Speakeasy

AWM Online is hosting a forum tomorrow!

On Wednesday 27 February, from 11am (QLD time - 12 noon for those of you enjoying daylight savings), Canadian literary agent Sally Harding will be joining us to answer your questions about books, writing, agenting and lots more.

Sally currently works in Vancouver, as literary agent with the Cooke and Harding Agencies. In the past, she’s worked in editing, bookselling and publishing in Australia and New Zealand, and her career in the industry spans over fourteen years. Visit the Harding Agency website for more information, or login to the Forum tomorrow to ask Sally a question!

The AWM Online Forums are for paid subscribers only. Please see the website for registration and subscription information.

This article has really, really awesome advice. It’s sensible, practical, realistic, and not patronising. I like that.

It is American, so some of the figures and terms don’t apply here in Oz (I’m not sure a freelancer can make $164,000 p.a. in the market here, but I haven’t tried, so who knows?) Regardless, every writer should read this article, for the perspective on writerly finances. It perfectly addresses the common misconceptions people (read: non-writers) have about ‘the writing life’, and dismantles them with well-condsidered facts and sensible arguments.

A lot of it boils down to common sense. Don’t spend money you don’t have, don’t assume you can write full-time without getting paid. Love your day-job, as it allows you to write while providing you with insurance and things. The part about where to live was really interesting (the article suggests not living in LA or New York, as rent alone will cripple a writerly income. Substitute for Sydney and parts of Melbourne, I suppose), as well as the bit about how to marry well. And check out the comments, for a few extra tidbits.

According to Bookseller + Publisher, four of Australia’s independent book distributors have just reached an agreement to merge their operations. Bookwise (who, incidentally, distribute the print editions of The Australian Writer’s Marketplace), Tower Books, Gary Allen, and Brumby’s Books and Music will retain their own brands but will consolidate their IT systems, operations, and administrative functions.

I’m afraid you’ll need to login to read the rest of the article - and I recommend a subscription, cause Bookseller + Publisher have some interesting stuff - but the gist is that it’s basically business as usual, with most of the changes internal and unlikely to affect booksellers or customers. Gary Allen is quoted in the article as saying that the main reason behind the merge was to ‘create a new entity with critical mass to compete more effectively,’ and that they should be able to develop the scale and reach to penetrate market niches more effectively, and become a more significant supplier.

How many indies does it take to make a non-indie? Does this mean that we’ve got four less independents, and one more giant? Or can they have corporate finances, and still be indies at heart?

Having just posted that I won’t be posting for a while, here’s a quick post on the Writer’s Strike.

According to most of the higher-ups in the WGA (the Writers Guild of America), the deal brokered at the end of the Strike is cause for celebration. Not so Harlan Ellison, whose vitriolic response to the deal has been making the rounds lately. Frankly, I can’t even keep track of exactly what the deal is, let alone how it works.

Just a quick note to let you all know that we’ve started updating the database for the upcoming print edition of The Australian Writer’s Marketplace, so updates on the blog might be a little slow. Or nonexistent.

But it’s all in a good cause - this will be the 10th edition of the hardcopy, and we’ve already got a really sexy cover design (I know that’s not the most important part of publishing a book, but come on. This is virtually a phone directory; a hot cover helps.)

So we haven’t abandoned you; we’re just busy phoning up the 2,400-and-something listings we have in our database, and asking them if we have the right phone numbers. And if you have a listing, or know anyone who has a listing, please get them to update it. Or call me, and I’ll do it for them. One less phone call, a little less RSI…

The Writers Guild of America has voted to officially end the writers strike!

It happened a couple of days ago, actually - sorry, we were a little distracted by the Apology - but this article from the New York Times, and this one from Entertainment Weekly, have details. 

A couple of days ago, the Guardian Blog posted on a particular question that seems to come up quite a bit: should writers plan their novels, or rely on spontaneous outpourings and worry about structure later? The writer of the article doesn’t like the idea of methodically laying out a story, plotting it down to the last chapter before the first sentence is even written. But I have to wonder, without enough plotting, wouldn’t a novel get a bit waffley?

We asked around, and opnions seem to come out at around 50-50 for each side. Some writers plan, some don’t. Some writing teachers will tell you to plan, some will tell you not to. And there’s a whole bunch who do a bit of planning, have a general idea of where their story is going, but jump into the first draft pretty quickly.

Like someone has said in the comments on the Guardian, it pretty much comes down to personal preferences. Figure out which method works for you, and go for it.

More on the study of literature with this interesting piece in The Australian over the weekend by Rosemary Neill about the rise of University ‘Creative Writing’ courses versus the decline in students studying Literature.

In 2006 33 of the 38 Australian Universities offered Creative Writing courses or modules and their popularity was in direct contrast to falling enrolments in Literature. Whilst many academic circles view this with concern, what is clear is that though we may not think that we want to read as much (the Under 25 age group has often been accused of being a generation of ‘reluctant readers’), we do want to write, and even be published.

And of course a good writer also needs to be a good reader. Any published author will tell you that one of the most important things in managing your career is to read, read widely and read often.  As Neill asks in her article, ‘Do creative writing courses lead students to literature, or prove a distraction from it?’ The answer seems to be that students will read, will have to read, literature of relevance to their own writing, they need to know the context and history. And it may even be that the new courses are attracting people to ‘Literature’ who previously would have run a mile.

Found this little gem via Bookslut: A post on University Diaries (a blog by an English Professor) that discusses what to look for in a professor of literature. UD quotes another professor, who wants his students to examine the literature they study in his classes in relation to their own lives and go from there. UD’s comment is that the point of studying literature is not personal identification, and that it also requires "a selfless, analytical interest in the form as well as the substance of aesthetic objects."

Having just completed 6 years of studying literature, I thought these comments were really interesting. I’m fairly sure I never once associated the content of the texts I studied to my own life, and I wouldn’t have even read most of them if I hadn’t been taking the course.

However, I would have found it extrememly hard to maintain "selfless, analytical interest" for 6 years, and I wouldn’t have enjoyed the course at all if I hadn’t been able to engage with the novels on some kind of personal level. As much as the talk of the ‘human condition’ is a cliche, there is still something in it. For example, since I’ve never been orphaned, or been to prison, or even to South Africa, reading JM Coetzee’s The Life and Times of Michael K should have been purely analytical. But I could still appreciate the loneliness and alienation of the main character, so some little personalisation doesn’t hurt.

The other thing this post made me wonder about was reading itself. Once you get trained in critical reading (reading for study, to pick out all the things you can bring up in an essay), can you ever read non-critically again? Can you ever pick up a book without looking for dominant themes and discourses? Will I ever be able to read the latest novel without looking for marginalisation and silencing?

The jury’s still out, I guess.

In a bizarre twist on all the author-fakes-life-story-and-or-plagiarises scandals that have popped up recently, journalist and foreign correspondant Robert Fisk has recently suffered a different kind of forgery. According to this article, a biography of Saddam Hussein was published in Egypt, naming him as the author. But he’s never written a biography of Saddam Hussein.

In the article, Fisk recounts the trip he took to Cairo to try and track down whoever was selling this book under his name, and it struck me that he didn’t seem particularly angered by the appropriation of his name. Perhaps it was just the article (all the expletives were edited out?), but I know I would find it really difficult to deal with this if I was in his position. Especially this:

[The book] took a very lenient view of the brutality of Saddam, it didn’t seem to care much about the gassed civilians of Halabja – and it was full of the kind of purple passages which I loathe.

Imagine it. The thougth makes me shudder.