My 2009 Reading List

What I've read this year, so far....

1. Loser's Town - Daniel Depp

2. American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, the Birth of Hollywood, and the Crime of the Century - Howard Blum

3. Author Unknown: On the Trail of Anonymous - Don Foster

4. Finding Nouf - Zoe Ferraris

5. Negotiating with the Dead - Margaret Atwood

6. The Twelve/The Ghosts of Belfast (ARC) - Stuart Neville

7. Safer - Sean Doolittle

8. The Music Lesson* - Katharine Weber - *a re-read and a worthy one at that

9. My Dark Places - James Ellroy

10. The Mongol Reply - Benjamin M. Schutz

11. The Wicked Pavilion - Dawn Powell

12. Fifty Dead Men Walking - Martin McGartland

13. Borderlands: An Inspector Devlin Mystery - Brian McGilloway

14. Molly Fox's Birthday - Deirdre Madden

15. Harry's Game - Gerald Seymour

16. The Collaborator of Bethlehem - Matt Beynon Rees

17. Henry and June: The Unexpergated Diary - 1931-1932 - Anais Nin

18. The Song is You - Arthur Phillips

19. Max Perkins: Editor of Genius - A. Scott Berg

20. The Rose of Sebastopol - Katharine McMahon

21. We Have Always Lived in the Castle - Shirley Jackson

Fantasy author Robin Hobb on the evils of blogging for writers

Jaye Welles turned me on to Robin Hobb's rant on why blogging is bad for writers.

It's something every blogging writer needs to read, and there's more than a little irony that I'm using my own blog to share it.

If Donald's comment about blogging scratches the writing itch didn't stop you in your tracks, this sure will.

Here's some highlights:

"Ah, my writer friend. It is harsh but it must be said. Compared to the studied seduction of the novel, blogging is literary pole dancing. Anyone can stand naked in the window of the public’s eye, anyone can twitch and writhe and emote over the package that was not delivered, the dinner that burned, the friend who forgot your birthday. That is not fiction. That is life, and we all have one. Blogging condemns us to live everyone else’s tedious day as well as our own.

"You and I, we are meant to write and edit and write again."

"My dear friend, writer of writers, esteemed teller of tales that no one else can tell, beware! Blogging is not writing. It masquerades as such, t’is true. You sit at the desk, your fingers dance their blind and clever dance across the keyboard, words appear upon the screen, and oh, it feels like writing, like the easiest sort of writing, the writing that needs not to be justified on the morrow. It is the writing that makes the idle stupidity of the day something of worth, for has it not been written down, have not readers shared it and responded to it? Have you not been recognized, flattered and preened for today’s bon mot? Is not that what the writer lives for?

"Remember that you are a storyteller...."

Here's the link to the rest: http://www.robinhobb.com/rant.html

The Wisdom According to Josie, or potent quotables and pithy maxims

Wherein I share my thoughts on the writing life.

"If you marry your novel to real life events and people, you divorce your story from structure." - Josephine Damian

"From the Nobel Laureate to the wanna-be, un-published writer, the blank page is the great equalizer." - Josephine Damian

"All writers, great and small, all put the story on the page one word at a time." - Josephine Damian

"There are only two kinds of authors: those that are in it for the attention, and those that are in it for the writing." - Josephine Damian

"Authors go wrong when they write the book they want to write instead of the book they should write." - Josephine Damian

"Write with a mother's loving hand; edit with the iron fist of a strict disciplinarian." - Josephine Damian

"FINISHED" springs ahead

On this morning when we put the clocks forward ((ugh!) my short story FINISHED was accepted for publication in the Oct. 15th issue of YELLOW MAMA.

The title has a double meaning - "finished" as in the culmination of sexual satisfaction and "finished" as in finished off - a euphamism for murder. Needless to say, it's an especially lurid and violent tale.

What, you expected a happy ending? From me? As if.

Much thanks to Yellow Mama's editor Cindy Rosmus for taking a chance on a story such as this.

http://blackpetalsks.tripod.com/yellowmama/index.html

Happy St. Patrick's Day! Kiss an Irish writer today!

Each morning, when Orthodox and Conservative Jews say their daily blessings, the men among them recite the following prayer: Baruch Atah Adonai, Eloheinu Melech ha-olam, shelo asani ishah; "Blessed are You, O Lord our God, Ruler of the Universe, Who did not make me a woman."

Well, when I wake up each day I say, Thank you God for making me Irish. Seriously, if I have any success as a writer it'll be because I'm Irish and I believe this genetic dispostion gives me a leg-over the non-Irish wannabes.

I found this article today on why it helps to be Irish if you're a writer.

"I was checking the list of nations which have the greatest number of Nobel Prize winners per capita and Ireland comes in at number eight with 1.24502 Nobel Laureates per 1 million people, but of the ten winners four of these are in literature (and proving a pretty irony, the other half is almost exclusively for the Peace Prize) so I would argue that per capita there is no other nation that has a higher per capita number of Nobel Prize winners for literature.

"Add to this the plethora of outstanding Irish writers who did not win the prize, Jonathan Swift, Brendan Behan, J. M. Synge, Sean O’Casey, Bram Stoker, James Joyce, and more recently Martin McDonagh, Conor McPherson, Marina Carr, Colm Toibin and Patrick McCabe and you have a truly awe inspiring literary tradition that is perhaps unmatched for such a small nation that does not even write in its own native language much.

"But why are the Irish so good at telling stories? Is it because they like to exaggerate? Is it because they like a drink or is that just a symptom rather than a cause of any literary effort? Is it because are such a historically repressed people that literature is the valve that allows them to release those truths which social pressure makes it difficult to talk about? Or is it because they have all kissed the Blarney Stone?

"While all of Ireland’s most famous writers employ the language of their English conquerors, Ireland is also home to the oldest vernacular literature in Europe. As this website explains:

'When George Thomson, the great scholar of ancient Greece, went looking for a culture and a literature to match that of Homer, he found it in the writings of the Blasket Islands. A remote and desolate set of islands off the south west coast of Ireland, where they developed their own distinct literature in the first half of the twentieth century.'

"There may be no simple answer, but still, it’s a question worth considering today, the day the world turns green to honour the paddyman who rid the Irish nation of snakes."


Source: http://blogs.news.com.au/news/splat/index.php/news/comments/why_are_the_irish_such_good_writers/50921

Audrey Niffenegger Receives $5 Million Advance for Second Novel

And she doesn't blog or do any other form of social networking. All Ms. Niffenegger has is a (very cool) website: http://www.audreyniffenegger.com/

Five meeeeellion! And all without the time suck of online promoting. Know how she did it? She had a unique best-selling idea and had the skills and discipline to be able to write a story well-told. What a concept!

I so rest my case.

Read all about the big deal here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/11/books/11niff.html?_r=1&ref=books

Another blog post against blogging, or Why writers should just STFU and write

Saw this article linked on twitter about the hazards of authors putting themself too much out there for their fans via blogging. I thought it should have a wider audience.

Here's a brief bit:

"These days, writers invite personal involvement and intensity from their readers. In direct proportion to the way in which they share their personalities (or for-consumption personalities), their everyday lives, their football teams and word counts, their partners and children and cats, it encourages in readers a sense of personal connection and access, and thus an entitlement to comment, complain, recommend cat food, feel betrayed, shriek invective, issue demands."

Of course my favorite part is when the author calls out those two whiny attention whores Patricia Cornwell and Tess Gerritsen on how they summoned their fans to take up arms against those who dare post an honest critical review of their latest shitty release:

"Writers are on shaky ground if they want to be upset by readers feeling angry and posting their anger when authors are widely inviting that sense of pseudo-intimacy and intensity – and sometimes even employing their reader base as a weapon. “Release the fans!” seems to be the phrase that applies."

To read the rest of the article:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090306.wbkread07/BNStory/globebooks/home