Monday, May 6, 2013
Don't ask, don't tell
It's late, I'm tired, my eyes are burning with allergies, but there's this doll. . .
Saturday, May 4, 2013
"WHALES, Mr. Melville?" - Part II
http://www.salon.com/2013/05/03/the_future_is_no_fun_self_publishing_is_the_worst/
The above article in Salon by novelist Ted Heller was a real eye-opener for me, and I recognized many of the toils and snares he writes about. I sent the following response to my good buddy Matt Paust, and I think it's so blippin' brilliant that I just have to post it here!
Wow. This is one of the best things I’ve read on the subject of trying to
straddle the Brave New World and the Sucks-to-high-heaven Old World of
publishing. He sounds bitter and extremely hurt, and is so raw emotionally he’s
like an open wound.
But this is the trouble with writers, myself included (of course). A real business person rolls with the punches. I look at my daughter, who is a tough-minded TV journalist who does NOT take things personally. On her first day on the job as a reporter, a producer came up to her – oh goody, a producer, maybe she’s going to praise my first story – and said, “Shannon. Someone has to tell you this. Your makeup. It’s way off.” “Way off?” “You look like a ghost on the screen. Your face is disappearing.” “What should I do?” “Really trowel it on. I mean it – way thicker than you think you need.”
What was her response? She told me, excitedly, about her first day, the challenges, etc. Then she said – and she was not kidding – “God, I’m glad they told me about the makeup. My face was totally washed out. I fixed it today and it looks way better.” I mean it. Her makeup. Most women would whimper in the powder room, and she took it as useful advice.
But this is the trouble with writers, myself included (of course). A real business person rolls with the punches. I look at my daughter, who is a tough-minded TV journalist who does NOT take things personally. On her first day on the job as a reporter, a producer came up to her – oh goody, a producer, maybe she’s going to praise my first story – and said, “Shannon. Someone has to tell you this. Your makeup. It’s way off.” “Way off?” “You look like a ghost on the screen. Your face is disappearing.” “What should I do?” “Really trowel it on. I mean it – way thicker than you think you need.”
What was her response? She told me, excitedly, about her first day, the challenges, etc. Then she said – and she was not kidding – “God, I’m glad they told me about the makeup. My face was totally washed out. I fixed it today and it looks way better.” I mean it. Her makeup. Most women would whimper in the powder room, and she took it as useful advice.
Another thing – she applied for a consumer advocate job and a colleague kept saying, “You’re going to get it. You’re going to get it. You’re the best one for the job.” She didn’t get it. Instead, they hired someone from Toronto (the big bad city around here) named Linda Steele, who has since become a kind of superstar on the channel. I asked Shannon gingerly what she thought of Linda. “Oh, she’s great. I’m a big fan of hers. You know, she really is the best one for the job.”
Then I look at the cringeing and whinge-ing writers do, the minute
injustice-collecting (this guy remembered every slight in gory detail) – and no
one is a worse offender at it than me – and I wonder, are we really good
business people? The topic of failure once came up, and Shannon said, “Yeah,
lots of things have happened, but I don’t consider them failures.” Perhaps as a
result, she has stayed afloat like a plucky duck and will probably go on to
other things when she’s ready. (The other thing is, she is NOT married to her
job and often says, “God, I hate being on television. The only part I like is
the research and the legwork” – in other words, what most people would consider
the drudgery.)
All this going on and on about my wonderful child (and I learn from her much more than she ever learned from me) is just to say, it’s hard for most of us (including Ted Heller? By the way, is he any relation to Joseph Heller?), because we DO put our nerves and flesh into the job and have no objectivity. I guess if we DID have objectivity, we wouldn’t have the sensitivity to be writers. These novels, they’re our babies. If someone dissed my makeup, I’d run home and go into a depression.
All this going on and on about my wonderful child (and I learn from her much more than she ever learned from me) is just to say, it’s hard for most of us (including Ted Heller? By the way, is he any relation to Joseph Heller?), because we DO put our nerves and flesh into the job and have no objectivity. I guess if we DID have objectivity, we wouldn’t have the sensitivity to be writers. These novels, they’re our babies. If someone dissed my makeup, I’d run home and go into a depression.
Another thing I notice – he wrote a great article, by the way, and I
do see myself in it in many places (if on a much-smaller scale) – he does not
mention social networking. He goes on and on about newspapers. He probably does network, because we all do, but it isn't uppermost in his article. Getting newspaper reviews and contacting editors seem to be at the top of his list. It's been my experience that after a couple of weeks, glowing newspaper reviews are fairly good for wrapping fish and almost never lead to decent sales.
Sorry if this is wordy. I worked for newspapers for many years (reviewing – I did well over 300) and noticed the assignments were dwindling. Book sections were withering away, to be replaced by wire service "canned” pieces that had the flavor of “this guy got paid off”. If he is still thinking newspapers, he’s drilling a dry hole. I lost my Edmonton Journal position (and it actually was a position – I was with them more often than not for nearly 30 years) when my editor phoned me and said, “We’ve tanked, there’s no more books section. Sorry to see you go.”
Sorry if this is wordy. I worked for newspapers for many years (reviewing – I did well over 300) and noticed the assignments were dwindling. Book sections were withering away, to be replaced by wire service "canned” pieces that had the flavor of “this guy got paid off”. If he is still thinking newspapers, he’s drilling a dry hole. I lost my Edmonton Journal position (and it actually was a position – I was with them more often than not for nearly 30 years) when my editor phoned me and said, “We’ve tanked, there’s no more books section. Sorry to see you go.”
Well, I couldn’t take THAT personally.
I think what you’re doing is really what you need to do. Get on the internet, use it, get on social networking wherever you can. Don’t wait for editors to email you back because they won’t. They’re inundated. Paper books are on the way out, and authors (even well-established ones) are getting desperate. Agents have gone over to non-fiction and children’s series, because that’s where the money is. They can’t afford to starve representing “literary fiction” or even fiction-fiction because it’s too dicey.
I think what you’re doing is really what you need to do. Get on the internet, use it, get on social networking wherever you can. Don’t wait for editors to email you back because they won’t. They’re inundated. Paper books are on the way out, and authors (even well-established ones) are getting desperate. Agents have gone over to non-fiction and children’s series, because that’s where the money is. They can’t afford to starve representing “literary fiction” or even fiction-fiction because it’s too dicey.
Nobody ever mentions this, but the real money is in celebrity memoirs. I watch some of the entertainment shows (blush – it’s professional development!) and in EVERY case Deborah Norville or whoever will say (i . e. about Amanda Knox or whoever is the narcissistic ditzhead of the week), “In her new book, to be released June 1. . . “ Billboard, billboard! Flashing phosphorescent billboard! And yet, I think these books also have a very short shelf life. I just stumbled across my copy of John Edwards’ memoir. John WHO?
In spite of the fact that Amanda Knox received an advance of something like $2.5 million, these books are nothing but literary porn which is all written by the
same person anyway. The flat, cliched style reveals the fact that they're clones churned out by drones. (Now there is a lucrative field! Ghost-writing. Can you
imagine how much you’d make pretending you’re Amanda Knox?).
This is getting very long, but I’ve been ruminating on all this for a very
long time now. Everything has shifted seismically, and to be honest it doesn’t
look like I’m going to get very far. I’ve tried a few less-orthodox things
lately, but since I think it won’t happen if I talk about it, I’m not talking
about it. The thing is, if a writer DOES think outside the box, they’re often
humiliated for being arrogant or unrealistic, but if they don’t, they’re
“-------".
This is why writers go crazy. Or is it the craziness, the abnormal empathy and sensitivity (and how often have I been accused of being “too sensitive”, as if it’s a crime) that makes us write? Most of us need to write. It’s what we do AND who we are. It’s that last part that does us in. To refer to my illustrious/practical daughter again: it’s really NOT who we are. It’s a job. Our work is a commodity that can be bought and sold. In fact, in being published, we are turning our work into a commodity. This is what we want, isn’t it? So over and over again, we’re going to get some version of “Whales, Mr. Melville?” It comes with the territory.
http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html
This is why writers go crazy. Or is it the craziness, the abnormal empathy and sensitivity (and how often have I been accused of being “too sensitive”, as if it’s a crime) that makes us write? Most of us need to write. It’s what we do AND who we are. It’s that last part that does us in. To refer to my illustrious/practical daughter again: it’s really NOT who we are. It’s a job. Our work is a commodity that can be bought and sold. In fact, in being published, we are turning our work into a commodity. This is what we want, isn’t it? So over and over again, we’re going to get some version of “Whales, Mr. Melville?” It comes with the territory.
http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html
Good Lord, it's the Rabbitville Gazette!
GOOD LORD! It's the Rabbitville Gazette!
When I was in Miss Wray's class at McKeough School in Chatham, in Grade 3/4 (taken in one year so I could go to a special Grade 5, one of those '60s educational experiments that led to total chaos and zero learning), sometimes we had a bit of free time. We could read whatever we wanted. I remember reading something called the Rabbitville Gazette, in some magazine or other. In fact, I liked the Rabbitville Gazette so much that I pawed my way through stacks of magazines to find issues that had the Rabbitville Gazette in them (because I soon figured out that it didn't appear in every issue).
Even then, I was ruthless in my digging around. Even then, I was a bloodhound. I WOULD find every issue of the Rabbitville Gazette, and I would read them all.
For some reason the name popped into my head today, I googled it, and. . .
YES! It really existed. It appeared montly in Jack and Jill magazine. I didn't subscribe to Jack and Jill, but it was common in classrooms. (I got a very strange magazine called Wee Wisdom which seemed to come out of the 1890s.)
I can see why I liked the Rabbitville Gazette. Though I can't read very much of it, it's funny and charming (I mean: Zoo Gnu News? A column called Useless Information?) And the Halloween "ghost editor" is best of all, though of course it would sail over the head of the average kid.
I like to picture a magazine run by rabbits. There would be no shortage of staff. Around March or April, everyone would suddenly disappear. Strange thumping noises would be common. Every once in a while there would be a sharp crack, followed by a piercing shriek.
Columns would be written about the atrocity of the lucky rabbit's foot, cautioning readers to count their feet every morning.
Not a lot of work would get done, rabbits being mostly concerned with other things. This is why they had to call in that "ghost editor".
Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book
It took me years to write, will you take a look
Order The Glass Character from:
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA
Barnes & Noble
Thistledown Press
Friday, May 3, 2013
Thursday, May 2, 2013
Jake and Harold: could they be blood kin?
Writers love to do this. They love to cast their own movies. The movies that won't be made out of the novels they will never publish. It sustains them, somehow.
I've posted on this before, but it's time to revisit. I have a couple of candidates in mind for the role of Harold Lloyd (and guess how I'm going to audition them. The casting couch is still very much in operation.) One was Zachary Quinto, until I realized his energy is all wrong (just too self-contained and subdued, though he made a marvelous Spock in the latest Trek movie). Then I went and saw something with Jake Gyllenhaal in it - he doesn't look like his photos, you know, but has a sort of a strange, vaguely cockeyed look and in some angles is almost nerdy. He has a much beefier physique than Harold, who did 85% of his own stunts and was made of springs and rubber bands. But he could capture Harold's energy, I know he could, and he has those puppy eyes and that tinge of love-me narcissism (just a tinge).
No, I wouldn't say they look alike because Harold's face is much more aquiline, if that's the word - narrow of face and nose, with a classic jaw that kept him handsome until the end of his life. And that three-cornered smile could be a trifle vulpine, evoking a forest faun or perhaps the Great God Pan.
But what about the vulpinosity (or vulpitudinousness) of this shot? There's more than a hint of it there.
Jakey Boy loves to seduce the camera, at least in his still shots. I still think his looks are kind of unorthodox, almost as if one side of his face doesn't quite match the other.
He has that bow-shaped-lips thing going on which can transform a man's face, giving it an appealing androgynous touch. But here it is on someone else.
(Hard to believe this is a goofy comedian, with that super-serious look.)
Somebody's rockin' my dreamboat. . .
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But what could be dreamier than this shot of a very young Harold, looking awfully satisfied about something? In this shot, I think I see a blood-kin kind of resemblance. In fact, it's quite startling.
But they suit him even better.
POSTSCRIPT. Do you think I spent hours finding these? I found these two in fifteen seconds. I am not kidding you. The photos just glom together magnetically. I don't know what's going on here.
'Yeah, I always loved Uncle Harold. . . people used to say I looked like him. . . "
And just one more pair (I promise) just to prove they were both. . .
CROSSEYED!
Dangerous old men
Two old men and a
cruller
God, the mall, the
mall. First I have to get on a bus. The goddamn bus I take to the mall, the
C38, is a bus that nobody wants to drive.
“I hate the C38,”
one driver said to another. While driving, which they’re not supposed to do.
“So do I.”
”I wanna commit suicide when I draw that one.”
”I wanna commit suicide when I draw that one.”
“Me too.”
“Goodness,” an old
lady sitting at the front exclaimed. (She didn’t say “goodness” at all, for all
I know it was “shit, man”, but that’s how it registered on my mind.) “Why do you want to commit suicide?”
“Trains.”
Right. Trains.
On the C38, which eventually takes me to the mall after an agonizingly dull
haul along Westwood
Avenue
We get stuck behind trains that are miles, light years, eons long. They defy physics by grinding slower and slower, stopping, then running backwards, as if time itself has inexplicably reversed. Einstein might want to ride on this train.
We get stuck behind trains that are miles, light years, eons long. They defy physics by grinding slower and slower, stopping, then running backwards, as if time itself has inexplicably reversed. Einstein might want to ride on this train.
Today, we had one.
A bugger of a train. A big train, a bad train.
While we waited
and shifted and yawned, the driver visibly chuffing and chafing to get going so
he wouldn’t get yelled at and blamed for being late, I heard some kids in the
back, guffawing in the usual stoned-teenager way. Their voices appeared to be
breaking, so they were pretty young.
They weren’t as
bad as some. One of them yelled once and the driver told him to shut up, but he
only yelled, “HEY! BUY ME A PIZZA!”, which I didn’t think was too bad compared
to the fxxy stuff I was used to.
Then suddenly.
An elderly
Indo-Canadian man approached the bus and knocked on the door (doors, really).
He shouldn’t have been let in because the bus was between stops. But it had
been between stops for 22 minutes now and showed no signs of moving.
The doors opened.
The old man was admitted.
He shot down the
aisle with the speed of a gazelle.
“You bloody
hoodlums, I kill you, you stay away from me, you creeps, you all going to die!”
He physically hurled his slight frame against the corner where the three kids
were squished together.
“Hey man,” one of
them said.
“I kill you! I
kill you! You all going to die!”
The scant
passengers all had that “Jesus!” look on their faces. I had the thought: if
this was the U. S.
The driver was
large and burly. He had that security guard/cop kind of walk. You know what I
mean. A sidearm look, though of course he wasn’t armed. I was all too aware of
policy on bus altercations: the driver had to call the Bus Police and wait for
them to come break it up.
If he’d waited,
somebody would have been beaten bloody, and it wouldn’t have been the old man.
The driver picked
the guy up by the shoulders and lifted him over the aisle and deposited him on
the sidewalk outside the door.
I was still worried.
What the f---? What had just happened, and why? Why would an elderly man
jump on a bus and attack a bunch of teenagers? How would he even know which bus
they were on, and why was he so pissed?
I was prepared to
lunge behind the back of my seat, just in case these were the notorious Bacon
Brothers of Surrey, but I didn’t have to. Once we finally cleared the railroad
tracks, the kids shambled off. One of them unhooked his bike from the rack on
the front of the bus. They were youngish, dressed in the slouchy casual garb of
slightly nerdy junior high students. The farthest thing from gang members I’ve
ever seen. They ambled away, guffawing about something-or-other. And that was
the end of that.
The only thing I
could think of was: did they vandalize his rock garden or something? Throw gum
wrappers on his lawn, pee on his rhododendrons?
The other thing,
God. I hate things like this. I was in the dollar store buying
something, wrapping paper I think, on one of those long tubes,very awkward,
especially in the rain. There was an old man in line in front of me, paying for
something-or-other. I only remember the cashier said it cost $21.59. I noticed
he had his wallet open in front of him on the counter.
Suddenly he
glanced sharply behind him and said, “My wallet. My wallet.”
I realized he was
looking at me. I was the only other person in line.
“Can’t trust
anybody these days,” he mumbled, shooting me a paranoid look.
“Hi,” I said,
brightly, or I think it was brightly. I was holding my own wallet in my hand
and had my purse and my paper in the other and could not even imagine snatching
his wallet out from under his drippy old nose.
“I CAN HELP YOU
OVER HERE,” the cashier at the next till said. She’d been standing there not
helping me, as if her till was closed or something, and it pissed me off.
“Sorry,” she said
when I slammed down my rolls of paper. “I thought you were with him.”
SHE THOUGHT I WAS
WITH HIM.
She thought I was with a hundred-year-old man with a persecution complex, a rheumy-eyed, baggy-pants old coot with a week’s worth of stubble, a man so bent he looked like a cheap dollar store pretzel, a man so old he probably thought the goddamn train was going too fast.
And she thought I
was “with him”. I wanted to say to her – I should have said to her – why
didn’t I say to her, “Yes. He’s my great-grandfather and I’m taking him
out for an airing. He’s due back at the asylum in 10 minutes.”
She thought we
were lovers. Husband and wife, for Christ’s sake. What did that make me? I look
in the mirror, and I don’t see an old person, I don’t.
(Let us interrupt this pointless story for PROOF. This was taken on Easter Sunday, goddamnit!)
Maybe I’m blinded. Maybe I really am a withered old hag. Maybe she thought it was a May-December thing. Who the hell knows or cares.
(Let us interrupt this pointless story for PROOF. This was taken on Easter Sunday, goddamnit!)
Maybe I’m blinded. Maybe I really am a withered old hag. Maybe she thought it was a May-December thing. Who the hell knows or cares.
I needed
something, needed an addictive splurge to shoot sucrose into my veins and make
me feel better. Tim Hortons looked inviting, and I ordered an Ice Cap, which consists
of eight ounces of full-fat cream with a shot of espresso. Had to have
something with it, so instead of my usual Boston Cream I ordered a honey
cruller.
I ordered a honey
cruller because the tray of honey crullers had just been slid out into the
display case. I ordered a honey cruller because the glaze was just lazily
sliding down the sides of the crullers and forming nice leisurely blobs. I
ordered – skip it, they looked good, I bought one. I looked around for crazed
old men – they were coming out of the woodwork today, I guessed – and sat down.
I had a long slurp
of caffeine-and-cream before taking a bite. I cannot describe this! The cruller
was still slightly warm. Like puff pastry, it was extremely light with an eggy
sort of softness inside. It melted on my tongue, which was telling me, “This!
Is! Good!’ while my brain planned to buy seven more of them so I could
keep on repeating the experience.
The cruller was
both soft and crisp, sugary, icing-y in a slightly granular way. It looked like
a honeycomb, sort of – all open and scalloped, almost faceted – maybe why they
call it a HONEY cruller and not a BASEBALL cruller! In any case, like most
pleasurable things, the cruller didn’t last long enough. I had never had a
cruller which was slightly warm before, but it stirred a long-ago memory of my
mother frying up doughnuts (NOT “donuts”, that modern atrocity which was only
invented to save lettering on signs, or else for the 95% of people who never
learn to spell), coating them in sugar and cinnamon, and letting them cool on a
rack in the kitchen. I would burn my tongue agonizingly to get at those
doughnuts. They were paradise.
The cruller thing
may never be repeated . Tim Hortons half-bakes their doughnuts in Etobicoke or
somewhere “back East”, freezes them and
ships them around the country like so many hockey pucks to be finished off in a
tepid oven. The next one will probably taste like nothing, with the consistency
of leather soaked for 100 years. But I had this one, this Proustian cruller, which
I will probably remember forever.
Or probably not.
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