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I’ll jump in. Yes, I’m working on what is turning out to be something close to a novella, or a “short novel” (as Katherine Anne Porter called them). It’s a story I wrote many years ago, which then weighed in at about 22 pages; I’m not up to 51, within spittin’ distance of 15,000 words. Too long! But it’s still growing, so who knows. Maybe it’s a novel?
Hi, Sally! Above each entry is a row of options, one of this is Reply. Click that and you’ll be replying to that particular post. It’s a little confusing because when you click Reply your text window opens at the bottom of the page, but not to worry, when you click Submit it will nest your reply under the post you’re replying to.
Let me know if that makes sense!
I didn’t mean to be discouraging, Nikita! I think there are many pathways for authors who expect and deserve (1) to be paid for their work, (2) to work with publishers who fairly support their authors, and (3) to participate as much as they care to in the way they and their work are presented to readers. Amazon has absolutely no interest in authors or publishers, whom they view as being essentially the same as makers of light-up snow globes or erotic bed-time clothing. If you can train yourself to see your writing this way, Amazon is one way to go.
But Amazon isn’t alone in this nor is it the main culprit. We have an immensely archaic system for getting creative work produced and presented to its natural audience. I was in the book business proper for a few years before Amazon came along, when we thought the main culprits were chain bookstores: Borders, B. Dalton, Barnes & Noble, etc. To some extent this was true and is still the case. When my collection of narrative poems, Marked Men, came out in 2013. I was told by three different B&N stores they simply did not do book signings for poetry. Why not? Because the audience for that genre is small, and B&N–like all bookstores–is in business to make money. It costs a store just as much to mount a book signing for Barbara Kingsolver or Peter Heller as it does to bring in little ol’ me. So some blockages are built into the model.
If certain pathways are blocked, what do we do? First, we keep writing, keep submitting, and work on creating our own audience. My feeling is that the audience arises out of community, by which I don’t mean a necessarily local community. I’m thinking of the community you’re building with your wonderful website (https://nikitaandester.com/), a site I’ve wandered through amid feelings of joy and envy. I don’t know how your list-building is going, but I think you’re on exactly the right path.
In the long run, you’re not going to want to do all this stuff yourself. You’ll want an agent, a web master (you seem to have one, slick as your site is), and some kind of support for reviewing publishing contracts. I always recommend The Authors Guild because they off free-to-members contract reviews by lawyers who are fully up to speed on the current publishing ecosystem.
Whatever the path, you have to cultivate a bit of cunning….
I somehow missed this good news, Sally. Best of luck with Platypus! However this particular submission goes, it’s heartening to know that you and Nikita connected over the completion of Broken Faith. In my dreams, this is a big part of this site—active creative engagement. No writer succeeds alone. I remember reading that Philip Roth, whose presented himself as a solitary artist, shared his drafts with 7 or 8 people as his books developed. Keep it up! And let us know how it goes, Sally….
Kirk, I like this very much! Sleek, cleanly organized, easy on the eyes. (Important, in my case!) Congratulations! I think you’ll find this a great “face” for your work.
By the way, I finished reading “A Time in the Sun” yesterday, and oh my is it good. You’ve inspired me to read some of Hemingway I’ve never gotten too–even the posthumous novels, which have been reviewed a bit savagely over the years. I’ve avoided them basically because of a panel discussion I saw many years ago, where the Hemingway scholars involved pretty much accused the family of butchering the work he left in order to make it “fit the image of Hemingway,” when part of his struggle as a writer late in life was to break out of approaches he’d been using. You’re far deeper into all this than I am, and I’m curious if you have a sense of whether this complain makes sense. Or are the scholars simply trying to clear the ground for their own editions of his posthumous works whenever the rights to publish them become available? (It’s a cutthroat world out there.)
On a more benign note, I can’t remember if I ever sent you the following poem, by the underrated poet Archibald MacLeish, who was a friend of Hemingway. I still knocks me out every time I read it:
HEMINGWAY
by Archibald MacLeish“In some some inexplicable way an accident.”
–Mary HemingwayOh, not inexplicable. Death explains,
that kind of death: rewinds remembrance
backward like a film track till the laughing man
among the lilacs, peeling the green stem,
waits for the gunshot where the play began;rewinds those Africas and Idahos and Spains
to find the table at the Closerie des Lilas,
sticky with syrup, where the flash of joy
flamed into blackness like that flash of steel.The gun between the teeth explains.
The shattered mouth foretells the singing boy.Two cents? I’ll go as high as a nickel! Please attach it (or can we not do that?) or email it to me at my personal email, poetjhwriter@icloud.com. I look forward to reading it!
Big congratulations, Nikita! The byline is a big step, as is that big fat novel draft! Keep it all flowing, amiga. It’s all about stamina and serendipity at this point. Talent will rise to the surface!
Ordinarily I’m not a big fan of contests, but Middle Creek Publishing does beautiful printing and is in the process of actively building its list in both poetry and fiction. So … something to consider!
This is a useful but A-minus article: http://quarterlyconversation.com/live-the-freelance-life-9-tips-for-becoming-a-writer
The minus comes from the fact that the writer—who wisely chose to remain anonymous—commits an error that’s one of my pet peeves. The very first tip is to “Write Everyday.” Of course, “everyday” (one word) means “commonplace, ordinary, […] conventional, run-of-the-mill, standard,” etc. You do not want to be writing in these ways. What you want to do is write every day—i.e., daily.
Oh yes, I know that many dictionaries now fail to draw this distinction and accept “daily” as a meaning, sometimes even the first meaning, for “everyday.” But they are wrong. Just as they are wrong when claiming that “nauseous” (“causing nausea”) is the same as “nauseated” (“to cause or affect with nausea”). Whenever someone tells me, “I feel nauseous,” I don’t correct them, of course (that would be rude); I simply say: “You don’t make me sick.”
🙂
Don’t let the click-bait headline fool you. This is a useful article….
Just Because Walt Whitman Self-Published, Doesn’t Mean You Should, Too
Given the name of this thread, I should admit right now that this link goes to an article about rejection—but rejection reframed.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/aug/26/rejection-authors-writers-creative-process
I wish I could convey to students how important it is to develop this kind of routine, Nikita. Especially in the early stages of a writing career, having a reliable system is crucial. It’s natural, especially when pitching a short story or novel, to retell the story in a nutshell in the cover letter, but even in those cases the 3-4 sentence rule should apply. In the world of film they call it “the elevator pitch”—a statement that can be delivered in the time it takes to ride up in an elevator: the core situation (“The rebellious tween daughter of a widower in his mid-thirties goes missing”); the context (“Dad discovers that his daughter has been keeping her risky social media life secret from him while confiding in his brother, her uncle”); the complication (“The cops suspect dad may have murdered the girl because he seems clueless about her online activities”); and the climax (“A dark family secret and the daughter’s dire situation are finally revealed, leaving dad and the cops to race against time to save her life”).
This is my imagined elevator pitch for Aneesh Chaganty’s 2018 thriller Searching, a movie I highly recommend. I know it could probably be done better, but the point is … four sentences for a full-length film! The same could be done for a novel, and certainly for a short story or an article….
Every chance to write, regardless of the topic, is an opportunity to develop the craft and move one’s career along. Congratulations, Nikita!
