readers of a certain number, in the thousands, for the novel to come out in paperback, and even more crucially, for a second manuscript by that same writer to be sellable. Is that enough to motivate the excellent, if grumpy and introverted, writer? I don’t think so.
The private writing self moans—do I hafta? Do I really hafta do a radio interview at 6 in the morning, followed by a classroom visit at 11, and a reading that evening, of this novel I finished two years ago, when I just want to hole up in my study and work on the book I’m writing now?
Yeah, I hafta. Because if my book doesn’t sell and I haven’t done everything I could think of to get it into the hands of readers, how grumpy am I gonna be then? However, if I can find ways to get back to my study, even in the middle of book promotion, then I remind myself of what it’s all for: to make a life of this. To bring in enough dough to go on writing. Regular writing hours on a new project hidden from public view—that’s what keeps me going, promoting the book that’s out there now
It is also worth questioning what role the Kindle will play in the lives of younger readers. If there is such a thing as a culture of reading, it begins in the home. Regardless of their parents’ educational background or income level, children raised in homes with books become more proficient readers. Does this apply to the Kindle? Sven Birkerts, author of The Gutenberg Elegies (1994), describes how our screen technologies exert a “conditioning impact” on all of us who use them; that is, “they make it harder, once we do turn from the screen, to engage the single-focus requirement of reading.” This seems a particular danger for children. We already know that electronic books marketed for children, far from being helpful in teaching literacy, can hamper it. Researchers at Temple University’s Infant Laboratory and the Erikson Institute in Chicago who studied electronic books aimed at children described a “slightly coercive parent-child interaction as opposed to talking about the story,” and concluded, “We shouldn’t use e-books to replace traditional books.” Anyone who has read a book to a toddler knows that one experience with an e-reader would yield more interest in the buttons and the scroll wheel than the story itself.It's a long piece but well worth the read.
Meanwhile, older children and teens who are coming of age surrounded by cell phones, video games, iPods, instant messaging, text messaging, and Facebook have finely honed digital literacy skills, but often lack the ability to concentrate that is the first requirement of traditional literacy. This poses challenges not just to the act of reading but also to the cultural institutions that support it, particularly libraries. The New York Times recently carried a story about the disruptive behavior of younger patrons in the British Library Reading Room. Older researchers—and by old they meant over thirty—lamented the boisterous atmosphere in the library and found the constant giggling, texting, and iPod use distracting. A library spokesman was not sympathetic to the neo-geezers’ concerns, saying, “The library has changed and evolved, and people use it in different ways. They have a different way of doing their research. They are using their computers and checking things on the Web, not just taking notes on notepads.” In today’s landscape of digital literacy, the old print battles—like the American Library Association’s “Banned Books Week,” held each year since 1982—seem downright quaint, like the righteous crusade of a few fusty tenders of the Dewey Decimal system. Students today are far more likely to protest a ban on wireless Internet access than book censorship.
Joe Schreiber scares the living crap out of me. No, not as a person. He's a perfectly nice fellow. But his novels are terrifying. Like blood-curdling. I first came to be familiar with Joe's writing when my good friend Keith Clayton, who was at the time an editor at Del Rey Books, acquired Joe's first book Chasing the Dead. And then made me read it. Alone. At night. (Did I mention I was alone?) Which wasn't very nice of Keith. And was also utterly brilliant of him. Because Chasing the Dead is hands down the most frightening novel I have ever read in my life and after I read the manuscript, I didn't sleep for the next three nights. (Like, not even a little.) And I haven't stopped recommending Joe Schreiber since.
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