Bloggasm

If you’re a Stephen King fan, you likely know that King has written several novels under the pen-name Richard Bachman, the most famous of which was likely Thinner. After it was revealed that he and Bachman were the same, King only wrote one more novel under that name, The Regulators, which was set in a similar world to his other novel (written with a SK byline), Desperation.

Well, it looks like King will be publishing a new book under the Bachman name. It’ll be titled Blaze. Follow this pdf link to read the first two chapters.

I don’t have time to read them just now, perhaps tomorrow I will.

via carnwrite

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Related posts: How much a Science Fiction novelist makes, Interview with Chandrahas Choudhury from The Middle Stage, Nick Mamatas releases his first novel under a Creative Commons license, Why bloggers aren’t always great at selling books

Laurence Simon is a blogger who lives and works in Houston, Texas. Aside from running his sarcastically funny This Blog is Full of Crap, he also has several catcams, and hosts a daily podcast where he reads extremely short flash fiction.

He’s one of the many bloggers who have joined Pajamas Media, which is quickly becoming one of the largest blog networks on the web.

Simon Owens: In our last interview, you spoke about some of your frustrations with Pajamas Media. Have things improved at all since then? Has the network grown at all?

Laurence Simon: No, they haven’t improved. Pajamas Media has pretty much established a core of bloggers they will link for stories, and that’s pretty much it.

At least they fired the blogger relations person, who was about as useless as tits on a bull.

The network hasn’t grown, but they’ve added a few bloggers to their main site. I tend to just follow Claudia Rosett and her United Nations beat, and that’s it.

Simon Owens: I’ve noticed what seems like a decline in cat-blogging. As someone who operates cat-cams, is this a real trend? Have other cute-animals blogs spun off from the idea of cat blogs? I think noticed a puppy blog not all that long ago.

Laurence Simon: I don’t have the numbers in front of me, but I think it’s growing steadily.

Carnival of the Cats remains strong in participation.

There’s cute animal blogs of all types out there, and that’s a good thing. Something for everyone.

Simon Owens: The topics on your blog are wide-ranging, much more eclectic than the bloggers I usually interview. Do you think that bloggers that don’t focus on a specific niche have a harder time gaining readerships?

Laurence Simon: Yes, they have a hard time with attracting readers because you’re not known as the go-to guy for a particular issue.

Also, people who come for one thing will leave because of another.

The people coming for cat stuff don’t want to read about the work stuff and vice versa.

Simon Owens: How many people participate in your 100-word challenge? I noticed several of the stories in the challenge don’t rely on the twist ending that a lot of flash fiction encounters. What does this form of fiction have to offer to make it inviting?

Laurence Simon: Usually between ten and fifteen participate.

I think people want to have a little fun, it’s quick and easy to do. And it’s also neat to see how other people play with a particular theme while there’s some things writers have in common.

Nick Mamatas–novelist, journalist, and short story writer– has released his first novel for free online under a Creative Commons lincense. You’ll find the first chapter below:

CHAPTER ONE

I was in Big Sur hiding from my public when I finally heard from Neal again. He had had problems of his own after the book came out and it started being carried around like a rosary by every scruffy party boy looking for a little cross-country hitchhiking adventure. They’d followed him around like they’d followed me, but Neal drank too deeply of the well at first, making girls left and right as usual, taking a few too many shots to the face, and eating out on the story of our travels maybe one too many times. Those boozy late-night dinners with crazy soulless characters whose jaws clacked like mandibles when they laughed are what got to him in the end, I’m sure. They were hungry for something. Not just the college boys and beautiful young things, but those haggard-looking veterans of Babylon who started shadowing Neal and me on every street corner and at every dawn-draped last call in roadside bars; they all wanted more than a taste of Neal’s divine spark, they wanted to extinguish it in their gullets. Neal was the perfect guy for them as he always walked on the edge, ever since the first shiv was held to his throat at reform school when he was a seven-year-old babe with a fat face and shiny teary cheeks. He wanted to eat up the whole world himself like they did, I knew from my adventures on the road with him, but I didn’t learn what was eating him ’til I got that letter that drove me to move under ground.

(more…)

Via Jason I found this Washington Post article: The Writing Life. As is usual with Stephen King’s recent writings, my eyes started to roll at the beginning of the article and continued on until the very end. The first counter-clockwise roll of the eyes started with this paragraph:

About halfway through my latest novel, Jim Dooley, a dangerously unhinged literary stalker finds himself in the study of his idol, Scott Landon, a famous writer. Although Scott has been dead for nearly two years, Dooley is overcome with awe. “He deserved a nice place like this,” he tells Scott’s widow. “I hope he enjoyed it, when he wasn’t agonizin’ over his creations.”

King has been getting a ton of flak from critics because he always recycles old plot points: 1.Physically disabled and/or mentally retarded Jesus figures (The Green Mile, Dreamcatcher) 2. A “katet” or group of youngsters who are tied together by destiny and propelled forward to the ending because of this destiny (Dark Tower books, IT), 3. Magical amnesia where said destiny causes his characters to forget major events when it’s convenient (Insomnia, IT), etc…

One of his most tired tropes is casting a main character who happens to be a writer. Not only a writer, but often it’s a bestselling or critically acclaimed writer, which leads us to two assumptions: 1. Bestselling writers are so numerous they must grow on trees, and 2. They have an incredibly high percentage of being visited by horrific supernatural events.

If I ever taught a writing class, one of the first things I’d tell my students is “Don’t cast any of your main characters as writers.” For one, it’s literary masturbation. How lazy can you be as a writer if you can’t extend your imagination past your own profession? By casting your character as a writer, you’re essentially casting yourself as the main character, which is as lazy as can be. Secondly, writers who cast main characters as writers create idealistic cliches in which the character is either a bestselling writer–which is unrealistic in its unlikelyhood–, or a starving artist. Neither of these are very compelling, and with the exception of a few cases, I’ve disliked most “writer” stories I’ve read.

This doesn’t stop Stephen King from casting his characters as writers. He even likes to use bestselling writers from time to time. Just for fun, let’s have a list of every book or story of his that has a main character who’s a writer. I’ll bold the ones where the writer is either critically acclaimed or bestselling.

1. Bag of Bones
2. “The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet” (can’t remember if this had a bestselling writer in it)
3. The Body
4. The Colorado Kid (newspaper journalists count as writers)
5. Cujo
6. The Dark Half
7. The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah (King casts himself as a character)
8. Desperation
9. IT (bestselling horror writer, no less
10. Misery
11. The Regulators
12. Salem’s Lot
13. Secret Window, Secret Garden
14. The Shining
15. “Sorry, Right Number”
16. Tommyknockers
17. “Word Processor of the Gods”

It’s been awhile since I’ve read a lot of those books and stories (high school), so there’s probably a lot more than that. But this list gives you a good picture of how Stephen King stories have become more recycled than your average formulaic fiction. And it looks like his latest novel not only has a “famous writer” in it, but is also another version of Misery.

The second time your eyes begin to roll is when he starts describing the “writing life”:

There’s a mystery about creative writing, but it’s a boring mystery unless you’re interested in this one small animal, sometimes quite vicious, that makes its home in the bushes. It’s a scruffy little thing with fleas and often smells of whatever nasty mess it’s been rolling in. It can never be more than semi-domesticated and isn’t exactly known for its loyalty.

Ah, vague artsy fartsy metaphor. Well, at least he doesn’t start using the biggest writing cliche of all: The Muse.

Oh wait:

I’ll speak more of this beast — to which the Greeks gave the comically noble name musa , which means song…

Some writers in the throes of writer’s block think their muses have died, but I don’t think that happens often…

I always thought that what happened was Mr. Heller finally cleared away the muse repellant around his particular clearing in the woods…

often under duress; most writers find their muses do not travel particularly well, although Truman Capote said his enjoyed motel rooms…

My muse is here. It’s a she. Scruffy little mutt has been around for years, and how I love her, fleas and all…

He uses the word “muse” at least three other times in the article, but you get the point. Rather than giving any substance to the “writing life,” the entire article is metaphor after metaphor that digresses further and further into vagueness until we can only come to one conclusion: The writing life consists of a magical creature, a flea-ridden beast that burrows down into the muse’s bossom (?) and sometimes lashes out, becoming an evil creature…

Ok, now I’m just making shit up. But now we at least know one thing: Stephen King’s essay/articles are just as overwritten as his monolithic books.

Related posts: Writing entire books attacking people who wrote books about other people, Interview with Chandrahas Choudhury from The Middle Stage

Heather Lindsley’s short story Mayfly is one of those stories that stems from a concept–that women can be born and live their entire lives in the span of a week–and then branches off into the many sociological implications of such a life. The character literally has the life-span of a mayfly, only in this case, the memories of her ancestors are implanted in her brain before she’s ever born. This allows Lindsley to skip past the question of how a character can have so much self-inflection after only being alive for a week.

This condition only exists within her family tree, so the reader watches how the world reacts to someone of her kind, how she and her ancestors are forced to kind of blend in, and because they grow and mature so quickly, nobody really notices that something isn’t right. In order for their lineage to go on, each woman must find a mate to impregnate her after only a few days of life–usually on the third or fourth day.

Like most stories of this kind, the backdrop allows for a deep characterization that is quickly realized. The character must struggle against the notion that her life is so short and must find some sense of worth within the span of a week. There’s a scene where she briefly considers picking up and reading a Tolstoy novel to add a cultural inheritance to future generations, but at the same time realizes that the book is too long to justify reading it. Instead, she goes to see Hitchcock marathons and visits art museums. All so future generations can call themselves cultured.

The presiding theme here is selflessness. On the one hand, she realizes that her life is so short and that she wants to do the most with it, but on the other hand she knows her time is very limitted and she has to prepare for future generations. This creates an internal conflict that works well with Lindsley’s writing style.

This really is a wonderful story. I highly recommend it.

Related posts: The solution to the Harlan Ellison problem, Interview with Chandrahas Choudhury from The Middle Stage, A really good short story I read today

Chandrahas Choudhury is a writer based in Mumbai, India. His literary weblog The Middle Stage features essays on both new and classic works on writers from around the world. His reviews have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, the Sunday Telegraph, the Scotsman and Himal. He is at work on a novel.

Simon Owens: How different is literary blogging from mainstream reviewing?

Chandrahas Choudhury: I see it this way: reviewing is the work available to me in the real world, and my weblog is closer to an ideal world. With my blog I tend not to follow the news – I write about whatever I’m reading or thinking about.

Reviewing brings with it constraints of space, deadlines to be met, and the pressure of staying up to date – if you don’t review a book the month it’s out, you’ve lost the chance to write about it.

A weblog allows you to rove freely across time and space and national boundaries, as long as you can keep things interesting for readers. On my blog I don’t have to worry about space constraints, though obviously I don’t go beyond a certain word length. Also, there’s the freedom to digress, to make all sorts of interesting connections. And there’s the opportunity to quote liberally – sometimes two or three long passages in a piece – so that you can show what you think the writer is trying to do. There’s something about a beautiful sentence or paragraph that you instantly want to share out with as many people as possible. So often, when I have to write a review of a book for a newspaper, I tend to write a longer piece with a more informal tone for my blog.

Blogging is also in some ways a different form from reviewing. With my blog essays I try to say something interesting about a writer or book but also to signpost other good essays on the subject, so there’s several hours of reading locked up in one piece. Reviewing doesn’t allow you to exploit the resources of the Internet in this manner.

Simon Owens: Have you ever had the pleasure of meeting an author after you’ve reviewed his work?

Chandrahas Choudhury: Only a couple of times. I liked Altaf Tyrewala’s novel No God In Sight (out last month in the US) very much, so I contacted him for an interview on my blog, and as we live in the same city we’ve become friends since, and chat a good deal about what kind of work we’re doing and what books we’re reading. Last month I met the writer Vikram Chandra very briefly at the launch of his book.

Simon Owens: How do you go about browsing for new authors? Do you take word-of-mouth recommendations or is there some other method?

Chandrahas Choudhury: I read the review pages of the English press around the world regularly, so I always know what’s just out, and sometimes I look at publisher’s catalogues to see what’s going to be coming soon. Like most readers I know instinctively what’s going to be to my taste and what’s not. But I always find that a good, alert, sensitive review will make me curious about a book. My friends will kill me for this, but I rarely ever read the books they recommend.

Simon Owens: How successful do you think book blogs are in striving to promote books? Do you think that they’re convincing readers to buy the books they recommend?

Chandrahas Choudhury: I think getting readers to buy books is only one of the aims of a literary weblog, and a relatively unimportant one at that. I don’t think we have the power to give an Oprah Winfrey book-of-the-month boost to a book.

To be sure, over time people come to trust your opinion about things, and will often track down your recommendations. But I think what literary blogs are really concerned with is good conversation about books. What kinds of books are out there that we don’t know about, or don’t generally get talked about? What does it mean to read well? What relation does reading have to experience, to our day-to-day lives? Each one of us has some kind of answers to these questions, and we advance them through talk about specific books. Literary weblogs can become part of a book culture in the same way as a good periodical can.

Simon Owens: I’ve noticed that you focus a lot on international writers. Is there a particular reason for this?

Chandrahas Choudhury: That’s just because I read quite widely, and think everyone should as well – unsystematic reading is one of life’s great delights. Also, in India, there’s not a great deal of attention given by the newspapers to books from around the world – most newspapers only have one page for books in a week. I find I have a great deal to say but nowhere to say it, so that I put all that onto my weblog.

I now have a great deal more traffic from the US and the UK than I used to, so I feel that in some small way I help to bring writers from around the world to the attention of Indian readers, and Indian writers to the attention of readers from around the world. (This may only be in my imagination, but even illusions are vital motivating forces for work. In fact, blogging itself is based upon the illusion that one will one day become rich and famous out of doing work for free, mostly for people who have nothing better to do than sit around surfing the Web). Fakir Mohan Senapati, for example, or Bibhutibhushan Bandhopadhyay – these are Indian writers whose work is easily the equal of anything in world literature. And Etgar Keret, or Osip Mandelstam – why shouldn’t more Indian readers be reminded of their work?

Simon Owens: What upcoming book publications are you looking forward to the most?

Chandrahas Choudhury: I actually dream of finding the quality time to give to classics I haven’t read yet. Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, for instance – I’ve never read it. I’d like also to read Bibhutibhushan Bandhopadhyay’s Pather Panchali (Song of the Road) – the book on which Satyajit Ray made the first film of the Apu trilogy. And a few months ago I found in a pavement bookshop in Bombay the Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis’s mammoth verse work The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel – it’s full of roaring lines and superb effects. I’d like to disappear onto an island for a month and read that, preferably with someone to read out bits to and to cook my meals for me.

But among upcoming books, I’d like to read Leila Aboulela’s The Translator, Roger Ebert’s Awake in the Dark: Forty Years of Reviews, Essays, and Interviews, the art critic Robert Hughes’s memoir Things I Didn’t Know, and David Thomson’s book on Nicole Kidman. I’d also like to lay my hands on the new issue of News From The Republic of Letters, the journal started by Saul Bellow and Keith Botsford. This one’s going to be a special issue in memory of Bellow. I’d even be interested in In The Line of Fire, the forthcoming memoir by Pakistan’s president Pervez Musharraf.

Simon Owens: What are the five blogs you’d recommend to supplement the reading of your own?

Chandrahas Choudhury: Two literary blogs I have a great deal of time for are Mark Thwaite’s ReadySteadyBook and Steve Mitchelmore’s This Space. The Indian writer Amitava Kumar has a great many interesting opinions, and Colour of Water, the weblog of my fellow Bombay writer Sonia Faleiro, features brilliant reportage on a slew of Indian subjects sharing space with funny titbits and gossip. Amit Varma used to run the Middle Stage before I took it over, and his widely read blog India Uncut is a distinctive mix of zany humour, libertarian opinions, and links to a great many bizarre things happening all around India.

Kassia Krozser, cofounder of Medialoper.com, is the blogger over at Booksquare. She’s a member of the Lit-blog Co-op, and often writes for Romancing the Blog and Paperbackreader.net.

Simon Owens: I’ve noticed that your blog seems to focus a lot more on women writers than the average book blog. Do you think that women authors aren’t well represented in the book reviews that come out every year?

Kassia Krozser: I focus on women writers because, obviously, I’m female and my personal bias is toward women writers. As the daughter of a librarian, I was privileged to have a lot of fiction shoved under my bedroom door, and when I look back at the works that spoke to me and — most importantly — stuck with me, they were largely written by women. I also come from the romance community, and, again, it’s been my privilege to work with women who are serious about their writing. As one who has failed miserably to write for Harlequin, I know that what seems so easy on the surface is actually the product of hard work. I take all fiction equally seriously, but, yes, I have a definite bias toward women and their writing. Which leads to your question…

Oh my gosh, yes. For a while there, I was bored and started counting the male to female ratio in the Los Angeles Times Book Review section (it’s my local paper). It was disturbing, both from the perspective books written by women that were reviewed and from the perspective of number of female reviewers. I remember the blow-up last year about women on opinion pages, and there was a lot of discussion about the editors tapping into what they know. I think that happens everywhere, and it’s not necessarily a deliberate move on the part of editors. Luckily, we have a lot of options available to us as readers when it comes to learning about great reads.

I also, yes, believe there’s a serious bias against commercial fiction. I think it’s a shame that good writing is being defined in narrow terms. First off, it dismisses a large portion of the reading audience. Second, it arbitrarily labels certain fiction as “good.” I have an issue with this because publishers slot books based on commercial assessments — it’s hard for hardcore literary types to accept this (heck, it’s hard for me to accept this because I have this crazy notion that talent is talent). Publishers decide how to market books.

Simon Owens: Do you think that the rise of book blogs will allow small presses to flourish more than before?

Kassia Krozser: Absolutely. Shelf space in bookstores is necessarily limited, and in the past, if you didn’t know how to find what you wanted, you wouldn’t. Book blogs are terrific because we (the bloggers) all have our individual obsessions, from translated works to romance novels, and we can focus intently on our favorite writing. In turn, our audiences overlap and expand. The blogosphere is often called incestuious, and I think that’s a great thing. While I might not love everything Blogger X discusses, all it takes is one book for me to share with my audience.

Small presses are using blogs in a good way. They’re approaching us and starting to encourage their writers to reach out to bloggers and their audiences. Developing a relationship with readers is a critical task for authors, and book tours are notoriously expensive. It makes perfect sense to reach out to willing communities via blogs.

Simon Owens:What are some of your favorite small presses that you’ve highlighted on your blog?

Kassia Krozser: I am madly in love with Unbridled. I’ve truly enjoyed everything I’ve read from them — it’s that trust thing again. When they send me a book, I put it on my “Read Now” list. It’s funny because New York publishers are just now getting the idea that they need to be branding themselves, but I’m not seeing a real distinction. Unbridled really stands out because of their openness, their great communications, and excellent books.

Simon Owens: Have you noticed any new major genre trends in publishing over the last few years?

Kassia Krozser: Other than the trend toward erotica? All the major publishing houses are actively seeking erotic imprints. As an industry-watcher, I find it fascinating because they’re following a trend that developed online; erotica has been a huge seller in the e-publishing community, and the New York houses have decided that they want a piece of the action. Of course, when everyone jumps on the bandwagon — see: chicklit — you tend to have oversaturation and a necessary decline in quality. Let’s face it, not everyone can write good erotica. It’s a lot more than sex, you know.

I think there’s also a return to magic in fiction. Books like Jeffrey Ford’s The Girl In The Glass add a slight paranormal aspect that allows the reader to abandon this world we inhabit and walk into something entirely different. For years now, we’ve seen a return to vampires and other non-human beings, but — and maybe this is just what I’m picking up for my own reading — there seems to be more subtle magic happening in fiction. I like that trend (if it is a trend and not just wishful thinking on my part).

Simon Owens: What upcoming book publications are you looking forward to the most?

Kassia Krozser: I am really excited about Carolyn Turgeon’s Rain Village (from, yes, Unbridled). It’s a story about reading, running away to join the circus, and growing up just a little different than everybody else on the block. The story mixes deeply intense emotional issues with a touch of magic — and I think we all need a little magic in our lives.

Simon Owens: What are the five blogs you’d recommend to supplement the reading of your own?

Kassia Krozser: I have so many sites that I read on a daily basis. Here are five, though I will say that my blogroll is a great start…and then you can move on to the blogrolls of everyone I link to…and so on. I’m going to be a bit self-promoting here –

1. Medialoper – This is actually a sister site for Booksquare. I started this site with some friends because Booksquare is deliberately focused on books and publishing, and I am also deeply interested in all aspects of new media. It’s our way of cutting back on the ranting and raving in the backyard, or, rather, moving the ranting and raving to the Internet.

2. Romancing The Blog – The best of the best on the romance genre. Yes, I write for them, too.

3. PaperbackReader – Smart, insightful reviews. The focus is women’s fiction. It is the perfect counter to the LATBR — we have a great team of reviewers.

4. GalleyCat – Like Booksquare, this blog focuses on the publishing industry. Sarah Weinman of Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind and Ron Hogan of Beatrice have made this a must-read for me.

5. if:book – if:book looks at reading and writing from an academic perspective, with a focus on new technology. Sounds dull and dry — I promise you that it is not.

(Related posts: Interview with Myfanwy Collins from Read by Myfanwy, Interview with Wendi Kaufman from The Happy Booker, Interview with Bud Parr from Chekhov’s Mistress, Interview with Traver Kauffman from Rake’s Progress)