Writers strike = kids’ book boom?

From United Press International:

Several people sidelined by the Hollywood writers strike said they are penning children’s tales to pass the time while they wait to go back to work.

“It’s kind of a nice way to do something creative at a time when we’re having a hard time doing our bread-and-butter work,” David N. Weiss, a Rugrats writer and WGA official, who recently turned in a first draft of the children’s book Carl the Frog, told The Hollywood Reporter.

The UPI piece goes on to name two other upcoming kids’ books by writers for That’s So Raven and Comedy Central’s The Root of All Evil, but since all three books are being published by the same company – Worthwhile Books, a new imprint of the ultra-corporate entertainment company IDT/IDW – it’s maybe a bit misleading to imply that this is a widespread new trend.

Martin Amis throws vinegar in old wound, opens new one

The latest salvos in the Amis/Eagleton polemic come from the increasingly rancorous novelist himself, who penned an earnest rebuttal in Saturday’s Guardian – “No, I am not a racist,” pleads the headline – and then glibly ran his mouth at a debate on Monday night. At the talk at Manchester University, where Amis and Eagleton both teach, Amis revisted the incendiary subject that got him into hot water in the first place – namely, the discovery of an alleged Islamist plot against the U.K. in August 2006.

At a debate at Manchester University, where the novelist is head of creative writing, he told a packed auditorium that only a machine would not have experienced “retaliatory urges” upon learning in August last year of the alleged plot to bomb transatlantic aircraft, in which, Amis said, 3,000 people could have died.

“There should be from every corner of the west a permanent factory siren of disgust for these actions,” he told students, staff and members of the public, including Afzal Khan, the first Muslim to be lord mayor of Manchester. He acknowledged Muslim efforts “to put their house in order” were made more difficult by the jihadis’ “monopoly on intimidation”.

Upon closer inspection, Amis seems to apologize in advance for the outburst in the Saturday piece, where he advises readers never to take a novelist at his word. Sort-of quoting Nabokov, he writes, “I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished man of letters, I talk like an idiot.”

So we’re likely to hear from Amis again, in considered prose, given that he continues to speak like an idiot.

But there was less assent when he went on to speak of a “distorted sympathy” towards Palestine. “I have sympathy for Israel. It’s not nothing to have six million of your number murdered in central Europe in the last century. Don’t you think that this has had a psychological effect on this race or religion, or whatever you want to call the Jews?

“Palestinians have never suffered anything as remotely terrible as that. There is an inexplicable numbness about Israel.”

Not all lost books are happy to be found

When lost books by well-known authors are found, it is usually an occasion for celebration. Not in the case of a non-fiction book about oil exploration written by Wallace Stegner, an award-winning novelist and creative writing professor who taught, among many others, people like Thomas McGuane, Ken Kesey, Larry McMurty, Raymond Carver, and Gordon Lish.

From the International Herald Tribune:

The owner of Selwa Press, Timothy Barger, is the son of the former president of a U.S. company that hired Stegner in 1956 to pen a promotional piece about its history. Stegner, who is known as the literary laureate of the American West, was treated to two weeks in Saudi Arabia and paid about $16,000 for his effort.

For reasons that now are a subject of dispute between Barger and the late author’s son, however, an edited version of Stegner’s manuscript was not published in the Arabian American Oil Co.’s in-house magazine until 1967. It was not available to the public until Vista, Calif.-based Selwa put out a trade edition of “Discovery!” in September without permission from Stegner’s estate.

“His particular version of the manuscript was one that was cut up by one of their PR people. It was never put up for sale,” said Carl Brandt, Stegner’s longtime literary agent. “If Wally had wanted to publish that edition, he would have been on the phone with me saying, ‘Let’s go, and get Viking to do it.’”

Barger has said that he secured the rights to the company-approved version from ARAMCO’s Saudi-run successor and that he did not need consent from Stegner’s heirs. Selwa’s edition was serialized in the company’s magazine in 1967 and later published in Beirut as a freebie paperback for employees.

Freebie paperbacks – now there’s a job perk we’d like to see come back into fashion.

Have your say: day jobs for authors

Q&Q is doing some informal research on the best day jobs for authors. What jobs provide the most flexible schedules to accommodate creative writing? What jobs provide the best raw material or inspiration for fiction?

So, this is a call-out to authors: please comment and tell us about your best day job ever, then stay tuned for our report.

Surviving the MFA

On the Dooney’s Cafe site, John Harris offers a survey of the career of Canadian author Robert Harlow, who was also the head of UBC’s creative writing program. The piece argues that too much exposure to academia can be bad for your artistic health:

It’s an ongoing experiment that might not be working out. With creative writing – with the New Criticism, even – we writer-profs may have gone too far. To me, Harlow’s career points at the dangers – prolonged artistic adolescence, permanent apprenticeship, and fascination with technique instead of with meaningful subject matter and messages. The result: AirBooks. But Harlow himself is a living illustration that the smart and brave can survive creative writing.

MtvU names first poet laureate

MtvU, a branch of MTV that broadcasts on 750 U.S. college campuses, announced this week that it has chosen its first poet laureate, The New York Times reports. And while names such as Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen spring to mind as poets already in the music world, mtvU chose John Ashbery, a celebrated 80-year-old poet who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror and continues to publish prolifically.

Excerpts of Ashbery’s poems will be shown in 18 promotional spots on the channel and its website (which will also have the full text of the poems).

Mr. Ashbery, who was the poet laureate of New York State from 2001 to 2003, was immediately receptive. “It seemed like it would be a chance to broaden the audience for poetry,” he said.

The poems used in the campaign span his career, and the spots are simple: on a white background, black text floats in to a sound like a crashing wave, appears on the screen for a minute, then floats away. From “Retro” (2005): “It’s really quite a thrill/When the moon rises over the hill/and you’ve gotten over someone/salty and mercurial, the only person you’ve ever loved.” From “Soonest Mended” (2000): “Barely tolerated, living on the margin/In our technological society, we are always having to be rescued.”

The station is also sponsoring a poetry contest for students. Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa will select a winner, who will have a book published next year by HarperCollins as part of its national poetry series.

“We hope that we’ll help discover the next great poet that we’ll be talking about for years to come,” said Stephen K. Friedman, the general manager of mtvU….

Quillblog suggests keeping quiet about the fact that there is significantly less bling involved in being a poetry star than a rock star.

Brits want to write books; Yanks probably won’t want to read them

According to The Guardian, a new poll has revealed that Britons want to be writers more than they want to be anything else.

A YouGov poll has found that almost 10% of Britons aspire to being an author, followed by sports personality, pilot, astronaut and event organiser on the list of most coveted jobs.

The Guardian speculates that this surge in literary interest is due mostly to J.K. Rowling, who is generally perceived to have made gobs and gobs of money by simply scribbling away in cafes over cups of tea. Judging by the fairytale content of the rest of the preferred professions list – which essentially amounts to playing sports, flying, and throwing parties – it seems that Britons are actually just saying that they don’t want to work for a living at all. Which is understandable enough.

However, according to our calculations, if all the wannabes follow their dreams, Britain will soon have 6 million authors storming the doors of the nation’s publishing houses. Good luck to ‘em, we say.

Meanwhile, The Guardian has also posted the results of yet another poll, this one from the U.S., which found that a quarter of Americans read no books whatsoever last year. And of those who did, the average tally was four books, with the Bible and romance novels named as the top picks. So we’re guessing that “writer” would not beat out pop idol, motivational speaker, and heiress as the preferred professions in the U.S., but hey – different country, different dreams.

Publishing contracts as employee benefits

How many aspiring authors are there are among the 30,000-plus employees of the Borders U.S. chain? Quillblog guesses a lot, and it looks as though Borders does too: the chain has announced it will publish a novel by one of its shelf-stackers, the winner of a contest that closes on Jan. 31, 2008.

Do you think the winning manuscript will be an angst-filled tale of a life stalled in a dead-end job until something wacky or earth-shattering happens? Nah, Quillblog doesn’t either.

(Thanks to GalleyCat for the link.)

Literary crimes, pt. 1

A murder trial currently under way in Poland suggests that there is definitely such a thing as too much author research. The defendant, according to an article in The Guardian, is 33-year-old writer Krystian Bala, and police say his popular novel Amok mirrors the facts of a real-life killing much too closely to be coincidence.

In Amok, Bala describes how the man was tied up in a similar fashion to [the victim] Dariusz J, with his hands bound behind his back and round his wrists and neck. The murdered man, the owner of a small advertising agency, had also been tortured.

Bala has vigorously denied having inside knowledge of the killing. He says he was simply an avid reader of the press reports and that he has been framed to cover up for what he described as a “bungled” police investigation.

It sounded like a tenuous accusation to us at first, but then the Guardian piece goes on to mention that the victim was a close friend of Bala’s ex-wife, and that, four days after the murder, Bala sold the victim’s mobile phone over the internet. Creepy.

The Random House Offensiveness Quotient

Authors: do you sometimes worry about employing excessively salty language? Do you fret about offending readers with your otherwise innocent descriptors? Don’t you wish there was a way of determining once and for all the words that amuse and the words that affront?

Well now there is! The friendly people at Random House Reference have devised a revolutionary – and handy! – chart for just such a purpose, called the O.Q., or the Offensiveness Quotient. As they state on their website:

When we label sensitive terms for Random House Webster’s College Dictionary, there are a lot of factors to consider. The way we decide has to do with how offensive a word is (the degree to which a word offends the person it is used to describe) and how disparaging a word is (the degree to which the person who uses the word intends for it to be hurtful).

To decide how to label a word, we go through a process that is something like the chart we give below. We call it the O.Q., or “offensiveness quotient” – modeled after the more familiar I.Q. (Intelligence Quotient). [...] Basically, the O.Q. is the average of a term’s rank on the scales of Disparagement and Offensiveness.

Thanks to the O.Q. chart, we here at Q&Q now know that while it is not particularly desirable to refer to someone of the feminine persuasion as “the little woman,” it is still preferable to referring to her as “baby.” Similarly, calling someone of European descent a “honky” is worse than calling them “whitey,” but not nearly as bad as calling them “cracker.” We’re not exactly sure how “spaz” can be considered more slanderous than “harelip,” but then, who are we to question such a finely honed system?