Word Pirates

Word Pirates is looking for a new member. The Petaluma-based writing group meets on the third Tuesday of each month to focus on
creative non-fiction and short fiction. Our goal is to inspire and support each other as we get our work ready for publication. A typical
meeting is split between reading our work to each other and starting new work through writing prompts.

We are looking for members who are professional writers/editors and/or hold a degree in writing. The group doesn’t focus on genre fiction, screenplays, or poetry. If you’re interested, please e-mail us a brief bio and sample of your writing and tell us what you are looking for in a writing group.

Contact: wordpirates @ gmail.com

In addition to dramatic stories bemoaning the economic downturn, recession, depression or whatever its currently called, the number of stories about the “death” of the publishing industry in general and literary publishing in particular rose exponentially. Well, it’s just not as bad as all that.

A study by the National Endowment for the Arts shows that the percentage of adults engaging in “literary” reading has gone up since 2002. Even better, the age group that increased most dramatically (18-24 year olds) is the group that previously showed the biggest decline. Youth is the future, and all that.

It’s not all sunshine and rainbows: The number is lower than it was in 1992, and it’s only about half the nation’s adult population. (Really? Half of U.S. adults haven’t read one single book, short story or poem in the last 12 months???) But in a time when the media and publishing industry alike seemed allergic to anything even remotely resembling optimism, it’s good to hear something besides gloom and doom.

By 2012, let’s get that percentage up even higher than it was in 1992!!

Link

Merry Christmas! Happy Hanukkah! Here is a delightful news story about children being excited to make their own books! And then they send the books to Peruvian school children! Mighty Authors is a very affordable self-publishing site for schools and children. And kids are excited about it. They are swapping books and making little libraries.

Sixth-grader Courtney Heaps said she’s saving her baby-sitting money to buy a bound copy of a scary-story book she plans to write later this school year. She’s eager to own a real book she wrote herself.

“I’ll probably read it to my brother and sister,” she said.

Anya Ulinich wrote a short story that one New York magazine critic says is ““entire work of fiction [written] with the sole purpose of a barely disguised personal attack on Jonathan Safran Foer.” Ulinich disagress.

Here is a passage from the story that elicited the theory:

Your characters are monsters who fashion heaps of bones into tiny missing pieces of themselves.

You can read the story here.

What do you think?

via Maud Newton

Apparently, the New York Times is all about writing about writing lately. Hurray for us! The Sunday Book Review will have a piece that plays with the idea of a “bailout for writers.” I promise to find something uplifting for the next post. In the mean time …. topical!

… overcapacity of farms and farm produce was driving down crop prices, and that elimination of that over­capacity was needed.

Overcapacity has been something generally acknowledged across the writing industry for at least 10 years. In a 2002 essay in The New York Times, the onetime best-selling novelist and story writer Ann Beattie mourned the situation of the modern writer, living in a world where people are more interested in “being a writer” than in writing itself. …

So how would my big St. Bernard of a bailout dig the publishers out of their drifts? According to the industry tracker Bowker, about 275,000 new titles and editions are published in the United States each year. Let’s say we want to eliminate half of them. Assuming it takes about two years to write your average book, we would offer book writers two years of salary at the writers’ average annual income of $38,000 a year. Add it all up and you get a paltry $10.5 billion to dramatically reduce the book overcapacity.

Of course, this is all theoretical and satirical and junk.

However, I took the real-life version of a writer bailout for a year; I worked in advertising. And now I don’t. So I guess bailouts are only for the greedy or the stupid. Burn! Take that, insurance, airlines, auto, banking …..

Upon hearing that “Joe the Plumber” has a book deal, Timothy Egan writes a rant that I think a lot of us would second.

There was a time when I wanted to be like Sting, the singer, belting out, “Roxanne …” I guess that’s why we have karaoke, for fantasy night. If only there was such a thing for failed plumbers, politicians or celebrities who think they can write.

Egan also hopes that having a writer in the White House will improve things. Man, Obama’s just doling out hope left and right … or maybe just left.

-marcia

PS - So … Shouldn’t it be “If only there were such a thing …?” Why do I ask? Yes, it should. Ugh, sometimes I hate that I used to copy edit for a living.

Just in time for your holiday gift shopping … the New York Times put out its list of the 100 notable books of the year.

“A Mercy” by Toni Morrison is on the list. Here’s a video of her reading an excerpt:

Literary Review gives the “bad sex” award “with the aim of gently dissuading authors and publishers from including unconvincing, perfunctory, embarrassing or redundant passages of a sexual nature in otherwise sound literary novels”.

Sex is really hard to write! I don’t normally go for “bad” awards. But these are otherwise good writers (usually) confronting a real writing problem: how do you write sex that isn’t silly, too-graphic, icky, confusing … the list of adjectives goes on. It’s kind of helpful to see what they did wrong (or what they did to rub this one literary journal the wrong way)…

This year’s nominees:
James Buchan for The Gate of Air
Simon Montefiore for Sashenka
John Updike for The Widows of Eastwick
Kathy Lette for To Love, Honour and Betray
Alastair Campbell for All in the Mind
Rachel Johnson for Shire Hell
Isabel Fonseca for Attachment
Ann Allestree for Triptych of a Young Wolf
Russell Banks for The Reserve
Paulo Coelho for Brida

Nominated passage from Allestree’s novel:

“He raised himself to his knees and bent to roll his tongue around her weeping orifice. He was bringing her to a pitch of ecstasy when she heard Madame Veuve, on the landing, put down the supper tray. Whiffs of onion soup strayed over them as he engulfed her. ‘Don’t stop,’ she clamoured; she was nearly there, it was in the bag.”

via Guardian UK

-marcia

The book “Can We Have Our Balls Back, Please” asserts that the British invented baseball, and cites the opening pages of Jane Austen’s “Northanger Abbey” as proof.

On the Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert did a great riff on what Austen baseball would be like. Here is an excerpt: (The video is also below, with the Austen bit as the second segment)

“Austen wasn’t writing about American baseball. It was a Jane Austen version, where the ball is not hurled about rudely, but introduced to the bat through proper channels at a society function. And one does not steal bases like a commoner; one sends word ahead to the next base by messenger, requesting permission to approach at the base’s leisure. Of course, what the bat cannot reveal is that though he loves the ball desperately, he has sworn an oath of loyalty to the glove to whom the ball was promised. So the bat must pretend he hates the ball, swatting at it, though he wishes nothing more than to profess his undying affection, but he can’t, he mustn’t, he shan’t! And so, the bat must retreat to the gardens of his estate and… pine.”

Writer inspiration! Watch this video of an adorable French child improvising a strange and imaginative story. I guarantee it will make you a better writer. Do it!

Once upon a time… from Capucha on Vimeo.

(I think “chicken box” = “chicken pox”)

-marcia

via Boing Boing