Dystopian Future of Publishing

I'm reeling.

I was at a cell phone service store today, chatting with the staff while waiting to deal with a billing question and my guy noticed my email address. "Are you a writer? Carlos is a writer," says my guy, "Well, not exactly a writer. A publisher."

"Carlos" (name changed, obviously) is a heavyset, laughing, youthful man in his late twenties, with short dreds and really nice shoes. "Yeah. I don't write a word. I make books. I'm not exactly a publisher, though," says he. "More of a market research guru."

Intrigued, I asked for more details.

"Well, I have an Amazon imprint, you know? for eBooks. And I take a look at what's hot - like what's being Googled a lot, what books people are searching for, you know?--and then I think of a title and a pen name and get some cover art, come up with a table of contents, do some graphic design and then I get my writers to do a 'report' for me. Each report is a chapter of the book."

I am now trembling and appalled (and despite myself, really impressed at the nerve and cleverness of this scheme). "Do you pay the writers?"

"Sure," he says, "I pay them $50 or $60 for a ten thousand word report. Then I throw it all together with good graphic design and put it out on Amazon as an ebook. They sell like crazy; no work for me."

"Sleep money," says my guy.

"Yup," Carlos proudly nods. "Sleep money. I just started, and it's going great. The guy who told me about this? He makes 60K per month."

Let me repeat that last bit. The guy makes sixty thousand dollars per MONTH. I hope you weren't trying to eat while you read that. I nearly choked.

On the good side, this can only be done in non-fiction, where people search by keyword and where people don't really care who wrote the book, just that it's by "an expert."

In fiction, we are still...so far...safe.  So get back to writing your novel, people. Or, hey - pool together with your writing group to each write a short story on a very popular, contemporary topic - self publish the collection, and promote it on Twitter using the popular hashtag. It might not be a bad way to fund the annual party!

--

There is still time to submit to the $1000 Pen Parentis Writing Fellowship for New Parents. All writers at any level with a child under ten are eligible. Follow this link for guidelines.  Deadline April 17, 2013.

What AWP taught me

This is going to be an unusually personal post - I went to AWP (the massive, twelve-thousand writers in a single event space dance-with-your-editor party that the Association of Writers and Writing Professionals puts on annually in various cities). First let me say that it was....amazing.  There were thirty panels for every time slot - each one hour and fifteen minutes long. There were six official time slots in a conference day, for three days. Do the math. You could spend a whole session just debating what panel to attend--!  Simultaneously, there was a two-floor book fair at which indie presses and literary magazines, MFA programs and writing retreats all had their tables. Down there, you were likely to run into people who did readings with you, who attended your grad school, or who had been standing in line for the bathroom with you for fifteen minutes the day before. In other words, those two floors were all about socializing and making connections. As if that's not enough, there were evening receptions (up to ten on-site per night) plus a score of offsite readings and social hours, dance parties and dinners.  It was...amazing.

So let me get personal. I am, first and foremost a mom. A writer. I just spent two whole minutes deleting one and replacing it with the other. I honestly don't know which I am first. If the kids need me, I'm definitely a mom first. But if they are at school, there's not a chance in hell I will choose voluntarily to create a felt-board so they can learn their spelling words if I'm in the middle of a writing session. So what comes first? Whatever needs me most, I guess. And yes, there's guilt in that.  But that's not what this blog post is about.

I also balance running Pen Parentis with the writing and the momming. And at AWP I realized that a lot of the time, I place the Directing higher on the scale than either of those things because it feels like a job. It can get tedious. It can be frustrating in an administrative "we just ran out of ink in our printer and need to put up flyers for tomorrow's event" sort of way. And it gives us the kind of pride that only a job can give you: a sort of legitimacy in the universe.

And what's hideous is that it means that even I, who run this organization, tend to subconsciously negate parenting and writing as legitimate. And I'm crushed about that, because it's preposterous.

If you could have seen the work that was being done at the conference to learn and innovate, to get inspiration for the next page, the next sentence - the people sitting on each other's feet (quite literally) to be able to fit into a very-full panel discussion on Traditional & Nontraditional Structures in the Novel, or Surviving and Thriving without an MFA or Borrowing from Literature to Create for the Screen...you too would have said, these people are not being self-indugent (a criticism I often hear about writing as a profession--yeah, it irks me too). I doubt any gastroentereologists at conferences at the Hynes Convention Center would stand through a whole session with one elbow in someone else's face and another on the water cooler, just to see a panel speak about a new surgery technique. Maybe they do, I've never been to a medical conference. But I have seen the suits that doctors wear to their conferences, and that sort of high-end costume doesn't encourage crowding.

But not even every large-scale literary event is this exciting. The difference between this conference and the BEA (Book Expo America that happens in June in NYC annually, and is the publishing industry conference) - is where the passion lies. At BEA, it is passion for the book: as a product, as a collaboration of author, agent, editor, publisher and distributor, and as a valuable, thrilling piece of art (or at the very least a valuable, thrilling commodity that sells like hotcakes). There are a lot more suits and a lot fewer panels, and nearly all those panels feature powerpoint. At AWP, the conference celebrates WRITING. The creation. The editing. The decision to sell or sell out or change or not. The teaching of writing. The collection of writing into anthologies. The transformations of writing both style and content. The impetus to write and the things that block it or fund it. This conference is all about the craft.

What did I learn? I learned that I actually wear three hats; which isn't all that surprising, given that my nickname in grad school was "Chapeau"... Here are my three hats: when I'm a parent, I feel guilty I'm not writing, but also I feel like I'm doing the exact correct thing by giving my all to my kids. When I'm a writer, I feel guilty I'm not doing more for my kids, though I feel personally most fulfilled. (I was surprised to discover that when I accomplish something great in writing it gives me a huge amount of personal, if fleeting, pleasure and makes me feel like yes, I've made the right choices.) And when I'm the executive director, all the doubts and fears and guilt fall away, to be replaced by hope and encouragement and I find myself acting like that tree in The Giving Tree, by Shel Silverstein. You know the one? "And the tree was happy..." When wearing the hat of founding director, I will scrape bottom to ensure that every writer/parent who is pushing to keep a writer hat on -- even part-time -- while wearing their parenting hat the rest of the time, gets rewarded and encouraged. You guys -- and you know who you were -- who attended that conference bringing along your kids? You were my heroes. I could see the suffering you felt as others looked askance "really? you couldn't get a sitter?" -- and wanted to shout on your behalf: it's frickin' impossible to get a sitter for four days!! And then I want to give a public shout-out to the many, many writers who are devoted to their craft, are working full time day-jobs and/or just don't have the funds to go anywhere for four days with or without their kids. They deserve celebration as well.

(as a side note, our Writing Fellowship for New Parents was created specifically so that you people whose only impediment to attending conferences or residencies like AWP is a financial one could finally do so. It's open for application until April 17--do spread the word, please.)

I kept thinking, between panels and meetups and waiting in coffee lines, that there were 12,000 "literary"-genre writers that attended this event, but that meant that there were probably a million writers who were actually WRITING while the rest of us were taking in panels, not to mention the writers in other genres who have other conferences to inspire them! That's a pretty miraculous and astonishing number of people who are faithful to the word as an art form, and I hope that all you guys, the guys who stayed home as well as those who made it out to AWP, I hope that you all find inspiration in the livetweet feeds, that blog posts, and all the Facebook posts and articles that resulted from this massive conference. Also I hope that you all keep writing and fighting the good fight. Give your all; change hats as often as you possibly can. Hats are awesome.

I'll likely write some specific things that I picked up at AWP on my next post. I attended a huge number of panels, and why not spread the wisdom? We can all be better at what we do - but for now, what's important is to remember to also enjoy it. A bestselling author on a panel about getting your book into the world says that she still to this day has to remind herself every day that it is amazing that we are able to do what we do - the work is hard, but oh, is it ever rewarding.

Free money costs time

It's grant season!

The NEA's amazing fiction grant is available every other year - and this is the year for fiction (next year is poetry, etc.) -- hard to keep track of because the grant is actually a 2014 grant but the application is due by February 28th, 2013. And if you think you're going to just whip it out, given it's only a one-page document, then you obviously haven't ever filled out an official government form... This thing makes a 1040 look EZ.

Kid you not.

You'll be writing bibliographies, copying and pasting files into PDF format, renaming the files with code names...it's enough to give any artist hives.

Perhaps they think they will save money by the sheer numbers of authors who give up.

But seriously people - I heard a spectacular presentation at AWP in Chicago about this, and you should apply. It's true that if you don't get the grant, you have lost a whole day of writing time. But it's something that you really CAN accomplish on a day like President's Day, when the kids are around and you get six or seven minutes with the computer every half an hour or so. This isn't brainy work, people. This is crossing T's and dotting i's. Make that day a productive day!!

it's a shockingly simple application. 25 pages of your best prose. A one-page bibliography proving eligibility (FYI: a hint, they don't want ALL your pubs, they want the minimum that makes you eligible. If you wrote seventy five books in the last ten years, yeah, JCO we know you did, still all they want is one bibliography. No judges see the eligibility page, just a bunch of government office people who throw out applications that don't follow the rules. they don't screen - they pre-screen.)

There aren't any letters of recommendation. There's no artist statement. Nada. Just a bunch of irritating formatting guidelines.

That's it.

So go get an NEA grant already.

Back to Birgitte - second post from South America

Guest blogger, Birgitte Rasine checks in with manuscript and toddler from her writing travels in the wilds of South America...

A Clash of Two Worlds

The tropics.  Hot hot sun, exotic fruits, amazing local food, plenty of wildlife and songbirds, a hammock swinging in the breeze, cool drink in your hand… what more could a writer want for inspiration?

As I quickly found out, that depends on what you’re working on at the moment—and whether you’ve got a toddler in tow.  After Christmas, we drove down to “Los Llanos,” the tropical grassland plains of Colombia, to spend 10 days at a small fishing lodge secluded near the banks of the ancient Manacacías river (for reference, the Manacacías joins the Meta which then flows into the legendary Orinoco in Venezuela).  Normally, a trip like that would be a dream for a writer looking for a faraway place to get away from the emails, the cell phones, the constant interruptions and stresses of the modern world.

But when you bring your two-year-old, a paradise quickly transforms into an obstacle course of potential hazards, and your writing time drains down into maybe an hour or two a day.  Malaria-bearing mosquitoes, uncertain water sources, weird and unfamiliar food, parasites lurking in every crevice and pool of standing water, rivers full of electric eels, anacondas, water cockroaches, crocodiles and all kinds of other eminently friendly and compassionate creatures.  Then there’s the ever-present potential for running into paramilitary or guerrilla forces, although fortunately these days that potential runs very low in this area.

Sure enough, the first day my little girl got sick—we didn’t know if it was the water from the swimming pool, the oatmeal that sat in the heat a little too long, or some unseen insect that had bitten her… but instead of succumbing to the strong temptation of panicking (we were hours away from a decent hospital), I spent the day watching over her and administering lemon and garlic water, a mixture that works wonders on E.coli and all kinds of parasites and stomach bugs.  I myself had suffered from a rather aggressive E.coli infection shortly after our return from the island of Providencia, and the lemon/garlic cured me in 3 days.*

Thankfully, the next morning my baby was fine, jumped in the boat with us, and spent the day fishing the wild ancient rivers of the Colombian plains.  Remember that piranha I was after?  I’m proud to say that I was the first to catch a fish on this trip, and it was indeed a piranha—although not the giant black one, it was a gorgeous red-bellied piranha.  We let it go: it’s illegal to kill piranhas here.  They’re incredible river janitors.

And my writing?  On this trip I brought my psychological thriller with me, the one that takes place in the Parisian métro.   Yes, I know: Parisian metro vs Colombian tropical flood plain.  The most unlikely bedfellows.  Normally, I have no problem plunging into the world I’m writing about regardless of where I am physically.  But this time, I found it very difficult.  I tried writing in bed, in the hammock, by the pool, but found myself wandering off, gazing at the trees, the birds, the river… I even considered staying at the lodge by myself while my husband and the rest of the family spent the day fishing, but I just couldn’t do it.  After all, who travels thousands of miles to this remote place and give up even one day on the river? 

So I resigned myself to editing in the early dawn or in the evenings after dinner, which worked fabulously well.  I was able to edit the majority of the work I had written to date, most of it tucked away in my mosquito net, away from would-be biters and stingers and other annoyances of the minuscule kind.  And because there was literally nothing to see (light pollution is minimal here), I could edit in peace knowing I wasn’t missing anything.

Besides, I told myself, I can write when I get back to Bogotá… and California.  There was simply too much to see—and see we did (I’ll write about that in my next post).  The Llanos have a way about them… the plain enters the very marrow of your soul, and won’t let go long after you’ve gone.

Birgitte Rasine

Author

http://birgitte.lucita.net

www.facebook.com/birgitterasine

https://twitter.com/birgitte_rasine

p.s. Medical disclaimer and a note about that lemon/garlic mixture: it is a known fact that citrus has extraordinary cleansing properties.  After all, they make detergent out of it don’t they?  It turns out that if you blend lemon, orange and grapefruit, pulp, rind and all (no seeds), with a bit of raw or powdered garlic, and drink it ideally with food, anything sitting in your gut that shouldn’t be there (as in, E.coli, parasites, worms, whatever) runs for the proverbial hills. 

It’s natural, won’t kill your flora, and you can get it practically anywhere.  And yes, if you can’t stand the bitter taste, you can add honey or sugar.  But as with any health-related suggestions, please talk to your doctor before using this mixture to cure specific ailments or conditions.  I know it works for me and my family, but if you’re allergic to citrus or garlic it’s obviously not a good idea.

and now, a word from our Fellow...

Sarah Gerkensmeyer, you will recall, knocked our socks off with her story "Monster Drinks Chocolate Milk" when she accepted her $1000 Fellowship. She has not disappointed us in her year of living writerishly (is that a word?) - she is currently at the Vermont Studio Center at a writing residency (yes, she has small children!) and she writes a guest-blog from there about an article that was in Scientific American last month...among other things. Her story collection, What You Are Now Enjoying, is forthcoming by Autumn House Press on February 15, 2013.

Please welcome: Guest Blogger and 2012 Pen Parentis Writing Fellow, Sarah Gerkensmeyer!

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“ScientistsDiscover Children's Cells Living in Mothers' Brains.”  I wish this were the title of one of my short stories. 

            As someone who juggles the roles of mother and writer (among many others), I was most definitely intrigued by this article in Scientific American last month.  I think that many parents who are artists spend a great deal of time thinking about the gulf that seems to exist between their work and their family life.  And this gulf can be so discouraging.  So riddled with guilt and worry.  Since becoming a mother, I've wanted to insist that my writing has opened up, that among the new joys and stresses of a family I can now conquer the world in my work.  And yes, there have been glorious, fleeting moments when I've felt this kind of spark, pushed into an urgent and intoxicating sense of discovery while writing during my sons' nap time or while they are away for a couple hours at school and daycare.  But often the negotiation of my family and my writing life seems fraught with imbalance and uncertainty.  I haven't read my four year old enough stories today.  I haven't worked on my novel in weeks.  If I let my writing slide, I'll lose a piece of myself.  If I devote myself too much to my writing, I'll become that nutty woman who locked herself in the attic with her notebooks and her Shirley Jackson and her Carson McCullers.  My two sons will never see me again—a mother who got lost in the wilderness of her stories.

            But then I read this article about fetal microchimeric cells that have been discovered burrowed into mothers' brains and bloodstreams and who knows where else.  I gave birth to two sons, but it seems that my babies never completely left me.  And what a comfort that is.  I wrote some of my strangest short stories right after my second son, Charlie, was born.  I was too overwhelmed during the sudden quiet of his nap times to try to dive back into the draft of my novel, and so I allowed myself to write very short and peculiar tales, little stunted creatures that I didn't  recognize when they landed there on the page right in front of me, the cursor blinking in confusion.  But I didn't care.  I was writing again.  And my new baby was asleep, warm and well. 

            Quite a few of those little stories ended up cementing my story collection together in unexpected ways.  Suddenly, I had a book.  I had a new baby and I had a book.  I like to think, now, that those newer stories are Charlie's in so many ways.  When I was huddled at the dining room table during his naps, hunched and desperate and spewing out odd tales, I wasn't fighting against the pull of my tiny newborn baby.  I was inspired by him.  When I was pregnant with him, those weird stories were in me, washing around and fusing together right alongside my developing son.  It's a nice, strange thought, isn't it?  That he gave me those stories to tell? 

            My husband and two sons dropped me off at the airport a couple days ago so I could head out to the Green Mountains for a two week stay at Vermont Studio Center.  I am lucky.  I have a generous husband who insists that I am a writer, not just a mother and all of those other things.  He insists that I deserve time on a mountain, with just my stories.  He insists that I fight through the guilt of leaving home, that our sons need to grow up seeing a mother do what she loves.  And I have two sons who are happy.  Who love me.  Who will welcome me home in two weeks.  But my family is also right here with me, my two sons especially—little bits of them burrowed into unexpected parts of me and my work. 

            On the way to the airport, Charlie (now twenty months old) chattered away in his carseat behind me.  He listed things, a mash of words I could recognize (horse, snow, mama, dog) and things I couldn't.  He was absorbed completely in the urgency of his language.  Now that he has started to talk, he often gets frustrated when we can't understand him.  He'll jabber a string of sounds that we don't recognize and he'll cry when we don't catch on—pointing at the television or the refrigerator or a stack of his books, a concrete need bursting to get out.  But I like to think that sometimes he's telling us something else entirely.  Sometimes he's lost in a long-winded diatribe that we will never be able to piece together.  Maybe it's the stories.  The ones that were swimming around alongside him when I was pregnant.  The ones I wrote after he was born.  The ones I haven't written yet. 

--Sarah Gerkensmeyer

2012 Pen Parentis Writing Fellow

www.sarahgerkensmeyer.com

Write well and prosper

Hope your Winter Holidays have been full of light and find you surrounded by your loved ones!

2012 at Pen Parentis was a series of overcoming obstacles - we threw a neighborhood event on a boat during a thunderstorm, the restaurant that had hosted us for three years closed its doors, a hurricane swept our November event out to sea...but at the end of the end, we came through. More than 250 neighborhood children and their parents attended our free Books Ahoy! event this summer, armed with umbrellas; we found a new partner to host our Salons (Wall&Water at the Andaz Wall Street is a Conde Nast 2012 Gold LIst location that treats us as VIPs); and we are hoping YOU will help us replace the amp and pre-amp that got fried by hurricane-weakened power lines at our December event. To make a donation through our fiscal sponsor just click here, and accept our warmest thanks (Fractured Atlas will send you a tax receipt!) 

May 2013 bring happy children, the inspiration for a new piece that causes you to gasp at your own daring, and the time to actually write it down.

Until next year -!

Rediscovering the joy of writing - against all odds

As a reminder: Birgitte Rasine, a California-based member of Pen Parentis, is guest-blogging for us. Here is the first  installment from her travels to South America with toddler and writing in tow....

We writers have never had it better, easier, or more convenient to write.   Laptops are lighter, smaller, thinner, faster and more powerful than ever before.  We can write anywhere, anytime.  We can send entire manuscripts to our editors from anywhere in the world instantly—assuming wi-fi of course. 

So what do you do when you’re in a country where electronics are stolen on a daily basis, you can lose your life for an iPhone, you’re constantly traveling, and you’ve got your toddler and husband with you?

First, you choose the places where you take your laptop very carefully.  You pack it up in your oldest, scruffiest backpack, one that ideally you can lock with a small lock.  You never take it out in public.  In airports, you wear a poncho over your backpack to put one more barrier between you and the people who want to make the load on your back a little lighter (here, pro thieves actually purchase full price airline tickets in order to get into the waiting rooms in airports or the planes themselves—apparently the potential loot is worth the ticket).

Cell phone?  Sure, but make sure you lock that brand new iPhone in your suitcase or a safe, and get an outdated old “native” model with a local number.  You’ll blend in better that way.  Also, be sure to study the facial expressions of the locals walking down the street—and wear that look everywhere.

In some places, you simply don’t take your laptop—or smartphones, tablets, or other devices—at all.   Take it from a travel veteran: do leave home without it. 

So we writers might ask, OMG how am I going to write?  I need to keep writing!  I’m on a writing retreat (slash family vacation)!

It’s really very simple—and you can thank your stars that your profession is truly one of the oldest in the world: that of a scribe.  All we need to practice our craft are our minds, a writing utensil, and a surface to capture our words.  Translation: paper and pen.  That’s it. 

So when we traveled last week to the Caribbean island of Providencia, which required flying from Bogotà to the island of San Andrés, spending the night in a hotel, then continuing on to Providencia in a little 15-seater (it was either that or braving the wild open sea for 3 hours in a catamaran), I left my beloved laptop in Bogotà.  I’m working on a short story and a novella, so I printed out the short story and made notes (for a trip of 5 days with family, I knew I could realistically focus on just one work). 

I wrote everywhere.  In the airport, on the plane, in the hammock after lunch while my 2-year-old slept cuddled next to me, but above all, I woke up early and went down to the shore to be inspired by the early morning light of the Caribbean sun.

Hard to focus?  Yes.  Constant background noise and interruptions?  Absolutely.  But all of this forced me to reach deep into my mental reserves and hold on to that cord of inspiration, hold the hand of the muse that lives within all writers and blocks out all interruption and noise.  Some may call it meditation, others willpower; I call it the writer’s zen.  Given the challenge, if you rise to it, you’ll find an extraordinary source of internal tranquility you can tap at any time, any place.  It’s yours to take with you wherever you go.

And yet… there was plenty of inspiration in watching people milling about in the airport, rushing about their daily lives in the streets on the islands, and all of the mundane interactions I watched unfold as we traveled from airport to airport to hotel to beach to wherever else we went.  It was for this reason, for the incessant changes in surroundings and the nearly constant background din I knew would be the status quo of our trip, that I chose to bring along my short story rather than the novella.

I never missed my laptop.   Instead, I rediscovered the joy of writing longhand, something I rarely do anymore, and of being able to take my writing with me anywhere without concern about the unfortunate incompatibility of electronics with sand, sun, salt water, or rain—in the tropics it rains hard and without warning—and above all, about having my work stolen along with my laptop.

It was, in a word, idyllic.  Now as I type this blog on my computer back here in Bogotà, something seems missing… it could be the salt air, the turquoise waters, and the total, absolute timelessness of the islands.

Birgitte Rasine

Author

http://birgitte.lucita.net

www.facebook.com/birgitterasine

https://twitter.com/birgitte_rasine

p.s. Now about the international conflict that the island of Providencia is caught up in—and that I hinted at in my first blog post.  The islands of San Andrés and Providencia are Colombian territory, and have been since 1928 as per the Esguerra-Bárcenas Treaty.  It’s this treaty that Nicaragua has been disputing since 2001; on November 19 of this year, the International World Court of Justice at the Hague granted to Nicaragua an exclusive economic zone extending 200 nautical miles from its Caribbean coast.  This means the fishing population of Providencia and San Andrés will be essentially cut off from their livelihood.  Colombia is opposing the decision of the Court, at the highest levels of international governance, and there is potential for an international confrontation between the two countries.  We already had our tickets… and weren’t sure what sort of situation we would arrive in: would it be a pleasant island vacation or an international conflict? As it turned out, at least for now, the locals on the islands are fairly relaxed about the situation.  But we’ll have to wait and see.