A new group has been formed on Goodreads, with the intention of reading and discussing as many as possible of the Great Books, as identified in the curriculum of St. John’s College, Annapolis, Md. Our reading for March is the first half of the Iliad, and if anybody wants to join us, I believe it is not too late to do so. You can find out as much as you need to know by visiting the group’s home page:
Reading too damned much—
7 March 2013 by 1 Comment
—or at least, too many bits and pieces of books in an unfocused way.
At the moment, I want to quote a bit from Paul Johnson’s The Birth of the Modern, never you mind why, and I’m not sure where my copy is. It is not in my bookcases, at any rate. I went looking for it in my bedroom, and put away seventeen of the random books lying on the floor. There are still books on the bedroom floor, and I have not found the one I am looking for yet.
Sometimes I really annoy me.
Wasserman vs. Resnick on genre publishing
7 June 2012 by Leave a Comment
[I]n certain genres (romance, science fiction and fantasy) formerly relegated to the moribund mass-market paperback, readers care not a whit about cover design or even good writing, and have no attachment at all to the book as object. Like addicts, they just want their fix at the lowest possible price, and Amazon is happy to be their online dealer.
—Some idiot named Steve Wasserman, in The Nation
OMG! This is such a relief! I’ve been so misled.
I can finally stop editing and taking pains to package my romance backlist well! NO ONE CARES! They’re just addicts!
I can finally stop editing and taking pains to package my fantasy backlist well! My readers don’t care about quality!
I can tell my dad, a science fiction writer, to relax and stop sweating over Hugo-quality material! No one cares! Science fiction readers are just junkies!
I can tell my publisher to stop spending all that money on my award-winning cover artist! An LA Times book reviewer has declared that it’s pointless! My readers are indifferent to brilliant cover art! We could probably just package the worthless sh*t that I write in a brown paper wrapper!
Whoa! So GLAD Mr. Wasserman enlightened me. The pressure to write well, the pressure on my editors to acquire and edit well, and the pressure on my cover artists and designers… Gone! It never mattered! Our readers our brain-dead junkies! Yay! What a RELIEF not to have to behave like REAL writers, editors, artists, and publishers, after all!
Clock share: Writers vs. the competition
13 January 2012 by 1 Comment
In one of his series of essays on ‘Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing’, Dean Wesley Smith takes aim at what he calls the ‘myth’ that writers compete with one another. He pours scorn on this ‘myth’, and on all who believe it. A short but representative sample:
The myth is simply that writers compete.
Of course, this is so far wrong, it shouldn’t be even talked about, but alas it’s still out there and going strong. In fact, I recently made the mistake of wondering over onto the Kindle boards and wasted a bunch of hours before I came to my senses. By the time I was finished with those hours, I knew I had to talk about this, since new writer after new writer talked about how they had to compete with all the other writers to get their books read.
He then goes on to paint a wonderful Technicolor picture of a world where there is an unlimited demand for fiction, pie for you and me and pasture for all the sheep, and the sky’s the limit, baby. Now, I do not know what religion Mr. Smith adheres to, but I am a lifelong devotee of what Kipling calls the Gods of the Copybook Headings. And one of the Copybook Headings, which people like Mr. Smith seem never to have heard of, is this:
Trees do not grow up to the sky. [Read more…]
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