I'm the author of the novels Solip, Say, Cut, Map, The Country, and The City. I've also written the nonfiction books EarthBound and Eat the Flowers. I'm currently publishing my novel A Task via Kickstarter in order to have an hourlong conversation with each of its first thousand readers. For a decade I published books through Sator Press, and for a decade I acted in film and television; now I help students at St. John's College. More info: kenbaumann.com.
Writers:
Remember what it is to be alone?
Fifteen interviews after XXXX gets his book published by XXXXX XXXX Press. Constant promo. Constant talk. Talk about the work. ‘What brought this book out?’ ‘What were you thinking here?’
Use of words: Great, Beautiful, Amazing, Stunning, Remarkable.
After an hour of thought, I’d say that I’ve read two books that I would consider great in my proportion. Two books. I know it’s nice to be nice. That’s okay. But, please, as an excuse, do not use the ‘it’s tough to be a writer.’ No. It may feel tough, but it is not. Look around you.
To sum: I think that within the internet, writers can easily grab hold of a lot of pages and capitalize and gather attention.
Remind yourself: This is a psychic burden, this page. Is it worth it? Is it worth it for me and for the audience?
It is okay to be alone.
Have you ever said no to an interview? You can! You can, actually. It can be worth the gamble of pissing off the proposer. You don’t even need to tell them that it is because of you, because of your want to sit quietly and think, and work. Talk can be poison.
It’s a mistake for a sculptor or a painter to write or speak very often about his job. It releases tension needed for his work. –Henry Moore
It’s easy to feel the frenetic prompts that the internet–and within it the communities–create. Resist them. Action for action is not action at all. It is movement. (Marketing is often the endgame for this movement; you create burden. Burden. Think about what you want to play, what you want to ask. What you want to give. Think long term. Ten moves in chess deep long term. Anything less than that is lazy.)
Resist the movement. Revolution, now, is a withdrawal.
Remeber what it is to write. Remember the seed?
The seed is you. Alone.
This is, as it must be, as much for me as it is for XXXX. For you. For me. One in the same here.
Anyone know the origin of this photo? Digging the ink, the stance, the composition, everything.
Max decided to go for a quick bike ride before dinner. He was going to tell his mom he was leaving, but then didn’t, oh well. She was busy with Gary anyway. Gary, her chinless boyfriend, was lounging on the couch, drinking red wine and watching one of those ludicrous musicals. Every night was some musical. Disgusting, untrue, wrong in every way.
first paragraph from an excerpt from the Where The Wild Things Are novel by Dave Eggers.
An overview of the Nook, a new e-reader from Barnes & Noble; oh, and there’s this:
And hey, great news for book cover designers… your craft will be preserved in the space of a postage stamp.
UPDATE: It’s here, and it features some good stuff: ‘Share favorite eBooks with your friends, family, or book club. Most eBooks can be lent for up to 14 days at a time. Just choose the book you want to share, then send it to your friend’s reader, cell phone, or computer.’ and ‘Visit the store, turn on your nook, and see what pops up on your screen. It’s as simple as that. You will get exclusive content, special discounts and more. And soon, you will be able to read entire eBooks for free at your local Barnes & Noble.
The question, then, is why novelists have ceded their ground to science. And from the writer’s perspective, if not from the reader’s, an allegorical interpretation of the neuronovel does seem possible. Is the interest in neurological anomaly not symptomatic of an anxiety about the role of novelists in this new medical-materialist world, which happens also to be a world of giant publishing conglomerates and falling reading rates? Are novelists now, in their own eyes and others’, only special cases, without specialized and credentialed knowledge, who may at best dispense accurate if secondhand medical (or historical or sociological) information in the form of an entertaining fictional narrative? And is the impulse to write not an inexplicable compulsion, a category of disorder outside the range of normal?
Writers: If the first sentence in your story is bad, rethink. It’s like handing someone a business card covered in shit.
