Buncha stuff about writing

So here’s what happens a year after the publication of a book….

There are no more print media reviews (although I give thanks on a daily basis for the internet, and bloggers, bless you all).

Most of the awards have been given out.

The trade paperback publication is still months away.

The author is up to her ears in two or three new projects, all of which are exhibiting a strange “running in place” energy. Lots of work and creativity going in, very little to show for it. I’m sure that some law of writing physics is attempting to reveal itself to me. We could call it the rising blister theory, but that would be inelegant. Let’s call it critical mass of narrative. Then let’s buy it a beer and try to persuade it to relax a little….

All this by way of explaining the lack of updates in the last 2½ months. It’s been very easy and enjoyable to disappear into the new book and the details of the everyday. I think it’s partly an effect of summer. But now that fall is rolling in, I’m preparing to be more engaged with the wider world. I love autumn — it smells and looks and feels right, a little wild, a little sad, with unexpected moments that feel like some internal space has just opened wide.

In that spirit, I have some things to share.

I’ve been noodling with a “links” page on this site, but I find that deciding what to include on such a page is a bit like choosing a tattoo. So instead, every so often I will stop in to the virtual pub and post things that been meaningful or interesting to me. Here are a few:

Open Letters. This site is no longer active, but is available in a complete archive state. There’s some great storytelling here. People are amazing. I miss the hell out of Open Letters.

@U2. The best U2 website on the planet, in my opinion.

Arizona River Runners. I took this trip nearly 20 years ago (edited in 2008 to add: and had hoped to go this year) and my heart has been full of canyon since. Along the trip, the guide stopped the boat by a wall that went up and up. “Touch it,” he said, and when we did he told us the rock was nearly 2 billion years old. The Grand Canyon is the closest thing I know to a cathedral.

An amazing poem by Wendell Berry. An acting teacher gave me this when I was at college a thousand years ago. Along with getting genuinely excited over a monologue I did one day, it’s the nicest thing she did for me. She also taught an improvisation class one summer that gave me one of the cruel moments of my life, and would be another Open Letter, if…. This poem is reprinted by permission of the publisher.

A website chock full of computer wallpaper. Amazing photos and graphic images of all descriptions. My mom, the Master of Web, turned me on to this site.

DATA. If you have email and a phone, you can help persuade the US government to keep its promise to help African nations work against poverty and AIDS. Make a difference in the world.

MoveOn. You can have more than just a vote, you can have a voice. This is the best organized, most effective grassroots organization I have ever seen. (Edited in 2008 to add: And I unjoined a couple of years ago because they lost focus on the electoral process and started trying to stick a hand in every issue under the sun, and it all started feeling a little too much like lockstep politics to me…)

From time to time, I will also pass along articles about publishing. It’s a wacky business; the more I learn, the more I shake my head. I think there are some changes coming, although I’m not sure what they are. It seems to me to be more and more difficult for a writer to a) break in to the business, and b) maintain a career. Having accomplished (a), I find myself concerned about (b). Reading articles like the ones below helps me understand how fortunate my experience with Solitaire has been in many ways (especially given the poor reviews in the trade — Publishers Weekly and Kirkus hated the book), and also how much more fortunate I will need to be with future books.

“It takes more than talent to become a best-selling novelist. Timing, marketing, and luck are also key…” (from the Boston Globe)

“Of the 60,000-some books that land in his office yearly, Steve Wasserman, editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review, has room to cover only about 1,500…” (from Poets & Writers Magazine)

“Look up a book on Amazon.com, and the first media review you see isn’t from a well-known book review outlet…” from Slate.

And other news: Stephen King is getting a National Book Award for Lifetime Achievement. Big smile from this side of the room. I’m delighted for him, and also delighted that the National Book Award had the guts to acknowledge that storytelling and characters who talk like real people, as opposed to speaking in ongoing tangles of metaphor and endless irony, have a huge place in the general reading experience. (Edited in 2008 to add: Here’s more about that.)

I am pretty tired of what passes for literary fiction in some circles these days. I prefer good writing to bad, but beautiful prose is not an end in itself. At least, I don’t think it should be. Nicola says that if you can see how much work the writer has done, then the writer hasn’t done enough work.

I’ve been following the commentary on the New York Times website regarding the award for Stephen King. It started out with (predictably) a lot of people being very fussed. Then there was a round of supportive posts from people who decided to come out of the closet as those who like a good read, and the literary canon be damned. For a while, the discussion flows along the lines of Oh no! versus You go, Stephen! Then it moves into consideration of what makes a work literary, which to me is a much more interesting and slippery question. I’d be interested to hear what people think — what’s “literature,” anyway? Any takers?

Cheers to you all.