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categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour

comments: 30 comments

PLEASING IMAGE

As we move away from traditional publishing, what are we moving toward?  Half of the top-ten bestselling print novels in Japan recently were originally cell-phone novels [LINK MOTOROLA], full-length, sent out to millions of subscribers text-by-text, fifty or a hundred words at a time, mostly dialogue. And several groups are vying to write the first novel created on Facebook—a line or two and pass it along, with no editorial influence, and certainly no commercial potential.  [CONSIDER PARAGRAPH BREAK] Twitter can’t be far behind.  Part of the new aesthetic seems to be Continue reading →

We are all poets now

categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour

comments: 32 comments

Stop the presses!  Alert the media!  Big news has come down.

And what’s all the fuss about?

Haven’t you heard?

New York, the all-knowing all-powerful publishing capital, somehow missed out on publishing an important literary book.

How could it happen?  Has it ever happened before?  Could it possibly ever happen again?  What does it all mean?

Continue reading →

Luck and Pluck and WTF

categories: Cocktail Hour

comments: 22 comments

I’ve been thinking about how much of any career is luck and accident, especially a career in the arts.  You get an idea or you don’t.  You meet the helpful person or you don’t.  You listen to good advice or fail to.  You ignore bad advice or don’t.  You connect with a mentor or you don’t.  You move here, you move there.  You’re hired, you’re not.  You get a little affirmation, you get a little discouragement, or a lot of one or the other, despite simply being who you are all along.  Slowly you learn what you’re good at, but always you insist on trying things you’re not good at, on doing the thing you can’t do, on reaching higher.  It’s the Peter Principal applied to the arts, though it’s entirely self-imposed.  Call it the Bill-and-Dave’s-Cocktail-Hour Principal.

I’m interested in hearing about other people’s trajectories. What did you used to do and what are you doing now to sustain and nurture the writing bug?  How’d you get where you are, or aren’t?  What did the early years look like?  What accidents Continue reading →

Beginning Is Terrifying Business

categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour

comments: 12 comments

I’ve been thinking a lot about apprenticeship lately, though I’m not sure exactly why (old age? sentimentality?)  I don’t think I ever actually used the word “apprentice” when I was one: all I really knew or thought about was making the book I was working on great, and getting it published so that it would change the world forever.  As it turned out, I wrote three books before getting the fourth one published, which ended up taking about thirteen years, and the world did not seem particularly changed. Continue reading →