101 Reasons to Stop Writing

The Weekend Updates are making a comeback, after a few lineup changes. Soon people will be talking about how they’re not as good as the old Weekend Updates, then they’ll take another long break, followed by a reunion tour. Along the way one Weekend Update will launch a solo blog with a more serious, experimental style, which GalleyCat will call “pretentious and dull”, one of the Weekend Updates will die in a tragic revision accident, another will be caught sleeping with a Weekend Update from another site. Yes, I know it’s five days late. If you remember the old Weekend Updates, you know this is pretty good for me.

I get to open this installment with the best quote I have read this year:

Stephen Page, the head of Faber & Faber, tells me that they closed their fiction ’slush pile’ (of unsolicited manuscripts, the only agent-free route to a publishing deal) a few years back.

‘We were getting 6,000 a year which we had a work-experience girl reading a page of once every so often. We had only discovered two books on the slush pile in the previous however many years. It was just unfortunate that one of those was Lord of the Rings so we felt a certain obligation to keep looking.’

‘It’s carnage …’ Inside the genteel world of books Carole Cadwalladr, Sunday Observer, Oct. 14 2007

The article discusses the Frankfurt Book Fair, the annual publishing industry meat-market, attended by 100,000, 180,000 or 300,000 people, depending on who makes up the statistic. It (the article, and apparently the fair) focuses mainly on the fallout and rumour-mongering following the disintegration of powerhouse literary agency PFD (after a change of ownership and leadership, the entire staff resigned, leaving a huge roster of writers represented by an agency with no agents). Of course the article degenerates into another “sucks to be a writer” whinefest. The journalist tries to interview agents before the fair, but the only agent who responds is already her agent. That’s the industry, right there.

For me, though, it’s a paradise of quotatery:

Unless you come with a letter of recommendation signed by Martin Amis, you might as well as forget it.

What becomes abundantly clear from Frankfurt is that if you’ve got a book inside, it’s really not a bad idea to keep it there.

‘No writer should ever go to Frankfurt. It’s soul-destroying. You see writers being traded like pork bellies.’

‘You look around and you think the world needs another book like it needs a hole in the head.’

If you read only one linked article from this Weekend Update, I’m wasting my time. (Via Justine Larbalestier.)

Truth is Stranger Than (Bad) Fiction

Let’s see if I can do this story justice:

A person, who may or may not be a writer (by any reasonable definition), who claims to be (but is not) named Lanaia Lee, believed in her writing — and in her conviction that she is the reincarnation of “Alexander the Great, Imhotep, Napolean [sic], Einstein” — so strongly that she paid a scam artist posing as a literary agent $400 a month to represent her first novel.

Months later, the writer begins to suspect she is being scammed — especially after being contacted by another scam victim who tells her the agent is a scam artist — and immediately signs on to have her next novel (first of a five-book series) represented. The scam artist says the novel needs work, and offers to ghostwrite this work for her.

After at least six months and several thousand dollars more, the writer achieves some dim level of awareness and changes to a different literary agent, a fan fiction author who may or not be a scam, who promptly closes a deal for the (ghostwritten) novel with a vanity press. The writer then sets out to promote the release of the novel in various places on the web, both genre-appropriate and not.

So far, this all-too-common story would only generate a few commiserating comments and what-were-you-thinkings at Absolute Write. But for this interesting wrinkle: The ghostwritten novel contained (at least) an entire chapter plagiarised word-for-word from a novel by late author David Gemmell.

The cry of Shenanigans has echoed for days. The writer and her agent are hysterically denying responsibility, claiming its all the scammer’s fault that they never revised (or re-read) the novel after the “ghostwriting”, and threatening lawsuits against those who uncovered the plagiarism.

The story was broken by Jane Little at Dear Author, in the brilliant post Top Ten Tips for Plagiarists. More can be found at Making Light and Writer Beware. The comments on all three blog entries reveal still more information, if you’re prepared to wade in. Comments from the (second) agent are particularly amusing, as they read like they were dictated in German to a five year old, then translated in to English via BabelFish.

If you skim-read the above, you should still read Top Ten Tips for Plagiarists.

News to Know, to Keep Up with the Conversation

• Bookseller.com reports that Orion Publishing won a “landmark” libel case, establishing (in the UK) that a published allegation is not libellous, if backed by years of research. Phew. If you can explain the implications of this to others, you’re well on your way to becoming a consummate bullshit artist.
• Doris Lessing wins the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature. The Washington Post reports on her bemused reaction. Salon.com provides Cliff Notes so you can pretend you know who she is.
• Lee Goldberg explains that Mystery Writers of America is not telling you to fsck off, they’re just telling shitty publishers and self-published writers to fsck off. That probably includes you, but Lee doesn’t know that.
• Variety reports on the possibility of a strike by the Writer’s Guild of America, which is putting extreme pressure on Hollywood’s scripted TV industry. This last happened in 1988, when even talk shows went dark for months. (Via Writers Write.)

From the Blogosphere

• If you’ve been wondering why those heartless bastards at the New York Times Book Review didn’t gush over your self-published opus (even though you sent them twenty-five copies and a bunch of IOU-a-bribes), Janice Harayda of One-Minute Book Reviews suggests it may be because they receive 500+ books every week — and that’s just from real publishers, all competing for the one remaining square inch of review space. Of course, it may be because your badly-pixilated do-it-yourself clipart cover looks like you drank paint for a week then took a shit through a flour sifter.
• EW.com reports that George Lucas is looking for “writers of real significance” for his upcoming Star Wars TV series, marking the first time the phrase “writers of real significance” has ever appeared in the same sentence as “Star Wars“. Apparently he’s not finished destroying your childhood memories, and wants to sell you cola and insurance too. (Via Writerswrite.com.)
• Someone called Terry Gerritsen discusses the importance of having a cool name.
• James A. Moore waffles on and on about what it’s like to get 49 pages of edit notes from your publisher — along with a long digression on Halloween, and an entire short story, included in the same post. Can’t imagine why his editor thought his novel needed so much work.
• Teresa Neilsen Hayden at Making Light posits an interesting rule of Internet debates, which really should be distilled down to a catchy Law.
• Fans of Knight Rider are insane.
• Readers Read reports that the reports of book burnings have been greatly exaggerated.
• Agent Kristin misses Miss Snark. We all do.

Problems You Will Never Have

• Lee Goldberg observes that if you write for a TV show, you may develop an attachment to the theme song that far exceeds its quality. But how can you trust a man who not only wrote for Baywatch, but still has the theme song on his iPod? He also discusses convention burnout.
• Joe Konrath has been conducting a long-term, single subject, no control, doubly blind experiment into how long it takes a midlist author to realise that he should be getting paid for speaking engagements he’s invited to. The answer? Four years (and four books), or approximately one second after his wife starts insisting on it. Further research is needed into why the spouses of writers put up with their self-sabotaging instinct for financial failure.
• Author self-publishes his backlist of novels? Not news. Successful series author mortgages house and launches own small press to publish his backlist of 17 out-of-print novels, to coincide with Nos. 19 through 21 being picked up by St Martin’s Press? News.
• Jay Lake explains the editorial machinations of closed (invite-only) anthologies.
• Jobbing Scriptwriter journals what it’s like to write a feature script in five days.

You Will Never Be This Good

• Reading Under the Covers recalls that Charles Dickens used to do three-hour public readings, night after night, unamplified, to packed houses, and still had enough energy to kick your adverbial ass.

Reasons Why Comics Suck Four-Color Ass

1. The New Costume.
   Fiction writers kill off major characters because they are tired of being known as a successful genre hack and want to be an unsuccessful serious writer. Soap operas kill off major characters because the actor shagged the producer’s wife at the post-season wrap party, or it comes out that the actress did some “artistic nudes” in her youth. But comics publishers kill off major characters to “re-invent” the series with a new “secret identity” and a new costume, so they can make the cover of Comic Buyer’s Guide, and sell the same toys repainted to the same fanatical geeks who buy two copies of every issue (one to red, one to “collect”). The latest victim of “Pimp My Superhero” is Captain America, who now looks like he gets dressed every morning by running through a freshly painted American flag. He’s now packing heat (again), Geraldo Rivera style. (Via Readers Read.)

Stop Writing if You Need This Advice

• Do not take your research too seriously. (Via Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind.)
• The Rejecter explains that Yes takes a lot longer to write than No.
• Jonathan Lyons says that agents should be on your Do Not Call list. Imagine you’re a restaurant critic with an impacted bowel. You spend three hours a day on the can, trying to free up six months and forty pounds of review material. You go to get a colonoscopy, and while you have two surgical residents taking video footage of your rectum like it was the Grand Canyon after an earthquake, a chef whose restaurant you dined in five weeks ago call you to ask what you thought of the fish.

Preparing this Weekend Update was made substantially easier with FeedGhost, an excellent feed reading program for Windows, and the only software I’ve ever encountered where if you have a problem, the developers email you.