Category Archives: Publishing

Authors, Blogs, Socials, Publishing

Big Publishers, Writer’s Complaints, and Blogroll

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Novelist and screenwriter Raymond Chandler, who took up writing as a career after losing his respect and position at Dabney Oil in 1932, read a laudatory profile on Ernest Hemingway in The New Yorker and said, “I realize that I am much too clean to be a genius, much too sober to be a champ, and far, far too clumsy with a shotgun to live the good life.”

Well, someone should have told Chandler he had his own genius as well as his own version of the good life, which needed amending.

Mark Twain vented his spleen on the writing skill of James Fennimore Cooper with many accurate complaints like this one:

For several years, Cooper was daily in the society of artillery, and he ought to have noticed that when a cannon-ball strikes the ground it either buries itself or skips a hundred feet or so; skips again a hundred feet or so — and so on, till finally it gets tired and rolls. Now in one place he loses some “females” — as he always calls women — in the edge of a wood near a plain at night in a fog, on purpose to give Bumppo a chance to show off the delicate art of the forest before the reader. These mislaid people are hunting for a fort. They hear a cannon-blast, and a cannon-ball presently comes rolling into the wood and stops at their feet. To the females this suggests nothing. The case is very different with the admirable Bumppo. I wish I may never know peace again if he doesn’t strike out promptly and follow the track of that cannon-ball across the plain in the dense fog and find the fort. Isn’t it a daisy?

Mark Twain, “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses,” 1895

What are other people saying about books?

Big Publishers: There are five powerhouses in U.S. publishing today: Simon & Schuster, Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Hachette Book Group, and Macmillan. If judges approve a currently contested merger, Penguin Random House would be allowed to buy Simon & Schuster, reducing the big publishers to four. This would make German media group Bertelsmann, which owns Penguin Random House and is already the world’s largest trade book publisher, in an Amazon-sized company. (via ArtsJournal)

Today is St. George’s Day in England, a day celebrated on par with Christmas at one time.

We fairly hope … that this day
Shall change all griefs and quarrels into love.
To cry “Amen” to that, thus we appear.
You English princes all, I do salute you.

Shakespeare’s Henry V, Act 5

Birthday: It is also Shakespeare’s birthday. He was born April 23, 1564, which is a date deduced by the record of his baptism in the Parish Register at Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon on Wednesday 26 April 1564. 

Block Party: Thoughts of Shakespeare naturally turn one’s mind to Brooklyn and “a timeless block party that could be 400 years old,” notes the NY Daily News.

Word Game: And when you think about block parties, you think about the word guessing games that are all the rage amongst the hip kids. The Folger Shakespeare Library has their own version called Prattle. This one is new to me. I’ve been playing Wordle and Quordle for several weeks now.

Photo: Bus Depot, angle view, Bond Street, Bend, Oregon 1987. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Blogs, Socials, Coffee, Tea, Drinks, Publishing

A Bright Age for Dropouts Drinking Coffee and Reading Defunct Lit-mags

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One of my daughters likes spicy food but doesn’t eat it much. She’s willing to try anything hot, and this week it was a dried Carolina Reaper, the world’s hottest pepper. I urged her to prepare for eating it by reading what she could find online, but no, she just scarfed it up and downed a milk shake as a counter measure. She told me she was going to do it but not when she would, so I didn’t know she had until she came to us at 1:30 a.m. to ask for help with sharp stomach pain. She threw up a few minutes later, which I understand is a normal response to eating these peppers.

So what are we linking to today?

Local Coffee: Some poor businessman failed to read the room when launching plans to remodel an Arby’s in Livingston, Montana, into a Starbucks. The community has a number of local coffee shops, like Chadz on N. Main and Eastside Coffee in the historic district, and the Livingston Business Improvement District don’t want Big Coffee to put a squeeze on them.

The Bright Ages: On the latest Prufrock podcast, Micah Mattix talks to the authors of a medieval history that focuses on many of the details we ignore about the Middle Ages. “It was, for the most part, seen as neither a virtue nor a vice that a city or region would contain various people from various places speaking various languages. It was a fact.”

Kudos to Mattix’s revived Prufrock newsletter, which you can subscribe to through the website of Spectator World.

Dropping Out: Hippies and drop outs were afraid, in part, of societal brainwashing and the mind-control everyone was talking about in the 60s. They wanted to know and live their true selves. (via Arts & Letters Daily)

Closing Shop: Literary magazines are being shut down. (Via Arts & Letters Daily)

Racism: A popular anti-racist author claims, “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” That’s how you fight bad discrimination, friends. You fight it with your own discrimination.

Photo: Newman’s Drugs, Lake Huntington, New York. 1976. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Bookselling, Fiction, Publishing

Winnie-the-Pooh is Now Public Domain

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Every year creative works slip into the public domain for use in Geico ads and local craft fairs. This year, the first story by A.A. Milne of his delightful bear in the Hundred Acre Wood has become public domain.

Johnathan Bailey of Plagiarism Today spells out what isn’t public domain, which is every Disney created and other Winnie-the-Pooh stories.

“Milne actually wrote four books based on the character and books 2-4 have not lapsed into the public domain. This means that many of the characters from the series, most notably Tigger, have not lapsed and will not for a few more years. In fact, the image of Pooh wearing a red shirt was not published until 1932.”

Authors, Blogs, Socials, Music, Publishing

Multiple Abuses over Many Years, Reframing Classics, and Winter Jokes

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A line of severe storms with a chance of tornadoes is pressing in on my area of the world. It’s not raining here now, but it likely will by the time I publish this post. The storms have already prevented a roofing project I had planned to participate in this morning, which isn’t good (because that roof isn’t going to patch itself) but may be good for me, because I felt more worn out than usual after a church Christmas dinner last night. I mostly washed dishes, but lifting trays of 25 glasses into a dishwasher is moderate-level lifting and I’m just a puny office worker.

Anyway, nobody cares about that.

In this week’s World Opinion, Hunter Baker urges us to pray for the overturning of Roe and a better understanding of human life.

World Radio has released all four episodes in a long story on the abuse and recovery of the key witness against a wicked Mississippi church leader who abused many children over many years. It’s a story that reveals important truths many of us can use in our own communities. I’ll link to the first episode. You can find the rest by searching the website or your podcast app.

The estate of George Orwell has been looking for someone to write a sequel to 1984, telling the story from Julia’s point of view. Now author Sandra Newman will put it together. The Guardian states, “It is the latest in a series of feminist retellings of classic stories, from Natalie Haynes’s reimagining of the Trojan war A Thousand Ships, and Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls, a version of the Iliad from the perspective of Briseis, to Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet, which centres on the life of Shakespeare’s wife, and Jeet Thayil’s Names of the Women, which tells the stories of 15 women whose lives overlapped with Jesus.”

Arsenio Orteza writes, “Those seeking proof that everything old is new again need look no further” than a couple new releases from Warner Classics boasting a 3D orchestra and spatial audio. I’ve also heard this year’s shopping trends have Hot Wheels, Barbies, and board games at the top of the list.

Sarah Sanderson read Tolkien’s “Leaf by Niggle“ recently. “I too find myself living in an age of anxiety. Tolkien worried that the Nazis would drop a bomb on him before his work was done. I ‘doomscroll’ my national, state, and local COVID numbers daily.”

Mary Spencer attempts to find romance in romanticized Midwestern winters. “He looked at her and she blushed. At least, he thought she blushed. It could have been windburn.” [This post is on McSweeney’s, so let me add that I’ve come across hilarious posts on McSweeney’s before and have not linked to them here because at some point they got nasty. This post only veers toward that territory, so I’m sharing it, but you may see what I’m talking about in headlines to other posts.]

Photo: Fairyland Cottages, Detroit Lakes, Minnesota. 1980. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Publishing, Writing

More Ghostwriting Wanted, More Ghostwriters Needed

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A growing demand for celebrity books has created an increased demand for ghostwriters or collaborators.

Madeleine Morel, a literary agent for ghostwriters, tells Publishers Weekly this type of writing, while still going largely uncredited, has swelled naturally. “A number of writers … have, in the past five to 10 years, turned to ghostwriting as other avenues have dried up—former midlist authors, former long-form journalists whose newspapers or magazines have closed, and former editors who’ve lost jobs to consolidation.”

These collaborators rarely get named on the cover of their book. Perhaps publishers don’t want to break the magic with readers. Publishers want to you to believe you are holding the honest thoughts of one whose face is on the cover. Readers want to hear straight from Alan Cummings, Hayley Mills, Julianna Margulies, or Ron and Clint Howard, not their interpreter, but any of these movie people that I just picked off a list of recent memoirs may not have the skills or time to put together a full book. That’s no smirch on them.

More celebrities appear to be willing to acknowledge one way or another that they needed writing help. Maybe all of society is more willing to acknowledge the little people behind the stars.

Bookselling, Non-fiction, Publishing

Black Friday Sales and Wangerin First Editions

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Black Friday has become synonymous with the spirit of Thanksgiving and growing corn by planting fish in the ground. It’s as American as a payday.

The Rabbit Room is holding a Black Friday all month for the sheer joy of it. Of particular interest to our readers may be these first editions of author Walter Wangerin.

Not to be outdone by a warren of artists, Banner of Truth is offering good discounts on many Puritan paperbacks and other fine volumes.

Publishing, Uncategorized

Sweet and sour times

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As we enjoy the collapse of Western Civilization, there are at least a few consolations to be found in the gradual reduction of lockdown restrictions. In Minnesota, our venerable governor has graciously eliminated occupancy limits in restaurants, and allowed us to go maskless out of doors, as long as we aren’t too friendly about it.

So I went crazy on Saturday and ate at a Chinese buffet for the first time since the Troubles began. Chinese buffets had come to occupy a disproportionate portion of my consciousness, such as it is. Many had already closed even before the pandemic; I feared the lockdown had wiped them out completely. I have an idea the place I went to had been open for a while, actually. But one of my great horrors is having someone tell me, “You’re not allowed in here,” so I waited until I was fairly sure it was OK now. (If you’re in the area and wondering where I went, it was Ocean Buffet in Brooklyn Center. In my experience, the majority of their customers are always Chinese. I tell myself this means something.)

And it was good. Not as good as one imagines after a year of abstinence, but good. I had to wear plastic gloves, provided at the door, at the steaming tables – the cheap kind of gloves made of the same plastic they use for produce bags in the grocery store. Prices have gone up, of course, but that’s a given. I felt a sense of closure. (Or anticlimax. I always get those two confused.)

Reduced restrictions means it looks like there should be some Viking events this summer. I need to take final action on getting my dead tree edition of The Year of the Warrior printed. The printer was going to get back to me, and hasn’t so far. I suppose I’ll have to call him. That book is loooooooong, you know, like something out of 19th Century Russia. It will be expensive to print.

My great fear is that I’ll sink a bunch of my savings into a stock of books, and then the lockdown will return and all my venues will vanish. And I’ll be left with a basement full of stock.

And my basement leaks a little.

Publishing, Writing

Writing pains, prolonged

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Demonstration of Proper Writing Position, from Hill’s Manual of Social and Business Forms. Wikimedia Commons.

Nearing the end of my formatting/proofreading of The Year of the Warrior text, in hopeful pursuit of a new paperback edition.

I approached this project with some trepidation. I had fond memories of writing the book, and I didn’t want to be disillusioned by the reality. I had an awkward idea that parts of it must be pretty bad, and I didn’t want to stare into that void.

Overall, I’m pleased. Where the book is good, I think it’s pretty good. Sometimes my prose can soar. I make interesting use of poetry, both original poetry and psalms, and I think those passages function a little like a movie score, raising the emotional level of the whole exercise. I am my own John Williams.

But there are flabby spots. I’m way too preachy toward the beginning of Part 2, The Ghost of the God-Tree. I don’t think I’d make that mistake today – I wrote this more than 20 years ago, and I hope I’ve learned a few things about my craft. I think I won’t be entirely ashamed to sell this book. A little ashamed, yes, but also proud, overall.

Today was a beautiful day in Minneapolis, 70 degrees and sunny, as we all watch reports of the Chauvin trial from the corners of our eyes. We hope for the best, but it’s hard to imagine a scenario that isn’t pretty awful. A Chinese restaurant I patronize quite a lot opened for indoor dining again today, and I was there for lunch. It was nice, but I had a sense, as I sat there among a multi-ethnic crowd, that we were all uneasy.

At times like this, one is tempted to ask, “Does novel writing matter?”

And I answer, “Of course it does.”

I have a delusion that somewhere in Heaven, Erling Skjalgsson is pulling for me. And Father Ailill, or someone like him.

Publishing, Writing

The return of ‘The Year’

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I hope I’m not raising cruel hopes among my millions thousands hundreds dozens (!) of longsuffering fans, but I guess I can tell you I’m in the process of trying to produce a new paper version of The Year Of the Warrior. Ori Pomerantz helped me out in the early stages, and now I’m proofreading a file to submit to a printer. (As you may be aware, Baen Books continues to sell the e-version, but our contract gives me the right to produce a tangible book. I note that the cover above was designed back in 2018, so this has been a long time coming.) It’s always a little awkward, when I’m selling books at Viking events, to tell people that the one Erling book I have for sale in dead tree form is Number Two in a series. TYOTW on paper will mean I’ll have books One and Two both (or One, Two and Three if you count TYOTW as a double. Which it is.). I think that’ll go over well.

Assuming there is a Viking Season this summer. If there isn’t, the money I plan to pay a printer will be sunk costs in my basement for a while.

So I’m re-reading The Year Of the Warrior for the first time in… a decade? Two decades? A long time. What do I think of it?

All in all, I’m pleased. There’s some weak spots, some sentences I’d recast or streamline. And the plotting, especially at the beginning, is occasionally forced. But a lot of the prose reads just fine to me, even moving in spots.

There are errors of fact. Some things I got wrong about Viking life, which have been clarified for me in the many years since. I wish I’d known that Erling’s father, according to a saga I’d never seen when I was writing, was killed in a thrall uprising while he was a boy (I spackled that story over in West Oversea). Other errors I won’t mention, because I’ve already repressed them.

I’m not fixing any errors in this version. “What I have written, I have written,” as a not-so-great Roman said. I think I need to own my mistakes along with my successes. It’s all on the record.

I’d forgotten some details. Erling’s shield shows two eagles (I need to mention that again; it’s thematically important). Father Ailill has a box bed in his house.

Anyway, I haven’t gotten an estimate from the printer yet, but I expect it won’t be cheap, especially with that beautiful cover by Jeremiah Humphries. So that’s where my stimulus money is going. Which is too bad, because I just got brake work done on the car…

Authors, Publishing

Baen Books under attack

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As you may be aware, I have been and am one of Baen Books’ authors (in electronic form in recent years). Going back to the time of the late Jim Baen himself, Baen Books has always honored the classic view of First Amendment freedom — they publish authors who run the political gamut from me (a Christian conservative) to Eric Flint, who is a Communist. All Jim ever cared about was telling a good story, and his successor Toni Weisskopf has carried on that tradition, in a way every American should approve.

Today we learned, via bestselling author Larry Correia, that Baen has come under attack as a threat to national security. (Cautions for language.) The precise target of the attack was Baen’s Bar, a free-wheeling online forum in which readers and authors interact. The Bar has always been an unrestrained sort of place, where people felt free to engage in hyperbole and “hold my beer and watch this.” Today, of course, you’re only allowed to hyperbolize if you have a government-issued Hyperbole Permit, so an effort is being made to close it down.

Because nothing is more offensive to a Leftist than any talk of revolution.

Anyway, if you’d like to stand up for free speech, you might want to buy a book from Baen. One of my e-books, even.