Category Archives: Miriam

October 26, 2011   Miriam   authors, favorites, fun, Miriam  
4

Unconditional

I don’t know about you guys but I have a handful of authors that I love unconditionally.  Yes, that’s right.  I love them beyond, despite, because.  Rationally and irrationally.  I’d buy one their books even if it was a technical guide to taxidermy.  Needless to say, this kind of unconditional love is exceedingly rare and requires much more than mere skill, talent or even genius in order to blossom and thrive.   Really, authors have to earn that I’ll-forgive-anything feeling about their work and not just because of how brilliant one or two or even a dozen of their books are.  For me, it’s a combination of their writing and the subjects that obsess them, their public persona, their ability to surprise, rabble rouse, or consistently awe (this last is the hardest).

There is, of course, no subjective measure for who is worthy of unconditional love.   For instance, I’ve read enough Joyce Carol Oates to have developed great respect and admiration for her.  But love, much less unconditional love?  Uh uhn.  On the other hand, Toni Morrison could fill a notebook with crayoned squiggles and I’d add it to my collection.  Don DeLillo?  Admiration, respect, deep like.  Jonathan Franzen?  Unconditional love.  (I know, I know.  Don’t judge.)

This is, of course, a longwinded way of telling you guys about my unconditional love of Jeffrey Eugenides, newly bolstered by this ridiculously charming essay in The Millions.  I haven’t read The Marriage Plot yet, but I will because this is an author whose failures I’d probably find more interesting and moving than other authors’ successes.   Does that make sense?

In fact, is there a place for unconditional love in literature?  Should we allow ourselves to blindly champion an author no matter how flawed, offensive, or just plain lame his/her work becomes?   Or should we be driven by our critical faculties and let the work in front of us be the sole basis for affection or dismissal?  Do you guys ever love writers unconditionally?

October 19, 2011   Miriam   Amazon, authors, bestsellers, competition, controversy, digital publishing, e-books, Miriam, self-publishing, selling  
9

Moneyball, Amazon and the end of publishing as we know it

In this week’s death watch, the publishing business is going the way of the Edsel.  E-books have won.  Traditional publishers don’t know what to do with themselves or their lists.  Agents are unnecessary.  Anarchy reigns among authors.   And, oh, yeah, Amazon is getting closer to world domination (tricky bastards).  There is no leadership.  The darkness is encroaching.  The center cannot hold!

Let’s see, that about covers it, I think.  Except, does it?

The afore-linked-to New York Times article contains a quote from Russ Grandinetti (whom we’ve met a few times at Amazon seminars we’ve attended and whom the Times refers to as “one of Amazon’s top executives,” leading me to believe they don’t know exactly what he does) which I actually loved: “It’s always the end of the world. You could set your watch on it arriving.”  It also mentions some other shady (unnamed) Amazon characters twirling their mustaches while claiming that “publishers [are] in love with their own demise.”  As wary as  my colleagues and I are about Amazon and their plans to expand into publishing, I tend to agree with their assessment that traditional publishers can come across as a self-indulgent, hand wringing bunch who’d rather blame the big bad corporate entity for poaching their authors and re-drawing the battle lines than take effective steps to compete and prosper.

Enough, already.  If the model is broken or the times have changed and there’s a new model out there, then learn it, adapt your systems, and make it work for you.  Publishers are sitting on gold mines of backlists.  They seem to be unable or unwilling to competitively price and promote the e-books  they are putting out.  They’re still paying too much for that “sure thing” Jane was talking about earlier this week.  Most of all, they are loath to innovate at the speed the new paradigm requires.

Gerry Howard writes movingly in this week’s PW about how you really can’t apply the principles of Moneyball to publishing because you’d be ripping out its heart and doing away with all that wonderful serendipity that made The Bridges of Madison County, Tuesdays with Morrie, The DaVinci Code and countless other “small” buys into huge bestsellers.  I agree.  But, the thing I take away from Moneyball (the book and the film) is that you’ve got to look at your game differently if you are up against a rich behemoth who outpitches, outhits, and outfields you because they can buy all the talent out there.  Whether you’re talking about the Yankees or Amazon, I think the lesson is the same:  you can win playing smart small ball too.

Thoughts?  Comments?  Angry rebuttals?

October 12, 2011   Miriam   characters, fiction, fun, gender, guilty pleasures, Miriam  
6

Hot messes

I’ve been reading a fair amount of category fiction lately, in part because that’s what seems to be working in the e-publishing universe at the moment.  As a result, I’m encountering tons of literary clichés, chief among them the dark, brooding, tortured hero with flowing mane, abs of steel and damaged-but-still-beating heart of gold—your typical romance hero, in other words.  And we all know who was responsible for these prototypes…that crazy old storyteller Homer.  Nah.  Despite how hunky and troubled Hector, Achilles, and Odysseus are, it was the “lady writers” who really turned this type into a cottage industry.  If you think about it, there’s a direct line from Austen and Bronte to Stephenie Meyer and Eloisa James (sorry, the latter don’t rate single names yet; maybe in a century or two) and the swooning readership that fell in love with Mr. Darcy and Heathcliff when they were hot off the presses (no pun intended) was probably not all that different from the one that has made Twilight into an international phenomenon.  I’m not the only one who says so, either.

But, what about the less than dreamy heroes?  The Raskolnikovs and Yossarians? The neurotic and often substance abusing characters in Hemingway and Fitzgerald novels?  The angst-ridden suburbanites of Updike and Cheever?   I mean, sure, they’re hot messes, for the most part, and most do not have washboard abs.  But, aren’t they just a little sexy too?  Or is it just me?

Who are your swoon-worthy literary heroes?   And, do you prefer tall, dark and handsome or short, insecure and funny?

October 05, 2011   Miriam   advice, audience, authors, Miriam, opinion  
6

“If it be not now, yet it will come…”

We all know that the last part of that quote is “the readiness is all.”   Words to live by, no?  So, why is everyone in such a hurry?

Specifically, I’m talking about the hurry to get a half-baked manuscript in front of an agent, the hurry to start the next book when you’re still writing the first one (and, by the way, you have a looming deadline for that first one), the hurry to get a new contract before the current book has been published, the hurry to get all of your writing published at once (something currently made much more possible through electronic means), etc.  We’re all in too much of a hurry.  We cut corners like we cut off other drivers—because we have to get somewhere five minutes ago before someone else beats us there.  We’re so obsessed with being done that we don’t do things well.

Sure, we’re in a hurry to make money and see our names up in lights and there’s nothing wrong with that (see Jim’s recent blog post on the subject of art vs. filthy lucre).  Without those incentives, we’d still be sitting around in caves eating leftover mastodon while wearing unfashionable fur coats.  But the rush to get rich and famous (or even just published) needs to be offset by a nice dose of readiness.  Your manuscript or proposal needs to be ready—edited and re-edited before even submitting to agents, polished for submission once the agent has taken you on, proofread so that most if not all “it’s” and “its” are as they should be.  You need to be ready to take on the unglamorous, thankless part of the process—writing query letters, sifting through rejections, following up patiently and courteously, starting all over again after a promising early read leads nowhere, being a savvy business person who reviews  his/her contracts and asks relevant questions of his/her agent and publisher, laying the groundwork for the platform you’ll need when you have a publisher and a publication date, and, of course, being a denizen of “the waiting place” while the publishing process unfolds with all the alacrity of a snail on downers.

So, yes, it’s a bit of a “hurry up and wait” conundrum.  On the one hand, you need the fire in the belly that gets that germ of an idea out of your head and into print.  On the other hand, making sure your work is ready for public consumption is not a process that should be rushed.  Write well, edit carefully, do your due diligence in getting published (know your audience) and then have patience with the publishing process—learn your lessons before rushing out to get the next one and the next one and the next one out there.

And, of course, readiness is a relative and somewhat intuitive term.  Seems to me that Danielle Steel’s work is ready a lot faster than Cormac McCarthy’s but that’s why there are different categories of fiction.  How about you guys?  How do you know when your work is ready?  And, do you sometimes hurry the process along in a way you know you shouldn’t?

September 28, 2011   Miriam   Amazon, Apple, buzz, competition, e-books, media, Miriam, news, retailers, technology  
5

World domination

When Dan Slater of Amazon, a longtime friend of DGLM, was visiting last week, I jokingly asked him what new steps his company was taking toward its ultimate goal of world domination.  Discreet as Dan is, he did not let on about the new Kindle Fire announcement (although we’d all heard buzz) but he definitely did not deny that Amazon was in the process of taking over the universe (at least the publishing universe).

Well, as the HuffPost live blog of today’s announcement by Jeff Bezos about the new tablet shows, the Amazon juggernaut rumbles inexorably on.  Not having seen one of these babies in person, I’ve no idea whether I’m going to rush out and buy the new KF instead of the iPad I’ve been thinking of gifting myself for Christmas.   On the one hand, I use my current Kindle quite a bit and, given how lame the Apple book store is, I expect that I’ll continue to get most of my online reading from Amazon anyway.  On the other hand, it’s hard to root for the prohibitive favorite in sports or big business.  I’m not sure I want to live under an Amazon dictatorship, no matter how benign.

Is it as dire as all that?  Or is this all just healthy, good fun on the part of the superpowers?  Are they just giving us all more options even as we have less and less time to avail ourselves of them?

September 21, 2011   Miriam   fiction, fun, great books, guilty pleasures, Miriam, reading, reviews  
21

Virtuous reading

My neighborhood book club is tomorrow night and I’m about 100 pages into this month’s fiction pick, The Tiger’s Wife.  I guess that if I stay up late and cram I can finish it in time to dazzle the ladies with my literary insights.  Problem is, I got to page 100 about two months ago and I have had zero desire to pick the book up again.  Despite the apocalyptically excellent reviews (sorry, couldn’t come up with an adjective BIG enough for the unctuous praise the book received), those first 100 pages left me pretty cold.  Sure, Ms. Obreht is a precociously fine writer, but if you’re familiar with magical realism and Eastern European novels of the last half century, you might find, like I did, that a lot of her schtick is derivative and not particularly emotionally impactful.

Or, you might think it’s a brilliant book and that I’m a boor for being bored by it.  No matter.  The point of my rambling today is that with any other book, I might have reached that 100-page stopping point and, deciding that life’s too short, buried the novel somewhere in the lower shelves of an overstuffed bookcase never to be seen again.  But, I can’t seem to do that.  This is one of those books that I feel obligated to slog through no matter how disappointed in it I already am or how certain that the next 200 pages are not going to change my mind.  What I want to be reading for pleasure is a toothy thriller, or a frothy paranormal, or literary fare that speaks to themes I’m concerned with right now, or historical nonfiction with lots of plot twists and stranger-than-fiction characters, or a totally irredeemable celebrity memoir.  What I feel obligated to do is finish Ms. Obreht’s opus just so that I can say I did.

I’ve always struggled with the notion of virtuous reading.  On the one hand, if it weren’t for virtuous reading, my literary education would be sorely lacking in some key areas (I’m thinking of you, James Fenimore Cooper).  On the other hand, with so many great books beckoning and the certainty that I’ll never get to enjoy but a fraction of the ones on my multi-page list of things to read before I die, it really rankles to devote valuable time to something just because it’s supposed to be good for me.

Where do you fall on this issue?  Do I keep reading and pat myself on the back for my moral fortitude or chuck it and move on to some other page turner?  What would you do?

September 14, 2011   Miriam   agents, authors, etiquette, fun, Miriam  
3

Handle with care

While Jane’s off gallivanting around the Middle East riding camels and taking in ancient history on her very well-earned vacation, I’ve been holding down the fort here at DGLM.  Really, the fort runs pretty smoothly on its own, but given the general state of my piles (I turn my back on them and they procreate), I find myself a bit more overwhelmed than usual this week.

So, instead of one of my lengthy, ruminative blog posts that I know many of you look forward to like the season finale of Dancing with the Stars (right? right?), I give you this link I came across a couple of weeks ago on the Huff Post.  It’s about the care and handling of agents, once you bag one, but I think it applies to most professional interaction, which mostly boils down to “don’t be annoying.”

Certainly, not being annoying is something we at DGLM are always striving for with abysmal levels of success.  And, we really do understand and empathize with our more neurotic clients when their craziness overwhelms their common sense, but we are also absurdly grateful when writers are well behaved and pleasant to interact with.  So, take a look at the piece and let me know which of these areas you find most challenging.

September 07, 2011   Miriam   authors, canon, college, culture, fun, great books, Miriam, opinion, reading  
4

Syllabi

Yesterday, as I headed north on Broadway toward the 125th street entrance to the West Side Highway in a downpour not seen since, well, last week when gregarious Irene was paying a visit to the entire East Coast, I found myself stopped at a light in front of the main gates of Columbia University, my alma mater.  The street was teeming with rain and fresh faced freshmen looking vaguely shellshocked.  Watching them hurry to cross the street before the light changed and the homicidal cabbie in the next lane hit the gas, their overstuffed backpacks and grim expressions sent me into a reverie about my long ago school days.

One of the reasons I chose Columbia was its mandatory humanities courses—philosophy, literature, music, and art survey courses composed of the “canon” of great works.  As those of you who read this blog regularly know, most of us here at DGLM love a reading list and what better reason to go into thousands of dollars worth of debt than to emerge with a reading list full of masterpieces chosen by…old white guys, reflecting the ideology and intellectual tradition of…old white guys.  Wait!  Even with the occasional nod to a woman or person of color the canon really was rather limited and limiting in its choice of authors. All these years later, it still is.

Don’t get me wrong, I loved many if not most of those canonical choices, but I wonder what I would have changed in that syllabus for my lit hum class.  Instead of the Iliad, perhaps One Thousand and One Nights?  Borges instead of Dreiser?  Zora Neale Hurston instead of F. Scott Fitzgerald?  How about genre literature?  I know I would’ve traded a great mystery novel for the millions of pages on whaling by the esteemed Mr. Melville in a heartbeat.

Obviously, there’s no right list of classics, but if the idea is to shape young minds that will then go out and shape the world, what would your reading list include?

August 24, 2011   Miriam   critiques, culture, editing, fun, Miriam, opinion, sarcasm  
9

A snark’s snark

I’m not sure it’s legal to work in publishing and not love Dorothy Parker.  The dame’s snarkiness has inspired millions of mean rejection letters from editors so ground under by their thankless jobs that the only joy they find in their dark, miserable lives is putting their rage (at incoherent prose, ill-formed thoughts, ridiculous storylines) on their publisher’s letterhead and sending it out to agents, who take the blow for their clients.

It’s not just editors.  Ms. Parker is also the patron saint of agents who have to sift through unreadable queries (see Jim’s blog posts on this topic), spend their evenings with manuscripts so flawed you literally don’t know where to begin pointing out problems, and stare agape at vicious e-mails from authors who did not take kindly to their form letter rejection or clients who took even less kindly to their attempts at righting their sinking ships.  I think all of us here at DGLM have at one time or another crafted bitingly sarcastic, splendidly caustic, unimaginably cruel letters in response to an offensive query or manuscript.  And, then, we’ve hit “delete” and taken the high, boring, inoffensive road.

In fact, I think all intelligent readers have a bit of Dorothy Parker in them.  How often have you wanted to throw a book across the room in bitter disappointment or indulged in homicidal fantasies about a bestselling author you’re convinced was taught to write by feral monkeys?  How about when, as Jane recently mused, you plod through a book everyone has touted as the best thing since Nutella only to find that you hate, hate, hate it (The Help, anyone)?

Unfortunately, in this era of political correctness and “everybody wins” thinking, Ms. Parker’s take-no-prisoners approach to criticism is becoming obsolete.  Which is why we should treasure every snarky word and phrase…like these.

C’mon, get mean.  Share some imaginary putdowns you’d throw out about a book or author you just can’t stand.

August 17, 2011   Miriam   culture, fun, Miriam, trivia, writing  
12

Deathbed wit

Most writers I know are fairly self-conscious by nature and most have a lot invested in being “writerly.”  Writing as a profession seems to define its practitioners in a way that baking or delivering mail, say, doesn’t.  Don’t you find that as soon as you tell people you’re a writer, they seem to hang on your words with an extra bit of anticipation?  Aren’t you mortified when you struggle to come up with the right phrase while in conversation or type the wrong word in a blog?  As a writer, you should have all the contents of Webster’s readily at your fingertips if not your tongue, right?  Everyone expects you to be able to solve the Times crossword puzzle (on Friday) but also have the mot juste for every occasion.  (This, by the way, applies to those of us who merely work with books as well, not just those who write them.)

So, how mortifying if one’s final words as a writer were pedestrian—“I’m dying,” “Get me a glass of water,” “Ugh.”  Just think how put out the people hanging around your bedside as you are preparing to breathe your last would be if you didn’t come up with a concluding statement for the ages.

Or maybe it’s just me.  This HuffPost offering has me thinking about what I would like my last words to be.  It’s important to be concise (you probably won’t have much time), clever but somewhat profound—unless satire is your métier—and sincere.  So, I think I’m going to start working on the perfect goodbye phrase.  Hopefully, I won’t need to use it  for a very, very long time, but it’s good to be prepared.  After all, you only have one chance to get it right.

What would your last words be?  Would you be sweet like Virginia Woolf, poetic like Emily Dickinson, pissy like Eugene O’Neill, or droll like Oscar Wilde?  Give me some suggestions.  If nothing else, a good parting phrase will come in useful in your fiction.

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