Category Archives: Authors

Authors

Destroy My Unfinished Works

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“There goes the browsing history.”

On August 25, Rob Wilkins, friend of late author Terry Pratchett and manager of the author’s estate, followed his friend’s posthumous directions by putting the hard drive with Pratchett’s unfinished docs under a steamroller.

Stuart Kelly considers whether such wishes should be honored. For instance, Virgil asked for the Aeneid to be burned after his death, and the king refused to allow it (via Prufrock News).

One could no doubt elaborate on the “broken” hexameters of the poem – something I was taught during schoolboy Latin – but the question that interests me is whether having an imperfect Aeneid is better than having no Aeneid at all. Of course, not having it would mean not knowing what we might have had; but there must have been an ethical tangle when Rufus and Tucca went against what they knew the author had wanted.

Authors, Writing

They Weren’t Stories

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Every published writer is the beneficiary of luck. Among my good fortune was the fact that editors began to treat me as if they were my aunts. They were all women, of course. There were no men in the fiction departments. On one of my visits to New York, three or four editors from different magazines sat me down in the Algonquin, plied me with manhattans, and discussed my career. It was now three years since my big resolution. I was selling stories regularly. One year I sold more stories to Redbook than anyone else ever had, using several pen names. It was the consensus of the group that I was ready for more. I needed an agent.

Ralph M. McInerny, author of the Father Dowling series, wrote about his career many years ago in First Things.

“What I thought were stories piled up on the workbench. With time I began to see why they were rejected: They weren’t stories.”

Authors, Writing

Good Talk with Writer Trevin Wax

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The Calling podcast has a good talk this week with Trevin Wax. He talks about his love of books and his calling as a writer in ways they don’t drip with sap (such as you may or may not read in other places). Here’s one quote lifted off the podcast page.

On writing’s challenges: “The biggest struggle is bouncing back and forth between pride and humiliation. If you’re not careful, that mix can paralyze you. If you take praise or criticism too personally, it’s bad for heart. It’ll shut you down.”

I would subscribe to The Calling, if my podcast app would cooperate with me, but it’s showing me the hand this week.

Authors, Blogs, Socials

‘Chronologically Lewis’

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Bruce Charlton, over at The Notion Club Papers, offers a link to a .pdf by Professor Joel Heck of Concordia University, Texas. It’s “a detailed, birth to death chronology of both Jack and Warnie Lewis.”

I’ll give Bruce the hand-off, instead of linking to it directly: http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.co.uk/2017/07/chronologically-lewis-by-joel-heck.html

Authors

The Catholic Sci-fi Author

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R. A. Lafferty (1914-2002) stands out as a faithful Catholic who wrote science-fiction. Neil Gaiman called him “undoubtedly the finest writer of whatever it was that he did that ever there was.”

In her review of The Man with the Speckled Eyes, the fourth and newest volume of a collection of short stories, Helen Andrews describes the man and some of his ideas. (via Prufrock News)

Running throughout the book is Lafferty’s cyclical theory of world history. Mankind builds civilization generation by generation and, periodically, destroys what he has built, so cataclysmically that the next generation has to start from the beginning. Fourth Mansions, his novel based on Teresa of Avila’s Interior Castle, follows the same theory. Just as the individual soul ascends from mansion to mansion, mankind ascends through levels of civilization; the higher it gets, the more demons try to assail it. Teresa wrote of vipers and toads. In Lafferty’s cosmology, these are “tentacled liberalism (the python-hydra)” and “Communism, from underground (the toad with the tantalizing jewel in its head).”

Authors

Jane Austen’s Enduring Popularity

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Has it been simply, unquantifiable choices that has kept Jane Austen’s works so well liked or could it be her word choices? The Upshot spells out some research into what types of words Austen used compared to many other authors in a two century span. (via Alan Cornett)

In other news, Jane Austen’s letter hilariously mocking a gothic novel will be auctioned for the first time at Sotheby’s tomorrow.

Authors, Bookselling, Creative Writing, Publishing, Writing

Book pitch: ‘Writing Speculative Fiction: Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror, Teacher’s Ed.’ by Lelia Rose Foreman

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Writing Speculative Fiction

My friend Lelia Rose Foreman has written a text book, Writing Speculative Fiction: Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror, Teacher’s Ed. It is aimed especially at home schoolers teaching high schoolers. An excerpt from my novel Death’s Doors is incorporated, with my permission.

Authors, Reading

The Man Who Ruined English Lit

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Stuart Hall, the man who apparently helped bind English departments with useless political ideology, doesn’t appear to have read anything written in previous generations. Christopher Bray reviews Hall’s autobiography.

Patently a decent man who wanted a better life for everyone, Hall genuinely believed that by alerting his students to the ideological subtexts of their favourite TV shows or pop songs (at one point he claims to be able to hear ‘the less chauvinistic bits’ of Elgar), they might liberate themselves from the hegemonic ‘master codes of the dominant culture’. In fact, by teaching kids that it’s enough to read or watch or listen to what already interests them, cultural studies has served only to trap them in the straitened cell of the self.

Mercy. Who will pull the bucket off our heads, if not our elders? And if our elders are the ones who trapped us in buckets in the first place, what hope do we have for any of us? Is there anyone apart from us who can teach us the truth? (via Prufrock News)

Authors, Bookselling

Autographing eBooks

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In our last post, we looked at a new problem for Californian booksellers who hope to attract buyers with autographed editions. Though I didn’t say it then, the law appears to apply outside the state as well as inside, because it defines Californian dealers as being in or from the state. It’s like original sin. The stain of being born in California can never be removed in this life.

I don’t know whether the law applies to digital book editions, but if you’ve been thinking eBooks wouldn’t have this problem because they can’t be signed, allow me to open the door of enlightenment for you. Authors can sign eBooks.

Two sites allow authors to list their eBooks and offer them for signing. Autography.com allows customized signing pages in their cross-platform app. You can sign an eBook remotely or at a book signing. Autographed pages can even be shared on social media. Authorgraph.com offers a similar service with less customization. In fact, it doesn’t appear to be actually signing eBook, but a page associated with the it. Readers can request signatures from authors who are using the service and can buy books through the site.

Has anyone developed a digital autograph book for fans to collect signatures on iPads? I’d think there would be a market for it, except in California.