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“Whenever you write, whatever you write, never make the mistake of assuming the audience is any less intelligent than you are.”
– Rod Serling
“Writing is a solitary business. It takes over your life. In some sense, a writer has no life of his own. Even when he’s there, he’s not really there.”
– Paul Auster
While I’m busy being industrious I thought I’d mention that Writer’s Digest is apparently giving away free writer resource CDs with its online workshop programs. I had the pleasure of meeting the head of their workshops program the other day, and am very near dashing into the Writing a Query Letter program now that I’m looking at the light at the end of the tunnel for my current project.
Call me unfaithful, but I’m doubly giddy about getting to the shine and polish stage on this project not just to be done, but to bask in the new opportunity it brings to finally step up to other projects that have been waiting on me. Having to say “no” is always a downer. Loving the story you’ve got in your hands makes up for it, but getting to do both is always the best of both worlds.
As for Kristen Johnson Ingram, anyone with an eighteen pound cat named Grendel is definitely on my list of writers to meet.
Many people apparently shy away from meeting their favorite authors for fear of losing the mystique associated with fame. Neil Gaiman has this to say on the matter:
“Actually, you should never meet your heroes if you want to keep them as heroes. They may wind up as friends or as disappointments or as pleasant surprises, but once you know them they immediately stop being heroes. (I’ve turned down several opportunities to meet Stephen Sondheim socially, because he’s practically all I’ve got left. Even David Bowie, who I’ve never even met, has managed to transmute in my head most of the way from DAVID BOWIE ZOMG!!1!* to my friend Duncan’s dad.)”
I find this funny in some ways because it has always been my intent to understand what about heroes makes them truly unique anyway. I don’t really have any expectations of other authors, except the hope that they’re insightful in helping to understand the craft of story-telling from a didactic perspective. It’s a nice aside to know little tidbits about them, but I find it far more comforting to know they have the same hopes and fears as all of us, and that those human sensitivities they’ve managed to hold on to make them more understanding of other people, who inevitably end up characters in their books.
I’ve never met Neil, though he’s quite polite and fairly approachable, and has been within a few feet of me on several occasions now. Not unless you count the time I showed up to watch him ad-lib for the first time on stage about the time he got left in a train station by his parents. His sudden “thank you!” as I laughed out loud in an otherwise cold room told me unequivocally that there is a decent person with a beating heart under the classic “don’t bother me” black leather jacket.
I wasn’t doing one of those horrible fake-laugh supports (please don’t ever do that, you’re a writer, and you have an obligation to make yourself aware of bad writing.) It was actually funny, it was just clear that he was looking for a friend at the time. Someone who knew who the hell Paddington Bear was this side of Brooklyn.
Therefore it’s ok to plug him and his prolific blog without worry that he’s secretly some git who will take the tender souls of the budding writers I’ve amassed and smash them to oblivion with canned, uninspired advice.
Uninspired advice is so much worse than no advice at all.
My heroes are safe. Most of them were long dead before I was ever born. The few who flickered out within inches of my meeting them leave me with some sadness, but more because there was no “thank you” where there should have been.
Bob Richardson is a good example. He grew quite mellow in his older years, by the time I was around to find him. His photo blogging style of auto-biographical photojournalism really reaches people, not because it is flashy or self-aggrandizing, but because it is true. Sadly his site “Beyond Cool” has finally been taken down at his death, but a quick search for it let me to this article detailing how much of his shots were reflections of himself in a way, and it was none other than Anjelica Huston who was back there behind the camera, propping him up emotionally while he was secretly so messed up on those little pills from the notorious Dr. Feelgood that he was starting to listen to the talking ashtrays. Now there’s someone who should write a book, or at least a screenplay.
By the way, the AAA Screenwriting contest will be extending it’s deadline through the weekend for anyone with a sudden bout of inspiration. Final deadline is Midnight, July 7th.
A word of advice. Close your browser. Turn off your phone. Pick up a pen. Be brave.
It’s commendable that author Neil Gaiman has worked with his publisher to get a copy of his novel “American Gods” up on his website. The choice was put to a vote by fans and Harper Collins provided the text. A few astute fans have pointed out the leagues still left for the publishing industry to catch up on however.
From the boingboing.net article: “The fact is that the full text of American Gods has been online for years, and can be located with a single Google query. I managed to download the entire text of the book in less time than it took me to get the Harper Collins edition to load the first page of Chapter One (literally!). The “security” that Harper Collins has bought with its clunky, kudgey experiment is nonexistent: pirates will just go get the pirate edition.”
One small step as they say, for Harper Collins …into the busy parking lot of a well-used and well-traversed internet.
Neil Gaiman has his own response over at his blog.
SlaughterHouse Studios has done something odd with the man’s dead bees. If that’s not an interesting enough quote, how about this one: “experience teaches me that death is better than grape jelly as far as smells and dead insects go. Trust me on this one.” Hmm. Think I will.
