A heart that is truly humble always fears to hear its own praises, because it fears that this praise may either be false or may rob it of the merit and reward promised to true virtue. If the heart is truly humble, the good that it hears of itself it either fails to recognize or fears lest the hope of future title to reward be changed for some passing favour.
—St. Gregory, quoted by Fr. Cajetan Mary da Bergamo in Humility of Heart
Archives for 2012
St. Gregory on praise
3 June 2012 by Leave a Comment
Mitchell and Webb on reality TV
13 May 2012 by Leave a Comment
That Mitchell and Webb Look presents the biggest thing on television since Pimp My Iron Junkyard Surviving Brother:
Laura Resnick on writing
7 May 2012 by Leave a Comment
Writing is like yoga.
It’s also like sex, cooking, parenthood, opera, war, gardening, and conjugating French verbs. But we’re going to go with the yoga analogy for now.
In my yoga class, my teacher tells me to think about my rib cage, my thigh muscles, my spine, my breath, my gaze, my ankles, my mouth, my cheeks, my hands, my balance, my toes, my belly, my kidneys, and The Universal. She also, at the same time, tells me to clear my mind and think of nothing. Then she tells me to stand on my left earlobe.
I’m sure the obvious parallels to writing are instantly apparent to you.
—Laura Resnick, Rejection, Romance, and Royalties
Panning for mica
5 May 2012 by Leave a Comment
J. A. Konrath wrote an ebook called The Newbie’s Guide to Publishing, chock-full of good advice when written; but alas, it is two years old now, and a geological era out of date. I don’t want to make a bad example of Mr. Konrath, who has done a beautiful job of keeping up with the times; his blog remains a valuable source of information and insight. But I want to quote this from the Newbie’s Guide, because it contains an important truth about the traditional publishing business, and a cardinal fallacy about salable fiction:
Consider the agent, going through 300 manuscripts in the slush pile that have accumulated over the last month.
She’s not looking to help writers. She’s panning for gold. And to do that, you have to sift through dirt. It might be some very good dirt she’s dismissing. But it is still dirt.
Be the gold.
The best way to get published, or to win a contest, is to shine. Don’t be mistaken for dirt. Don’t do anything that lets them reject you — because they’re looking to reject you unless you can show them you’re brilliant.
This all sounds very well, but in practice it has a terrible flaw. Mark Twain knew what that flaw was. He learnt it the hard way, and wrote about it in Roughing It: [Read more…]
Some thoughts on ebook pricing
5 May 2012 by Leave a Comment
There has been much hollering and handwringing on all sides of the argument about ebook pricing. Traditional publishers claim that printing and distribution are a small part of their costs, and therefore, that ebooks must be priced as high as print books to make money. On the other side, independent writers and a lot of consumers point out that the marginal cost to produce an ebook is approximately zero, so ebooks should be tremendously cheap. The third side points out that retail prices are a matter of supply and demand, and have nothing to do with the cost of production as such.
All three sides are wrong, or at least incomplete. [Read more…]
G. K. C. on Oscar Wilde
26 April 2012 by Leave a Comment
I remember a venerable man with a very long beard who seemed to live at one of these clubs. At intervals he would hold up his hand as if for silence and preface his remarks by saying, ‘A Thought.’ And then he would say something that sounded as if a cow had suddenly spoken in a drawing-room. I remember once a silent and much-enduring man (I rather think it was my friend Mr. Edgar Jepson, the novelist) who could bear it no longer and cried with a sort of expiring gasp, ‘But, Good God, man, you don’t call that a thought, do you?’
But that was pretty much the quality of the thought of such thinkers, especially of the freethinkers. Out of this social situation arises one sort of exception to the rule. Intelligence does exist even in the Intelligentsia. It does sometimes happen that a man of real talent has a weakness for flattery, even the flattery of fools. He would rather say something that silly people think clever than something which only clever people could perceive to be true.
Oscar Wilde was a man of this type. When he said somewhere that an immoral woman is the sort of woman a man never gets tired of, he used a phrase so baseless as to be perfectly pointless. Everybody knows that a man may get tired of a whole procession of immoral women, especially if he is an immoral man. That was ‘a Thought’; otherwise something to be uttered, with uplifted hand, to people who could not think at all.
In their poor muddled minds there was some vague connection between wit and cynicism; so they never applauded him so warmly as a wit, as when he was cynical without being witty. But when he said, ‘A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing,’ he made a statement (in excellent epigrammatic form) which really meant something. But it would have meant his own immediate dethronement if it could have been understood by those who only enthroned him for being cynical.
—G. K. Chesterton, The Thing
Mary Sisson on the risks in publishing
25 April 2012 by Leave a Comment
Some wise words on weighing risk vs. reward in publishing:
My attitude is to look at what happens if you make the wrong choice.
If you self-publish and you do something wrong, you can fix it. If the entire self-publishing industry implodes, you still have the rights to your work, so you can still go sell it to a traditional publisher.
If you go traditional and something goes wrong, you are completely screwed. You’ve signed away your rights, you don’t have control over how your work is marketed, etc., etc. If your publisher goes under, it’s going to take a long time and a lot of legal work for you to be able to re-sell that work, assuming you ever can. Is it worth to you to take that kind of risk in return for some editing and cover art?
Jerrold Mundis on the flow of writing
24 April 2012 by Leave a Comment
It’s a rare occasion when the words just flow without interruption. More often they flow for thirty seconds, five or ten minutes at a time. Then you stop and think, stare at the page or the screen, look out the window, or whatever it is that you do, and then write for another thirty seconds, five or ten minutes. Once in a while, you’ll catch fire and in a white heat type as fast as you can for an hour or two, even three or four. That has happened to me — maybe ten or fifteen times over the past twenty-five years. For most writers, nearly every day it’s a matter of hills and valleys, with pauses in between.
—Jerrold Mundis, Break Writer’s Block Now!
Another bit from the same book that particularly struck me:
The average full-time writer puts in four to four-and-a-half hours a day, five days a week; the average part-time writer puts in one to two hours a day, five or six days a week. . . . Writing is energy-intensive. Overreaching invites burnout and block.
Reject yourself! (Mark Twain on quality control)
19 April 2012 by Leave a Comment
There are at least two schools of thought about editing and revision in self-publishing.
One (exemplified, perhaps, by Dean Wesley Smith) says that you should write as much content as you can and publish it as soon as it’s done. This results, I suspect, from taking Heinlein’s Rules far too seriously. Folks, they’re not the Gospel according to St. Robert; they’re one man’s opinion, and a very unusual man he was. ‘You must refrain from rewriting except to editorial order’ is fatal advice for a self-published writer, because, in the nature of things, that editorial order will never come. (It did Heinlein great harm, too, in his later years, when his editors stopped trying to argue with him.)
The second school of thought, which I have seen well expressed by Joel Friedlander, is that you ought to take every bit as much care with editing and revision as if you were a conscientious publisher printing someone else’s work. [Read more…]
John C. Wright on being a famous writer
17 April 2012 by Leave a Comment
. . . my name is known everywhere my books are read. I mean everywhere, as far away as my basement and occasionally in my living room. My fame is such that there are members of my family who recognize my name after only a few reminders.
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