I don't even KNOW this guy!

This is a fictionalized, but NOT wholly-imagined Facebook conversation I saw today:

Kenneth R. Beaverbrooke: You wouldn't believe what just happened to me. AGAIN. Someone tried to "friend" me on Facebook, someone I didn't even know! He looked like some cheap salesman for something, self-promoting all over the place, don't know why he thought he had the right to try that, especially since he probably hasn't even read my seventh bestselling novel, my erotic masterpiece, CHILLED: Blue Balls in the Yukon,  now available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kindle, Kandle, Kundle, and everywhere fine electronic transmissions are sold.

Ronald J. Rottenburger: Oh, yeah, Ken baby, I hear you, I hear you! I know just what you mean. They do that to me all the time. Maybe they just see my astronomical total of friends, all those thousands, you know, and get so intimidated, they try to friend me up to steal some of my glory. (Snort)

Kenneth R. Beaverbrooke: Excuse me. Were you saying something? Never mind. This sort of thing happens to certain authors, because certain authors exist in a special stratum of intelligence to which no one else can aspire. This is especially true if they are in their seventeenth week on the New York Times Bestseller List, and even more true if their seventh novel is an erotic masterpiece titled CHILLED: Blue Balls in the Yukon. I can't believe the presumption of these people thinking they can aspire to being my social and/or literary equal. 

Ronald J. Rottenburger: Ken, Ken. Relax! WE love you, baby. WE know you feel traumatized by all those hundreds and thousands of people trying to friend you every day, people you don't even know, but take heart, Kennie boy. Think of it this way. You're just one of those guys who knows everybody.

Kenneth R. Beaverbrooke: I beg your pardon, whoever you are. Just what is meant by "everybody"? Have you forgotten my staggering powers of discernment? I don't know "everybody", nor would I wish to know "everybody",  though Poppy Dollartree and I have more than a nodding acquaintance.

Ronald J. Rottenburger:  Ken. Ken. Listen to me! I'm not trying to come between you and Poppy.

Kenneth R. Beaverbrooke: Yes you are, you lousy little interloper! It's people like you I have to "unfriend" all the time. Ronald J. Rottenburger, you are not worth my time.

Poppy Dollartree: Squeallll! Kennieeeeeeee, hi, it's Poppy! Let's cozy up and crack a bottle of ice-cold Wild Turkey.

Kenneth R. Beaverbrooke: Poppy! My God, I haven't seen you since the SSWA meeting yesterday afternoon!

Poppy Dollartree: Yes, that's right. Smug and Sociopathic Writers Association, like they say. Of course that's just a joke! Smart and Sexy is more like it. Nothing like those long meetings in the conference room - a conference of two! But back to the issue at hand. I am constantly being propositioned on Facebook by men I don't even know.

Kenneth R. Beaverbrooke: Tell it, girl.

Ronald J. Rottenburger: Hey, guys, I've figured out what to do about this!

Kenneth R. Beaverbrooke: Can I delete that? No? Then let's just carry on, shall we? Poppy, baby, are you up for playing a part in the movie adaptation of my erotic masterpiece,FURBURGERS: Crimes of Passion in the Beaver Trade?  You'd look swell in one of those great big politically-incorrect coats.

Ronald R. Rottenburger: Hey, guys. . .

Poppy Dollartree: Ooooooh! A movie star! I can see myself on the red carpet with a glass of that classy champagne.

Kenneth R. Beaverbrooke: Yes, and it wouldn't be any goddamn Wild Turkey either.

( I have to tell you that this selfsame self-important fictionalized Canadian-famous author later delivered a nasty crack at me for no good reason. Someone had posted a dreadful article called What to Do if you have a Gun to your Head. With a sickening sinking feeling, I realized it wasn't a joke - it was actual, step-by-step instructions, like a fire drill.. I posted a comment about how heartsick this made me feel and about how I wasn't sure I even wanted to live in a world that had degenerated to that level of madness. Kenneth R. Beaverbrooke responded, "well, hey, Margaret, why don't you take a clonazepam?" When I deleted my part of the conversation he made a bunch more snarky comments, so I told him I had been under the delusion that I was no longer in junior high with people sniggering at me and hurting me for sport. But no: this sort of casual mean-spiritedness is alive and well and living on Facebook! I still don't know why he felt the desire to throw that little ball of carbolic acid at me - perhaps it was just to brighten his day. And the ironic thing about it all is, HE DOESN'T EVEN KNOW ME!)

Order The Glass Character from:

Thistledown Press 

http://www.thistledownpress.com/html/search/genre/Fiction/the_glass_character_p580.cfm

Amazon.com

http://www.amazon.com/Glass-Character-Margaret-Gunning/dp/1927068886/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1395534131&sr=1-1&keywords=the+glass+character

Chapters/Indigo.ca

http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/the-glass-character/9781927068885-item.html?ikwid=the%2520glass%2520character%2520margaret%2520gunning&ikwsec=Home

Writers Today: the futility of Fakebook

I decided to cut-and-paste this piece rather than publish a link, because YOU HAVE GOT TO SEE IT if you are a serious writer, especially if you are a serious writer in Canada (though I believe it applies in other countries more than we know). It's a harsh truth, but a truth nonetheless, that the onus for being in the "first tier"  has fallen back on the writer, creating a whole new set of expectations/pressures:  "Hey look, you have social media now, you should do GREAT!", and, "Hey, Fifty Shades of Grey was self-published!" The money is just not there any more, anywhere, and this speaks volumes about the "global economic changes" that have marginalized literature as never before.

What's the solution? I can only think of one thing. Keep on writing, troops. Don't let the bastards get you down.

Artists struggle to survive in age of the blockbuster

RUSSELL SMITH

Special to The Globe and Mail

Published Thursday, Nov. 28 2013, 5:00 PM EST
Last updated Thursday, Nov. 28 2013, 5:00 PM EST

In the artistic economy, the Internet has not lived up to its hype. For years, the cybergurus liked to tell us about the “long tail” – the rise of niches, “unlimited variety for unique tastes” – that would give equal opportunities to tiny indie bands and Hollywood movies. People selling products of any kind would, in the new connected world, be able to sell small amounts to lots of small groups. Implicit in the idea was the promise that since niche tastes would form online communities not limited by national boundaries, a niche product might find a large international audience without traditional kinds of promotion in its home country. People in publishing bought this, too. The end result, we were told, would be an extremely diverse cultural world in which the lesbian vampire novel would be just as widely discussed as the Prairie short story and the memoir in tweets.

In fact, the blockbuster artistic product is dominating cultural consumption as at no other time in history. Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on each successive Hunger Games, and the rep cinemas have closed. A few sports stars are paid more individually than entire publishing houses or record labels earn in a year.

A couple of prominent commentators have made this argument recently about American culture at large. The musician David Byrne lamented, in a book of essays, that his recent albums would once have been considered modest successes but now no longer earn him enough to sustain his musical project. That’s David Byrne – he’s a great and famous artist. Just no Lady Gaga. The book Blockbusters: Hit-making, Risk-taking, and the Big Business of Entertainment, by business writer Anita Elberse, argues that the days of the long tail are over in the United States. It makes more sense, she claims, for entertainment giants to plow as much money as they can into guaranteed hits than to cultivate new talent. “Because people are inherently social,” she writes cheerily, “they generally find value in reading the same books and watching the same television shows and movies that others do.”

Well, the same appears to be true of publishing, even in this country. There are big winners and there are losers – the middle ground is eroding. Publishers are publishing less, not more. Everybody awaits the fall’s big literary-prize nominations with a make-us-or-break-us terror. Every second-tier author spends an hour every day in the dismal abjection of self-promotion – on Facebook, to an audience of 50 fellow authors who couldn’t care less who just got a nice review in the Raccoonville Sentinel. This practice sells absolutely no books; increases one’s “profile” by not one centimetre; and serves only to increase one’s humiliation at not being in the first tier, where one doesn’t have to do that.

Novelists have been complaining, privately at least, about the new castes in the literary hierarchy. This happens every year now, in the fall, the uneasiness – after the brief spurt of media attention that goes to the nominees and winners of the three major Canadian literary prizes, the Scotiabank Giller, the Governor-General’s, and the Rogers Writers’ Trust. The argument is that the prizes enable the media to single out a few books for promotion, and no other books get to cross the divide into public consciousness. And, say the spurned writers, this fact guides the publishers in their acquisitions. Editors stand accused of seeking out possible prize-winners (i.e. “big books”) rather than indulging their own tastes. This leads, it is said, to a homogenized literary landscape and no place at all for the weird and uncategorizable.

But even if this is true, what can one possibly do about it? Abolish the prizes? No one would suggest this – and even the critics of prize culture understand that the prizes were created by genuine lovers of literature with nothing but the best intentions, and that rewarding good writers financially is good, even necessary, in a small country without a huge market.

It’s not, I think, the fault of the literary prizes that the caste system exists. Nor of the vilified “media” who must cover these major events. It’s the lack of other venues for the discussion and promotion of books that closes down the options. There were, in the nineties, several Canadian television programs on the arts. There were even whole TV shows about books alone. Not one of these remains. There were radio shows that novel-readers listened to. There were budgets for book tours; there were hotel rooms in Waterloo and Moncton. In every year that I myself have published a book there have been fewer invitations and less travel. Now, winning a prize is really one’s only shot at reaching a national level of awareness.

So again, what is to be done? What does any artist do in the age of the blockbuster? Nothing, absolutely nothing, except keep on doing what you like to do. Global economic changes are not your problem (and are nothing you can change with a despairing tweet). Think instead, as you always have, about whether or not you like semicolons and how to describe the black winter sky. There is something romantic about being underground, no?

Look on the bright side: Poverty can be good for art. At least it won’t inspire you to write Fifty Shades of Grey.

 

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm