Publishing

A Last Minute Win

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Beth Kander has an article on Writers Digest website dated 12 December 2024, about how she entered a writing contest at the last minute an won more than the contest!

Beth Kander

Beth Kander is a novelist and playwright with tangled roots in the Midwest and Deep South. The granddaughter of immigrants, her writing explores how worlds old and new intertwine—or collide. Her work has been described as “riveting,” “emotional,” “expertly crafted,” and “habit-forming.” Expect twists, turns, and secrets, with surprising heart and humor. Beth has too many degrees and drinks too much coffee. Her favorite characters are her dashing husband and their two lovely kids.

She says, “This book definitely has a non-traditional origin. I was knee deep in another project when a friend texted to let me know that the pop culture site Hey Alma was having a Hanukkah movie pitch competition. Eager to procrastinate on my existing project, I checked the pitch competition deadline—and found out it was the very next day. Long story short (literally), I threw together a pitch for I Made It Out Of Clay, a quirky romcom-with-a-golem concept, submitted it at the 11th hour, and ultimately won the competition.

Industry folks started reaching out to me to inquire about film rights. My literary agent, Alli, passed along some great advice from a film agent colleague: “Write the book first, not the movie.” So, I set aside my other book projects and prioritized writing this novel. The story immediately provided myriad unconventional opportunities to explore big topics: grief and family dynamics and identity and adult friendships and turning 40 … I got to write about these heavy things while laughing and making monsters. What a gift.

I won the pitch competition in December 2022. I was so inspired, I drafted the novel in two blurry months. My agent took it out on sub in February 2023. It sold at auction in March 2023, and publication was set for December 2024. So all told, a two-year-process from idea to publication. That’s fast—often, the writing alone can take longer than that! I’m grateful that although the acquisition happened fast, I had a great editor and plenty of time to revise the book, several times over. I loved spending the time really developing the story and connecting with each character.

I’ve learned so much in the process of publishing this book that it’s honestly hard to even know where to begin, and there have been plenty of surprises along the way. But if I had to pull out the biggest lesson, it’s this: You just never know.

You can spend years working on a story you really believe in, only to have it languish and eventually fade away. You can have an overnight idea that becomes the story everyone’s eager to read. You can’t trust trends or tricks. You just have to keep trying. I think a lot about this two-panel meme, where the first panel is labeled “what people think success looks like” and shows an arrow moving steadily forward and up, and the second panel is labeled “what success actually looks like” and it shows a tangled mess that a forward-facing arrow finally re-emerges from… which feels relevant to the publishing process. But I’ve been over-the-top lucky to work with my agent, Alli, to navigate every detour along the way. And working on I Made It Out Of Clay with my editor, April, and the team at Mira/HarperCollins, has been a delight. Sometimes, gracefully and gratefully, the puzzle pieces slide into place.

You just never know.

This was the fastest writing process I’ve ever undertaken. To go from a paragraph-long idea to a 90,000-word novel in two months is… well, not something I’d necessarily recommend, honestly. Thank God for coffee.

But what I realized is that I didn’t speed-write this book in a vacuum; it wasn’t an anomaly, or a fluke. It was a culmination. All those years, all those other stories; that was my training for this manuscript-marathon. I doubt I’ll keep that pace up with many subsequent projects, but I’m definitely holding fast to the lesson that even the projects that don’t pan out help shape the ones that will fly.

There’s so much I hope that readers will get out of this book—catharsis, cackling-laughter, genuine enjoyment, a sense of release. There’s some strange stuff in the story (an actual monster!) but it’s really rooted in characters that I hope are relatable in all their imperfections and deep desires for something better. Most of all, I hope this book gives readers permission to laugh in the midst of sorrow or acknowledge sadness even as they dance for joy; to let complicated, conflicting emotions exist alongside each other on the page and in our lives. The publication of this book intersected with a profound loss in my own life, and I’ve become so grateful for anyone and anything that acknowledges that we can feel many things at once. If readers come away with that affirmation, I’ll be thrilled.

Write the book you want to rewrite—because most of writing is revising! Don’t agonize over every word in a first draft; that will only slow you down. Just write the story. Get it onto the page. Drafting is the stage where you capture the idea. Revising is where you figure out how to really tell the story well.”

English Literature Is Making a Comeback

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There is an article in today’s Telegraph by Ben Wright, which argues that AI is making a degree in humanities more valuable than ever.

Ben Wright

Ben Wright is a columnist and associate editor for The Telegraph. He was previously business editor and before joining the Telegraph was City correspondent at the Wall Street Journal and editor of Financial News.

Ben said, “Some might call it a tragedy. The number of students taking English literature at A-level dropped from 83,000 in 2013 to 54,000 last year. The number applying to study the subject at university dropped by a third over a similar period. Some pessimists believe the English literature degree could die out within a decade if the subject doesn’t make a better case for itself.

It’s not hard to understand why. For years now, we’ve been telling students to focus on Stem (science, technology, engineering and maths) subjects in the belief that a strong knowledge in these areas was the key to gaining entry to a whole range of industries. When you work in the money markets (or law courts, or Silicon Valley), what use are the novels of Wordsworth gonna be, eh?

That’s not complete nonsense but now the pendulum is in danger of swinging too far. And I’m not just saying that as one of the dwindling tribe of English literature graduates huddled together for warmth under the shrinking shelter and capricious protection of the media and publishing industries. Many employers, including those at the very cutting edge of tech, are coming to the same conclusion.

Strangely, a chronic problem has become acute with the advent of artificial intelligence. Andrej Karpathy, one of the founding members of OpenAI, caused a bit of flutter earlier this year when he tweeted: “The hottest new programming language is English.” What he meant is that increasingly you don’t need to be able to code to code.

A friend of mine who works in the tech industry points out that the deep learning algorithms and transformer models created by the likes of Google, Meta, and OpenAI among others in the past few years didn’t create Large Number Models; they created Large Language Models (LLMs).

Anyone can therefore write prompts for ChatGPT and their ilk. “Natural” language is therefore becoming the “user interface” for artificial intelligence. (That sentence alone illustrates why Silicon Valley might need some help with the transition.)

As my friend put it: the invention of the iPhone put a supercomputer in everyone’s pocket, but LLMs give all of us the ability to program it. In many ways this is great news. It means that technology is becoming more democratised and accessible. It opens up a host of opportunities for those who are skilled in the use of language. The problem is, that’s not many recent graduates.

Anjney Midha, who is on the board of several AI companies, says he often sees very bright Gen Z kids struggling to write clear prompts because they mostly communicate through broken or pidgin English: “Translating thought to language is insanely hard for them.”

Ethan Mollick, a professor studying AI at Wharton business school at the University of Pennsylvania, says this means that – in an inversion of the old order of things – experienced managers are becoming better coders than bright young things fresh out of university.

Nor is the problem confined to the world of tech. Universities are finding that many students arrive having never read a whole book from cover to cover. This is leading to a massive deficit in old-fashioned skills that turn out not to be so old-fashioned after all.

For the past few years, Kingston University has been asking businesses what skills they need but currently aren’t finding in potential employees. Top of the list are the ability to communicate, analyse, adapt, problem-solve and think creatively.

What’s more, it turns out that computers can learn to code far quicker than humans can. They can easily be taught how to ace exams in maths and science. But even the most sophisticated generative AI struggles with English literature papers. There’s a clue here.

In a recent interview about AI, the mathematician Terence Tao said: “I think at the frontier, we will always need humans and AI. They have complementary strengths.” So, contrary to the prevailing doom-mongering about the relentless rise of AI being about to damn the humanities to perpetual irrelevance, might the very opposite be true?

With such a large supply and demand mismatch, you’d assume the market will eventually correct itself, but perhaps things can be helped on their way. Colin Hughes, the head of the country’s largest exam board AQA, argued the GCSE English language needed to be rethought because it was “not very inspiring” and “a bit too mechanistic”.

One obvious way to update the syllabus would be to teach the writing of clear, succinct and unambiguous prompts for artificial intelligence chatbots. English literature could also be made more relevant.

That is not – repeat, not – about bemoaning the canon for being too “male, pale and stale”, as Sharon Hague, the managing director of Pearson, recently did. Nor should we point the finger at “wokeness” for killing off the English degree.

Such tensions have always existed in the discipline. So academics can continue with their squabbles about which voices are most marginalised, but only after pointing out that studying literature is a crash course in empathy, that almost all careers require an element of storytelling and that the only way to learn how to write well is to read lots.

Anyone can therefore write prompts for ChatGPT and their ilk. “Natural” language is therefore becoming the “user interface” for artificial intelligence. (That sentence alone illustrates why Silicon Valley might need some help with the transition.)

Harold Bloom argued that deep reading fostered higher order thinking. An education in the humanities or the liberal arts also makes students more adept at dealing with nuance and expressing opinions based on value judgments. These are useful skills for dealing with an unpredictable future and a world composed of various shades of grey.

None of this is going to result in an immediate stampede of people signing up to study English literature at university. You don’t need to understand Chaucer to write clear AI prompts. What’s more, you shouldn’t really need any better argument for studying great art other than for its own sake.

But if reading whole books and writing essays is no longer a given, then those who can will have an edge over their peers. And if more students can be persuaded that’s a good way to become more employable, a reasonable proportion of them will go on to study English literature at A-level and a reasonable proportion of them will go on to do so at university.

It’s only common sense that if you are worried about the rise of machines and robots stealing our jobs, it’s better to lean into the stuff that AI finds trickier to do. The not-so-secret ingredient is right there on the packaging; they’re called humanities for a reason.”

Why Don’t Men Read Anymore?

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There is an article on The Standard’s website: “Men Don’t Read Anymore – What Happened?” that I think deserves our attention. It was written by Martin Robinson and dated 12 September 2024.

Today, the MailOnline website says: “Martin Robinson joined MailOnline in 2012 as a senior news reporter and became chief reporter in 2016. He has also worked at Westminster. Martin previously wrote for the Daily Telegraph, The Sun, The Daily Mirror and the Evening Standard, primarily covering London politics, crime and the London 2012 Olympics after starting his career in regional newspapers. He lives in London with his wife and three children. In his spare time he coaches youth football and follows his beloved Ipswich Town.” Apparently, he is also a freelancer.

Martin Robinson

He says,” Why don’t men read? Oh, I know dear male Standard readers do, those urbane, literary, poised and secretly perverted doyens of good taste. But those other men, they are not reading fiction. Oh sure, they read Sir Alex Ferguson’s book, Lewis Hamilton’s book, books about cage fighters and career criminals, but nice books that win literary prizes? Nope. The book buying public in the UK, US and Canada is 80 per cent women.

Is this why no-one wants my woe? Why my breathtaking work of utterly miserable fiction has been rejected by every literary agent in London, including a few I didn’t even send it to. Despite pouring my little spiteful heart and ugly soul into 350 pages of unrelenting male despair, everyone is chipping in with how much they hate it, how little it would sell, how much of my life I wasted on it. And those are just the gentle let-downs.

I could get all thicko anti-woke conspiracist about it — “I clearly wasn’t successful because I’m a man!” — but instead I’ll go thicko anti-male conspiracist: other men have let me down!

No-one wants to read my crushingly depressing glimpse into the masculine mind because no one is interested in what men think. Least of all men!

This sense of men lacking the sophistication to understand the nuances of existence has been at the centre of the analysis about why the modern man’s preferred reading choice is the captions on Rio Ferdinand’s podcast videos.

LitHub quoted an Irish novelist saying women are better novelists than men because they have a better grasp of human complexity, and the piece explored men’s reluctance to buy books written by, or about, women as indicative of a stunted view of literature.

Dazed put it down to the patriarchal late capitalist system, quoting one professor who said: “Our culture makes a fetish of practical outcomes, and perhaps because the outcomes of fiction-reading don’t patently lead to higher wages, it seems less worthy.”

All of which provides excellent food for thought when your thought revolves around: why is the book industry spaffing millions on Matt Haig’s global book promotion, while I can’t even get a non-automated reply?

Didn’t men used to be more engaged in the internal struggles of existence? I’m not going to reel off a load of male writers highly attuned to mysteries and complexities, but y’know, Shelley was hardly Andrew Tate was he?

Things have changed. Men have changed. Or the perception of men has changed. One which seems to be increasingly reductive. It becomes a self-fulfilling doom loop where men are considered by the literary world to be half-dog, half-machine, while men themselves take the excuse to act like robo-hounds because it’s easier and there are apps demanding their attention instead. They’re right, men are not buying women’s books, but they’re not buying men’s books either. They’re just not reading, OK?

And so you see. The abject failure of my rotten novel is not my fault, it’s the world’s…”

I don’t think we should be at all concerned, because you and I read plenty of fiction!

Do I Have to Write a Novel?

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There is an article on the Electric Lit website by Amy Stuber dated 1 October 2024 which rang bells for me. Its title is “I Love Short Stories Do I Have to Write a Novel?”

Amy Stuber’s fiction has appeared in the Missouri Review, New England Review, the Masters Review, and elsewhere. She’s an editor at Split Lip Magazine, and she lives in Lawrence, KS. Her debut story collection, Sad Grownups, will be released in October 2024,

Amy Stuber

Ms Stuber says, “In 1993, I published my first decent story in a literary journal and a few months later received a letter from an agent whose name I recognized. I’d written short stories in college classes, sent them off, and typically the only thing that came back was a rejection, housed in the self-addressed-stamped envelope I’d sent with the story, my own handwriting preparing me for the paper inside that said thanks, no or we liked this, but.

The agent letter was a surprise, and I was buoyed by it for days. The letter went something like this, “I enjoyed your short story. I’d be interested in seeing more of your work. Do you have a novel?” It felt great  to be approached. It was flattering. But the answer was no: I didn’t have a novel.

A few years later, I received another agent letter after another story publication. A few years after that, an email. The notes all said some version of “I liked your short story. But do you have a novel?”

I’d heard from my graduate school creative writing teachers, who taught us only to read and write short stories, that a fiction writer’s final form was novelist, or at least, they said, that was the publishing industry’s core belief. The books that sold well, the books editors at big publishing houses wanted to acquire, were novels. Collections could be published, sure, but they were afterthoughts or add-ons.

Whenever it came up, the “do you have a novel” question made me a little indignant. Novels use words and sentences, obviously, just like short stories, but they require a different skillset, as well as a lot of attributes, like patience and a good memory and discipline, that I—first as a 20-something who just wanted to write poem fragments on my forearms and listen to Pavement, and later as a parent, shellacked with two smallish kids and a full-time job—did not have. If I could write even a third of a short story over a few weeks, it felt like a win. 

When my kids were more self-sufficient and I found myself with actual pockets of time to write and submit, I started getting wildly, embarrassingly jealous of every Publisher’s Marketplace announcement I saw. More egalitarian and generous writers would Tweet about how “there’s enough success for everyone, there’s plenty to go around,” but I, then in my 40s, felt like maybe there wasn’t. Maybe short story writers, all of us vying to win the same few small-press collection contests that ran each year, were doomed to not have book deals. I decided to try to feel content about publishing individual stories in literary magazines and pushed aside the idea of a book. 

The next time an agent emailed me was 2020, and it was the same line as ever. “Do you have a novel?” No. “I really cannot sell a collection on its own.” Okay, I understand. “Do you plan to write a novel?” I guess. Maybe? 

I signed with the agent, which was a leap of faith more for her than for me. I started trying to expand a short story I’d published, to build it somehow into a novel. In most ways, it was like trying to make a bathmat work as a rug in a room the size of a ballroom. Still, I wrote early in the morning, on weekend days, while waiting for doctor’s appointments, on all-hands meetings. I remember even feeling a little bit hopeful, like, “Maybe I’m doing it, maybe I’m really writing a novel, finally,” like this magic land, unenterable for twenty plus years, was opening to me. 

In the end, my draft was more of a loose assemblage of stories. The plottier parts that lurched each chapter forward, the parts that made it a possible novel, weren’t working. When I expressed self-doubt to my agent, she asked me, more than once, if this was “the book [I wanted] to send into the world,” which felt pretty jagged. I remember thinking, Well, the book I want to send into the world is my short story collection. Maybe I even said it out loud. 

The process was flattening. People wanted “propulsion,” and I was focused on sentences and moments. I liked the quiet pockets I was able to build into short stories but that felt harder to make work in a novel.  

In a stupid fit of “now what?” I frantically, in a few months, wrote a whole other novel. The agent hated it, which stung, but it was likely hate-worthy. 

How did I spend the pandemic? I speed-wrote two novels, only to realize I am not a novelist, or at least not yet, and market trends, traditional publishing’s seeming demands for books that rapid-cycled you from beginning to end in one sitting, weren’t going to make me one. 

In summer 2022, I parted ways amicably with my agent and returned to story writing. She told me if I started working on another novel project, she’d take a look. I didn’t fault her. Agents have been told collections don’t sell. So many of them have to deal with the industry realities of looking for plot-heavy books. This isn’t to say there aren’t brilliant and successful poetic, experimental, quiet novels – there obviously are. But if you’ve queried an agent lately, you know: propulsion and plot are king. 

I disassembled the second novel draft and built some short stories from the parts, then wrote some new stories, too. I understood stories and loved how within one I could focus intensely, think about every word, and I could experiment without worrying about staying on a path of forward momentum. I revamped my short story collection, sandwiched in some new stories, moved things around, took out the flash fiction.

This, I thought, feels like the book I want to send out into the world. 

I submitted it to the same few indie presses and university contests where I’d sent earlier versions of a collection and had been rejected more than once. At this point, only a few of the stories were the same. What the hell, I thought. I was 54 and had gotten my first “but do you have a novel?” agent letter thirty years earlier. 

And then I waited. Items in my Submittable queue changed from Received to In Progress. 

In August, I moved my daughter into her first dorm room in a tall building, and I thought, simplistically probably, about how the dorm, each floor, with each room another person, style, story, was a collection, and how so many things in the world were more an assemblage of disparate parts than a mellifluous whole. My daughter, who is also a writer, said it didn’t make sense for people to be so weird about short stories. Why was publishing so opposed to short fiction, when the world seemed to want and love short-form everything else?

In September, a few weeks after leaving my daughter in New York, in my haze of sadness that was like an anvil hitting me repeatedly and saying you fucking fool why did you help make a person who is designed to leave you, I got an email from one of the small presses. I saw the re: ____ subject line, and I braced myself for the rejection those emails usually are. Instead, it was a nice editor I’d corresponded with a few years before, telling me they wanted to publish my collection.

I was so numbed by life that month, by all the accumulative sadnesses of being 50-something in a whirlpool of life change, that I wasn’t sure how to feel. But when I stood up from my computer to walk around the neighborhood and look at all the familiar things, so many of which had years of memories attached to them, each their own little story, I let myself feel happy. This wasn’t the novel. It wasn’t the Big 5. But it felt truer to the writer I wanted to be.

Small presses, less beholden to concerns over big sales, are able to publish collections and the kinds of books Big Publishing tells writers we shouldn’t bother making. For that, I’m grateful. 

As is true of so many writers I know, some of my favorite texts are short stories. Each time I come upon a new collection in the library or in a bookstore, I get excited about the hive of situations and characters I’m about to dive into and the room for experimentation. It feels like so much possibility. 

I remember hearing last year that a lot of traditionally published debut novels sell only in the hundreds of copies. The managing editor of the small press that accepted my collection told me something like, “During the life of the book, a good outcome would be selling 1000 copies.” A thousand sounded good. Better than the hundred of some novels. Big Fiction’s insistence on the novel as default is maybe a failure of marketing or the imagination about what a book can be and do. 

I’m trying again to write something that approaches a novel, but this time I’m letting myself lean into my tendencies and reminding myself that a novel does not require a traditional narrative arc, nor a set number of scenes and beats. So I’m trying a “novel in stories,” and I’m not writing it with some big splashy publication in mind. I’m writing it when and how I want to write it. 

After an excerpt of the novel-in-stories project won an Honorable Mention in a contest, an agent I adore, a “dream agent,” messaged me and asked me if I had the full novel ready.  I don’t, at least not yet. But when I do, I hope I’m able to pull together a whole made of small slices of the world pulsing together, a collection in its own way, that champions the short form while also feeling like a whole. To the industry, maybe it will even be considered a novel. 

Is this just an essay about someone who wanted to and couldn’t sell a novel so now wants to champion the short story? Maybe a little. But, more, it’s about a circuitous path away from and back to the thing I actually enjoy writing, that the industry told me I shouldn’t do if I wanted to succeed.” 

I may be in the same boat as Amy, but I got in it at a different port. I’ve written ten published novels. Some are good, some are rubbish, but none have sold 1000 copies. I want to try short stories, and I’m about 2/3 of the way to completing a collection – a collection of good short stories, enjoyable to write and to read. Maybe this is what I should have been doing!

Are We Authentic?

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There is an article on The Conversation website by Sreedhevi Iyer dated 29 August 2024 titled ‘Why are authors expected to be authentic?’ which is both amusing and sad.

Sreedhevi Iyer

Sreedhevi Iyer has lived in Malaysia, Hong Kong and Australia, and can only answer ‘many places’ when asked where she is from. Her writing has been published in several countries, including the United States, United Kingdom, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Australia, Sweden, and Italy.Jungle Without Water is her first book published in Australia. The Southeast Asian edition was shortlisted for the Penang Monthly Book Prize 2017. Her fiction work has also been nominated for the Pushcart Prize in the United States. She has guest edited Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, and Drunken Boat, and was writer-in-residence at Lingnan University of Liberal Arts in Hong Kong. Sreedhevi is currently teaching creative writing at the University of Melbourne and RMIT.

Ms Iyer says: “The recent Oscar-winning movie American Fiction – an adaptation of Percival Everett’s novel Erasure by screenwriter and director Cord Jefferson – is a scathing look at the racial stereotyping prevalent in the publishing industry.

In one scene, Theolonius “Monk” Ellison (played by Jeffrey Wright) participates in a literary panel to promote his new book. The event is woefully under-attended. Monk then decides to join the crowds for celebrated black author Sintara Golden’s sold-out session. Golden is promoting her book We’s Lives In Da Ghetto. She gives a reading in an overtly black vernacular, to the audience’s delight and Monk’s disdain.

In another scene, Monk and his literary agent are on the phone with a publisher interested in purchasing Monk’s latest novel. Its title is My Pafology. Monk has written it as a joke, a satire of black stereotypes, but the publishers mistake it for serious literature. At his agent’s insistence, Monk speaks in “black” parlance to them, in keeping with his pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh. He sounds “street”. He sounds “real”. The publishers love it.

Such scenes proliferate in American Fiction. As an academic, an intellectual and the author of several books, Monk faces the reality of having to fake-write the kind of book “they want”. The satire highlights the deeper issues around what the book industry considers “authentic”, and the burden it places on African-American authors.

Monk resists the requirement that he has to “write black” and even “talk black” to be a spokesperson, that he must represent his racial experience. But the more he resists this pressure – by moving his books to another shelf in a bookshop or refusing (initially) to accept the publisher’s bid – the more the audience becomes aware of the restrictions on his self-expression.

“Look at what they publish.” Monk says. “Look at what they expect us to write.”

Literary personas

Fictional writers, like Monk and Sintara Golden, satirise the reality faced by authors of colour, who are expected to perform a version of themselves in public and, paradoxically, end up adopting a persona – a supposedly “authentic” but in fact phoney persona – for the benefit of readers, literary gatekeepers and other industry players.

Reductiveness in the name of “authenticity” is not specific to the American market. Global literary discourse also requires authors of colour to produce ostensibly “authentic” narratives. They are then required to embody this “authenticity” when presenting themselves in public.

But are such narratives predetermined by race, ethnicity and language? Who qualifies as an “authentic” author? The demand for “authenticity” – within literary culture, in particular, and postmodern culture in general – has become a problematic, paradoxical idea. Authors are now expected to depict an authentic experience – and yet the form of such authenticity is pre-determined on their behalf.

There would seem to be several underlying reasons for this. One is that contemporary literary culture tends to equate the author with the worlds they create in their books, expecting them to align. Laura Mandell, an assistant professor of English, argues that

whenever we talk about “great literature” using an author’s name, we confuse people and texts, subtly reinforcing the unconscious idea that authors are literature rather than that they wrote it. The ideology of authorship fosters such a confusion, and it simultaneously imposes expectations on people as to how to behave.

Another reason is the way book publication automatically renders the author a public figure. Even if this is expressly resisted, as in the case of Elena Ferrante, whose real identity remains uncertain, it only further underscores its ubiquity.

Authors of colour often employ personas as means of navigating these expectations. At a literary event in Hong Kong some years ago, I interviewed Junot Diaz on his views around his identity.

Diaz is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, a recipient of a MacArthur Genius Grant, and a professor of Creative Writing at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His writing voice employs a mixed register of Spanglish, nerd jargon and taboo slang – perhaps an amalgamation of Monk and Golden. Here is his response, verbatim:

I’ve always told people that you know whatever your formula is about being Dominican, about being African diasporic, or being poor or being from New Jersey or being an immigrant, whatever your formula is, please, safely put me outside of it. Whatever your test is, I have failed. Really, I have failed. I am so much happier to fail everybody else’s formulas, to not belong, that’s my joy, although I am deeply embedded in my community, even though I feel strongly related to my community.

My poor girlfriend feels like she’s living some crazy Dominican nightmare, 24/7. Everybody’s fucking Dominican in my world, so, she’s like what the fuck am I doing with this guy? Even with all these things, I will still argue that whatever people’s reductive formula about what authentic is, of a Dominican person in New Jersey, I don’t want any part of it.

Diaz’s uneven, mixed register of street vernacular and academic lingo is a strategic performance. His persona acknowledges both his racial and class background, and his transcendence of that background through his literary accomplishments.

He is, however, also indicating that he is “keeping it real”, that he is still a part of his community, while not accepting the “reductive formula” around his identity.

Like Monk in American Fiction, Diaz resists being pushed into a finite category around race or ethnic identity. At the same time, he is performing that identity in his manner of speech, the same way Monk is asked to speak as “Stagg R. Leigh” over the phone. Even when he is denigrating the idea of his pigeonholing, he is enacting it.

Another example is from an interview with Madeleine Thien, Booker-nominated author of Do Not Say We Have Nothing. Thien’s prose, unlike Diaz’s, is spare and lyrical, focusing on small moments. Also unlike Diaz, Thien in real life embraces her pigeonholing, almost weaponising it.

When I interviewed her about reviewing culture in Canada, she also enacted a persona, but in a different way. “I used to feel frustrated and sad by the misreadings of works by writers of colour,” she said:

[Reviewers] make such sweeping generalisations about a place, and what they think the literary culture is, when they actually have possibly not read a single book about Vietnam, or whatever it is, you know, about Lebanon, about China, even, I mean, most people have not read a single novel set in China and yet when they sit down to write that review, there’s no conception that they are out of their depth. Because if you know you’re out of your depth, you can’t really write a really sensitive and interesting critique that comes from that place, you know?

The paradoxical nature of contemporary literary discourse around “authenticity” requires Thien to perform her activism, her outrage, her wielding of identity politics, her sense of responsibility to the rest of her ilk. It’s the prescribed social self of the “real” author.

But instead of claiming her “authenticity” is not up for discussion the way Diaz does, Thien discusses her responsibility to the larger culture. She wields her identity and power of representation (perhaps in some ways like Sintara Golden), performing the outrage expected of her in the diversity conversation.

True to oneself?

The idea of being true to oneself now extends into identity politics. It pigeonholes writers to produce a certain type of narrative. It’s not write what you know; it is write what only you know. Deviation renders the work (or worse, the writer) inauthentic – one of the last taboos of postmodern culture.

In one of the later scenes in American Fiction, Monk and Golden have a quiet lunch together in a miserable room. They have been brought together as jury members for a literary prize. Curious about Golden’s contempt for his hoax-novel Fuck, Monk gently suggests Golden’s writing is guilty of the same pandering.

The questions are also from the audience. How did she catch that the writing panders? What did she see in it that was disingenuous? And is she perhaps aware of the disingenuousness in her own work? Is she pandering on purpose?

The film refuses us the satisfaction of an answer. Golden merely throws Monk’s query back at him. She implies that his perspective comes from a position of academic privilege, making him unaware of the realities of black life. It is an irony in the context of the film, but it also confirms how Golden views her own role in the industry, and how she views being “authentic”. Monk and Golden, like Diaz and Thien, both make choices around authenticity. Their opposite responses are both true.

Review: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

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I have another confession to make: I didn’t bother to read this book (also) when it was first published, because I was put off by the title and the hype. But when I was preparing my summer reading list, I decided to add it. In fact, I actually ended up buying the first three books in the original Millennium Trilogy, because they weren’t listed individually on Amazon.co.uk. But before I got there I bought a series of three Millennium books on Amazon.it. When they arrived, I saw that they were books 4-6 by a different author, who was ‘carrying on’ Stieg Larsson’s (the original author’s) ‘footsteps’. I read the first 100 pages of book no. 4, thought ‘this is rubbish’, and put books 4-6 in the bin. (For those of you who don’t know, Stieg Larsson, the original author took the complete manuscripts of book 1-3 to the publisher, and died of a heart attack before he could see them in print.) My view, having read 100 pages of book 4, is that the publisher made a hasty decision to satisfy a demand for more Millennium without qualifying the author and with inadequate editing.

Stieg Larsson

Wikipedia says: “Karl Stig-Erland “Stieg” Larsson, Swedish: 15 August 1954 – 9 November 2004) was a Swedish writer, journalist, and activist. He is best known for writing the Millennium trilogy of crime novels, which were published posthumously, starting in 2005, after he died of a sudden heart attack. The trilogy was adapted as three motion pictures in Sweden, and one in the U.S. (for the first book only). The publisher commissioned David Lagercrantz to expand the trilogy into a longer series, which has six novels as of September 2019. For much of his life, Larsson lived and worked in Stockholm. His journalistic work covered socialist politics and he acted as an independent researcher of right-wing extremism.

There are two principal and quite unique characters in this novel: Lisbeth Salander, tiny, mid-twenties, brilliant computer geek, anti-social, severely abused as a child, and Mikael Blomkvist, mid forties, bright, moralistic, attractive publisher of the journal Millennium, in Stockholm. Both are dedicated and very competent investigators in their respective fields: Lisbeth: personal and corporate security; Mikael: business. At the outset, Mikael has been convicted of libeling the billionaire industrialist Wennerström; he serves a three-month prison term. He is offered a one-year freelance job to write the history of the Vanger industrial family, but he knows that his real assignment is to discover who murdered the grand-niece of the patriarch, Henrik Vanger forty years ago. Impressed with her work investigating him for Henrik Vanger, Mikael hires Lisbeth to use her computer skills in investigating the Vanger family. They discover that Michael Vanger, the current CEO of Vanger Industries, and the brother of Harriet Vanger, the girl who disappeared, can be linked to several violent murders of women, but not to his sister disappearance. Lisbeth saves Mikael from death at the hands of Michael, whom he has confronted. Michael escapes, but pursued by Lisbeth and he commits suicide by driving head-on into a truck. Knowing that Michael did not kill Harriet, Lisbeth and Mikael trace Harriet to a sheep farm in Australia where she is the owner/manager. Lisbeth unearths some terrible dirt which destroys the Wennerström empire, and, incidentally, she siphons off several billion krona into her own account.

This book is very hard to put down. In fact, I kept it close at hand so that I could read a page or two when I had a chance. Larsson drew his characters clearly and persuasively, so that they stand out in your mind. He also went to the trouble of setting each scene so that the reader feels s/he is there. But above all, he was a master at creating and maintaining tension about what will happen next to these characters about whom the reader really cares. He also skillfully leads the reader into anticipating X, when a surprising Z actually occurs. Great creativity!

Book Banning in Britain

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There is an article in today’s Daily Telegraph by Ben Lawrence which startled me. We’re all familiar with book banning in the US, the EU and elsewhere, but in the UK? (Ben is Commissioning Editor of the Telegraph.)

He said, “We are banning books again, and this time it appears to be a consequence of ill-informed hysteria. The Index on Censorship discovered that 28 of the 53 British school librarians they polled had been asked to remove books – many of which were LGBTQ+ titles – from their shelves. It appears that pressure had come from parents and, on some occasions, teachers too. For a society that’s meant to be modern and tolerant, these findings are depressing: the culture wars are failing to subside, and we seem to think nothing of using our children’s education as an ideological battleground.

That battle has been raging in America for several years. In March, the American Library Association reported that 2023 was an all-time peak for such censorship. I imagine that much of the opprobrium launched at titles such as All Boys Aren’t Blue by George M Johnson – the memoir of a young, queer, black activist – was led by Republican-Christian zealots. In Britain, however, the root causes are harder to deduce. Certainly, our national disease of knee-jerk reaction is partly to blame. According to the Index on Censorship, one worker was asked to remove all gay-related content from the school library due to a single complaint about a single book.

Yet the depressing thing is that we have long been intent on cutting off children from literature and its “dangers”, ignorant of the fact that books are crucial to young people’s development. The current situation in the UK smacks of the dark days of the 1980s, when Section 28 legislated that no local authority could “promote homosexuality”. In the line of fire was a ridiculously innocuous picture book from Denmark called Jenny Lives with Eric and Martin, which featured a small girl with two dads, and now looks about as morally corrupting as a Cliff Richard fan convention.

John Clarke, head of Haringey’s Community Information with a copy of Jenny Lives with Eric and Martin in September 1986

I sometimes doubt that those who are quick to show their outrage are even concerned about the morals of Britain’s children; it’s more about their own fear of the unfamiliar. Some books represent a world that exists outside their own limited boundaries, which they therefore can’t control. This was the case in the 1980s: Section 28 felt, in part, like the natural product of a society that had failed to come to terms with the Aids epidemic.

But what those who try to ban books consistently fail to realise is that any attempt to arrest social change will ultimately, in a functioning democracy, be doomed. Perhaps in China, where there are edicts against books that fight against communist values – Alice in Wonderland, for example, is banned for its anthropomorphisation of animals – a suppressed book really can stay buried. But in most places, the allure of a title in samizdat will always ensure its longevity.

For censors have always proved to be on the wrong side of history. Those who fettered the genius of James Joyce and banned Ulysses on the grounds of “obscenity now” look like narrow-minded killjoys. As for Lady Chatterley’s Lover by DH Lawrence? For what it’s worth, I’m still not convinced that it’s great literature, but its depiction of sex was a necessary step forward for British society, and the end of its ban a crucial catalyst for making England a more tolerant place.

It’s telling that one of the few authors who refused to defend Lady Chatterley during the 1960 trial at the Old Bailey was Enid Blyton, an author whose work now often looks mean-spirited and bigoted. In fact, Blyton’s books were banned from my own school library in the 1980s – along with Judy Blume’s progressive adolescent novel Forever – which just goes to show how times change.

And yet, although this news from the Index of Censorship is worrying, I still feel hopeful. Curious minds will always seek out good writing, however long it takes them to find it. Book banning may be a global industry – but the freedom to read will always prevail.”

Business Rule for Freelance Writers

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There is an article by C. Hope Clark dated March 29, 2023 which will interest those of you who are freelance writers or are thinking to go in that direction.

C. Hope Clark is the founder of FundsforWriters.com, noted by Writer’s Digest for its 101 Best Websites for Writers for 20+ years. She is a freelance writer, motivational speaker, and award-winning author of 16 mysteries.

C. Hope Clark

Ms Clark describes the 25/50/25 rule of freelance writing. “You’ve been submitting to a few places, and you’ve published a few pieces. This freelance writing business is intriguing, but you’d love taking it from hobby level to professional, so what is the answer?

Submit more often? Of course. Your goal is to increase your acceptance rate, and that takes more submissions. Let’s say you do this for months, and you have some acceptances under your belt, but the income isn’t quite what you hoped it would be.

You do have a few regular markets that provide steady income. It might not be the best income, but it’s reliable. They’ll take almost anything you write, so you keep sending them pieces. They take up a major chunk of your time when you stay insanely busy writing, researching, and pitching. So busy, yet you can’t break the ceiling of mediocre pay.

Let’s visit the rule of 25/50/25 when it comes to pitching your talents.

The First 25

Twenty-five represents a percentage of your submissions. This first 25 are those lovely, easy markets you know you can pitch to and get accepted most of the time. These are the markets you are close to, most familiar with, and rely upon for money. They come through for you time and time again.

These markets are the easiest to get attached to and the hardest to say no to. They become all that you write for because they feel safe. Your rejection rate is minimal, and you waste little time on pitches that say no. While cranking out 100 of them might gain you an elementary level income, what if you want more than that?

These piece-of-cake markets are why your income is stagnant. They should comprise no more than 25 percent of your work. Let them give you some security but don’t let them consume your life such that you remain stuck at that level.

You want to be more than that.

The Second 50

Fifty represents markets that are much more difficult, and you expect to be rejected almost as much or more so than accepted. You feel you have a chance at these, and they usually pay more.

Remember, your goal is not only to gain in income, but in reputation as well. Your name is money as your portfolio builds. This 50 percent category should comprise your meat and potatoes part of your day. To make the math simple, think of a 40-hour work week. Researching, pitching, and writing for these markets should eat up half of your hours.

That sounds scary. That’s a lot of time to invest into a 50-50 chance of being accepted, but the payback for landing these is so much better than sticking to the first 25 percent. Not only are the checks usually larger, but once you land one, you have a connection to go back to. Then you have another. Then three or four or more.

You might be amazed at how you hunger more for these projects than the original, low-paying ones that got you started. These make you feel more alive, more talented, and hopefully, more financially comfortable.

The Third 25

These are the dream markets. These are the top-shelf opportunities you’d love to land but were too afraid to pitch. They now are on your calendar. You study them and believe you could grow to be as good as half of the submissions, but to run with that crew feels awful intimidating. The rejection rate surely has to be 70, 80, or 90 percent of the time.

But that also means an acceptance rate of 10, 20, or even 30 percent.

What if you won one of these markets? You’d dance, scream, buy yourself a wonderful dinner with drinks, and pat yourself on the back that you broke through that wall and proved you had some modicum of talent.

Why not try to make it happen again?

Then again?

Out of your 40-hour week, that’s 10 hours of stepping up your game. It doesn’t ruin your schedule, and it has way better odds than winning the lottery. With a quarter of your time devoted to what you feel is a gold-plated world, a level market you’d love to spend most of your time writing for, you haven’t shirked your other writing duties.

The Surprising Results

If you are diligent in this 25/50/25 search for freelance work, you spend a quarter of your day on the easy stuff, half on the difficult yet achievable, and a quarter on the next-to-impossible.

Stick with it for several months, long enough to pitch and receive replies . . . hopefully with contracts. The journey has to be long enough to see the big picture.

The surprising results are that you become magnetized to climbing the ladder to the more lucrative markets. With each acceptance, you unknowingly take another step higher. Before long, you find yourself sliding along the 25/50/25 scale.”

Best Seller List

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There is an article on the Literature News website, 10 March 2024, written by ‘Manish’ which confirms my long-held suspicions about the New York Times Best Seller List.

“When bestseller book lists are curated based on editorial whims rather than objective sales figures, the transparency and reliability of such rankings are compromised, leading to challenges for readers seeking genuine insights into popular literary tastes. In an ideal scenario, bestseller lists serve as valuable tools for readers to discover widely acclaimed books and gauge the preferences of their peers. However, when these lists are influenced by subjective judgments rather than concrete sales data, the distinction between truly popular books and those merely promoted or favoured by a select group of editors becomes blurred.

“This phenomenon undermines the credibility of bestseller lists and hampers readers’ ability to make informed decisions about their reading choices. Books that receive prominent placement on these lists due to editorial biases may garner unwarranted attention and overshadow lesser-known titles that may be more deserving of recognition based on their actual sales and reader reception. As a result, readers may miss out on discovering hidden gems that resonate with their interests and preferences.

“Now, let’s reveal the moot point of this article. In recent years, the New York Times Bestsellers List has come under scrutiny for its alleged editorial bias and lack of transparency. The controversy has sparked a heated debate within the publishing industry, with some authors and publishers questioning the list’s credibility and relevance. At the heart of the controversy is the claim that the New York Times Bestsellers List is not a true reflection of book sales but rather an editorial product subject to the editors’ preferences and biases. Critics argue that the list does not accurately represent the actual sales figures of their books, suggesting that the list is not a reliable indicator of a book’s popularity or success.

“In response to these claims, the New York Times maintains that the list is an editorial product and that they have the right to make decisions about which books to include and which to exclude. They argue that the list is not solely based on sales numbers but also takes into account other factors, such as the quality of the writing and the book’s overall impact.

“It’s absolutely ridiculous that the New York Times has the audacity to call their list a “Bestseller List” when it’s clearly nothing more than a biased, subjective, and editorial-driven selection of books. It’s a slap in the face to authors and readers alike, who expect a bestseller list to be based on actual sales numbers and merit, not the whims of a few editors. The fact that the NYT openly admits to considering their list an “editorial product” and claims the right to include or exclude books based on factors like “quality of writing” and “overall impact” is a complete joke. Who are they to decide what constitutes quality or impact? It’s nothing more than an elitist, self-serving attempt to control the narrative and push their own agenda. If the New York Times wants to maintain any credibility, it should stop masquerading its list as a “Bestseller List” and rename it something more accurate, like “NYT Editorial Subjective Choices.” It’s time for them to own up to their biased, subjective, and editorial-driven selection process and stop misleading readers with their so-called “Bestseller List.”

“Evidently, the controversy has led to calls for greater transparency in the selection process for the New York Times Bestsellers List. Some authors and publishers have demanded that the New York Times provide more information about the criteria used to select books for the list and the data sources used to compile it.

“The debate has also highlighted the role of other bestseller lists, such as those published by Amazon and other retailers. These lists are based on actual sales data and are seen by some as more objective and reliable indicators of a book’s popularity.

“In conclusion, the controversy surrounding the New York Times Bestsellers List is an ongoing debate that raises important questions about the role of editorial judgment in the selection of books for bestseller lists and the need for transparency in the selection process. As the debate continues, whether the New York Times will respond to the criticisms and change how it compiles its Bestsellers List remains to be seen.”

Writing about Sex

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The recent edition of the Sunday Telegraph had an article by Claire Allfree “The art of writing about sex (and getting it right)”

Ms Allfree is a freelance journalist specialising in arts and entertainment.

Bottoms up: an 18th-century painting of Jupiter and Io by Edouard Gautier-D’Agoty (after Correggio)

Ms Allfree writes:

“My friends joke that I’ve become a pornographer,” says Lucy Roeber. “I haven’t, of course. But the English don’t know how else to describe a magazine about sex. So we joke about it instead.”

Later this month, Roeber and her deputy editor, Saskia Vogel, will publish the first edition of the revamped and relaunched Erotic Review. During the late 1990s, the Erotic Review was a high-end, lavishly illustrated print magazine, but for the past 14 years, it has languished as a little-read online newsletter. Now, at a moment when sex parties and orgies seem to be all the rage, it will be back to its pomp as a physical product, available from bookshops and published three times a year.

Each edition will include a guest art curator, while highlights from the inaugural publication include an essay on the blossoming popularity of romance fiction, a photo sequence from the performance artist Esben Weile Kjaer celebrating the art of the kiss, an explicit short story about a porn shoot from the veteran contributor Michel Faber, and a Chekhovian portrait of marital desire from the Welsh novelist Cynan Jones. Where the original at times felt like a magazine for overgrown schoolboys (Boris Johnson was a contributor), this new iteration feels like a magazine for grown-ups. “If we were going to bring it back, we had to take it seriously,” says Roeber. “But I also think in 2024 the audience is really shifting. Today, young people in particular are much more open and curious.”

The Erotic Review has a chequered history. First published in 1995 by the Erotic Print Society as a pamphlet featuring articles about sex and desire, in the late 1990s it became synonymous with Rowan Pelling. She became the editor in 1997, at the age of 28, and, over the next six years, transformed it into an 84-page publication with a circulation of 30,000, while attracting writers such as Barry Humphries, Auberon Waugh and DBC Pierre.

Under her reign, the sensibility was distinctly British, which is to say that sex was either filtered through a heavy dose of irony or with a hefty side helping of cheesy end-of-pier smut. The art tended to feature cheeky shots of posteriors and bosoms, while pieces included meditations on “the best nipples in town”. Pelling even cheerily encouraged her female staff to wear stockings in the office.

Vogel, a 42-year-old Berlinbased author and translator who interned at the magazine under Pelling, remembers a prevailing obsession with “nurses and spanked bottoms”.

“The British have this real thing about vice and corporal punishment,” she says. “I loved my time there, but I did feel that perhaps the magazine could benefit from a different perspective.”

In 2004, it was taken over by the media company that produces Penthouse, and after changing hands again several times it became an online magazine in 2010. A descent into obscurity followed, despite it being lovingly maintained by its founder, Jamie Maclean – now retired. It feels a bold decision to bring it back as a print edition at a time when the cultural winds are blowing firmly towards the digital sphere. But Roeber and Vogel are upbeat. “It feels important that it should itself be an object of desire, something you can hold and collect,” says Roeber.

Anyway, they argue, there’s not much space in the mainstream for serious writing about sex. “If something gets labelled as edgy or erotic, it tends to be untouchable by the mainstream,” says Vogel, pointing to Rebecca Rukeyser’s personal essay about the curious internet porn phenomenon of “goon caves” (an online subculture in which men saturate themselves with porn while simultaneously practising abstinence), which had previously been rejected by several American journals.

Yet today’s cultural climate is very different from the lad culture of the 1990s. How does a magazine that once featured a photo spread of its female staff in their underwear navigate a post-MeToo world? “We are certainly moving away from the heterosexual male gaze that we’ve all been used to,” says Roeber. “That’s not to say we don’t have heterosexual men in the magazine, because we must. But there are lots of ways of talking about desire.”

All the same, our new hypervigilance when it comes to issues of consent and power has the potential to make writing about sex a bit of a minefield, particularly if you are a heterosexual man.

“I wanted to write a story about the male gaze and how women can change the power dynamic,” says Michel Faber, whose smartly subversive contribution, “Not Just Anybody”, about a porn shoot, reckons directly with this issue. “But it took me ages to think of a story that wouldn’t be guaranteed to attract condemnation from people who are not interested in art, but very interested in quarrelling with strangers on the internet.” Vogel agrees that “there is potentially something a lot more fraught about writing about heterosexual sex”. She points to the American writer Garth Greenwell, who combines the literary with explicit homosexual eroticism. He has said that with his most recent novel, Cleanness, he wanted to see if he could write something that was “100 per cent pornographic and 100 per cent high art”.

Most pornography, however, dispenses with the art bit, which is a shame, according to Roeber. “Porn is incredibly effective at arousal, but it’s very one-note,” she says. “We have a guest curator for each issue and the aim is to open our eyes to different sorts of images, and different ways of exploring desire through art.”

But what about the prudes? In Britain, we tend to deflect our profound cultural reserve when it comes to matters of sex through a nudge-nudge, wink-wink larkiness that Roeber argues previous incarnations of the Erotic Review knowingly played up to. “We are making the magazine much more international in terms of contributors, partly to sidestep this Anglo-Saxon moral awkwardness,” she says.

“As a culture, we are certainly very embarrassed about romance,” agrees the Scottish poet John Burnside, who is contributing an essay about the eroticisation of travel to the second issue. “We are the only country in the world, for instance, which gives out a Bad Sex Award, much to the amazement of many countries across the world. How we write about sex says a lot about the culture, about how relaxed and imaginative it is.”

So, what makes good erotic fiction? Vogel points to a couple of sentences in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho. “It’s a moment of anticipation. Patrick Bateman [the novel’s sociopathic fantasist narrator] is lying on the bed, waiting for a couple of women to arrive.” The novel’s extreme violence is considered so controversial, some countries sell it with a shrink-wrapped cover. Is she saying the best sex writing is transgressive? “For me, it’s where the mind wanders,” she says simply. Burnside, who thinks a lot of so-called classic writing about sex – Anaïs Nin, Henry Miller – is “boring”, believes that some of the best erotic writing pivots on the unconsummated. “These days, I look down on old men writing about voluptuous women. I’m much more interested in the almost. The look across a room that comes to nothing.”

In essence, Roeber believes there is a loosening of “moral correctness” around sex and art that makes 2024 the perfect time for an Erotic Review relaunch. In fact, “I’m not sure this incarnation of the magazine could have existed 50 years ago.”

The first issue of the relaunched ‘Erotic Review’ will be published on March 11; ermagazine.com

Let me know what you think.