Roy Miller's Blog, page 272
February 15, 2017
HMH Names Jack Lynch New CEO
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has appointed Jack J. Lynch, Jr. as CEO, president, and a member of the board of directors. Lynch succeeds Linda Zecher, who resigned as CEO in September after five years at the company.
Lynch has a long history in the educational and technology fields. He is currently CEO of Renaissance Learning, which operates in the K-12 learning analytics space. Lynch’s background includes being the founding CEO of bigchalk.com, an education network serving 40,000 schools, and serving as president and CEO of the Pearson Technology Group. Prior to joining Renaissance, Lynch was a member of the executive board of Wolters Kluwer.
Commenting on Lynch’s appointment, Lawrence Fish, chairman of the HMH board, said Lynch “brings an uncommon set of K-12 education and technology experience along with an outstanding track record generating exceptional returns for investors. He is the right leader at the right time as HMH and the education industry continue to transform and evolve.”
Indeed, Lynch will have his challenges. HMH, like many educational publishing companies, has struggled with the slow and often rocky transition to greater use of digital materials in schools. For the first nine months of 2016, HMH had a loss of $103 million, compared to a loss of $36 million in the same period in 2015. The company will report results for the full year next week.
“HMH is exceptionally well positioned to lead the education industry in the rapid transition to digital and highly personalized learning experiences,” Lynch said in a statement. “Educators today are seeking solutions from companies they can trust to improve student outcomes, and HMH is well positioned to meet that need.”
Lynch will join HMH in the next few weeks after he wraps up his duties at Renaissance Until he moves to the company. L. Gordon Crovitz, a member of the HMH board, will continue to serve as interim CEO.
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5 Tips for Writing Engaging Romance
Happy Valentine’s Day, readers! For those of you who are digging into the hotter-than-ever romance genre, we have a special guest post today from Harlequin author Rhenna Morgan. Below, she shares five important tips for writing romance that engages your readers—and sells. Make sure to head over to the There Are No Rules blog this afternoon for a companion post from Carina Press (Harlequin) Editorial Director Angela James.
This guest post is by Rhenna Morgan. Morgan’s book ROUGH & TUMBLE, the 1st book in The Haven Brotherhood Series, releases with Carina Press on February 20, 2017. For advance release news and exclusive content, sign up for her newsletter at RhennaMorgan.com.
For social antics and an abundance of smoking hot man candy, follow her on Facebook, Twitter, or Rhenna’s Romantics.
1. The beauty of writing romance is the promise of what will be.
Not just the happily-ever-after ending, but the beautiful tug that keeps a reader moving from page to page. So, while conflict is necessary in any book, it’s still critical for the romantic element to carry equal, if not more, weight.
2. Speaking of happily-ever-afters, in my opinion, a romance must have one.
(Or in the case of a series with the same couple, a happy-for-now.) I was reading romance long before I was a writer, and the fundamental reason I’m devoted to the genre is because I’m guaranteed of walking away from an ending with a smile on my face and love resonating in my heart. To break that trust with my readers is a route I personally cannot—and will not—take.
[Four Tips for Writing for the Romance Market]
3. Write the hero you daydream about sweeping you off your feet.
Chances are, every other reader out there has had a similar desire and/or daydream once or twice, and that story is one that will resonate. (A word to the wise though—let your significant other assume all those ideas originate from spending time with him.)
4. We hear a lot about writing strong heroines, but I’ve altered my recommendation: Write a heroine you can respect.
Deep down, I think that’s what people mean when they encourage strong heroines, but some romance writers—especially new ones—interpret that to mean hard-to-reach, outwardly opinionated, and/or strong-willed women. Yes, those heroines can make for a snappy read and crackling hot chemistry—especially when paired with the right hero—but there are loads of good heroines to be written with quiet inner-strength. Heroines with a soft heart, yet the courage of a lioness.
5. Figure out your niche and own it.
I still can’t put words around mine, but I can feel it and, at the end of the day, romance is all about heart. It’s about the flutter in your belly and the dreamy sigh that comes at a particularly poignant moment. What better way to feed emotion into a story than to be who you are and put all your unique beauty into each word?
Agents are hungry to sell romance to publishing houses. The How To Make Your Romance Hot Enough For An Agent onDemand webinar will teach you:
The specific elements of a romance novel agents look for
Common red flags to avoid in your romance novel
Places to go to get your work reviewed and critiqued
How to make an accurate list of legitimate agents who rep romance novels and how to approach them successfully
And more!
Click here to download your copy ASAP.
If you’re an agent looking to update your information or an author interested in contributing to the GLA blog or the next edition of the book, contact Writer’s Digest Books Managing Editor Cris Freese at cris.freese@fwmedia.com.
You might also like:
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‘Homesick for Another World,’ Food (and Bodily Functions) for Thought
In “Homesick for Another World” there is retching in nearly every story. Sometimes fingers are stuck down throats. One character likes to vomit in public — he’s like the Naked Cowboy, but different — “just to make a scene.” Another hastens to the toilet and, in an expression new to me, “vomited with joy.”
Photo
Ottessa Moshfegh
Credit
Krystal Griffiths
Shakespeare told us, in Sonnet 118: “We sicken to shun sickness when we purge.” Moshfegh’s men and women cannot quite cope with this world. They are desperate and lonely and estranged. They want to tear the pain from their hearts, and it is less complicated to void their stomachs. Our empathy for them blends with disgust, which is nearly the definition of the grotesque in literature.
Moshfegh’s dark, confident, prickling stories are mostly about youngish men and women not so far out of college. Some are schoolteachers, some unemployed. One is a Yale graduate in debt, another a callow young actor from small-town Utah who is about to be devoured by Hollywood.
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They’ve taken a wrong turn somewhere and find themselves hunkering down in nowhere towns, dismal cabins, shabby apartments. Often they are recently divorced or separated. They have little money and no support systems. They are in flight from, or feuding with, parents and siblings.
Sex is not healing in Moshfegh’s world. Men sleep with prostitutes, or force their hands down women’s throats. One woman reports that in mid-act “his genitals swung in my face like a fist.” Chekhov’s dictum about guns (if one is on the wall in Act I, it must be used in Act II or III) applies in one of these stories to a newfound dildo.
Moshfegh uses ugliness as if it were an intellectual and moral Swiss Army knife. The transgressive sex in her stories can put you in mind of Mary Gaitskill. Her stories veer close to myth in a manner that can resemble fiction by the English writer Angela Carter.
There’s some Flannery O’Connor, Harry Crews and Katherine Dunn in her interest in freaks and quasi-freaks. There’s a lot of pus, acne and scarring here. One woman’s genitals are so large they flop against her thighs.
Like Diane Arbus, Moshfegh lights things from below. Psychologically, you don’t see well-set dinner tables in her fiction. You see the chewed gum and crusted snot stuck to the table’s underside, the run in the hostess’s stocking.
If her work has echoes of other writers, her tone is her own. At her best, she has a wicked sort of command. Sampling her sentences is like touching a mildly electrified fence. There is a good deal of humor in “Homesick for Another World,” and the chipper tone can be unnerving. It’s like watching someone grin with a mouthful of blood.
A teacher tries to convince a student that she can’t get fat from being ejaculated into. A man has a theory about how to stay fit: “It was to tense your body vigorously during everyday activities. He walked around with buttocks clenched, arms rigid, neck and face turning red.” It’s the Sean Spicer workout.
Moshfegh is a penetrating observer of class and social mores. At a hipster bar (“Joanna Newsom yodeled and harped from the speakers”), a woman stares at a bartender with a bow-tie neck tattoo and thinks: “He looked like one of those portly, nebbish types who if you shaved him and scrubbed him and dressed him in Van Heusen, you’d discover your cousin Ira, a tax attorney in Montclair.”
A few of these stories are dead ends or semi-stunts, vignettes that strain for eccentricity. More often, one by one, they click and spin like bullets in a revolver.
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Moshfegh’s humans wrestle profitably with authenticity. One man thinks about his family’s small cabin in the mountains: “I loved it, or at least I thought I ought to love it — I’ve never been very clear on that distinction.”
What stays with you, at the end of “Homesick for Another World,” is less the ugliness than the loneliness and the pervasive sense of disappointment and failure. “Twenty years later,” one man thinks, “I still felt that the good things, the things I wanted, belonged to somebody else.”
This same man reports an “oceanic emptiness in my gut.” Do not come to these stories if your own guts are easily stirred. I sometimes ask myself about a book: What is its most representative sentence? Here it is almost certainly this one: “My uncle emptied his colostomy bag, and then I sent that cheesecake down the toilet.”
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My Job Writing Custom Erotic Love Letters
I left my marriage in 2001, refusing support from my ex-husband (other than a share of the sale proceeds of the house we had bought together). I couldn’t have known it when I left, but it turned out to be a disastrous year, financially, to leave; in 2003, I still hadn’t found a job in my field close to where my ex and my children lived.
I had been in the midst of writing a novel when the marriage broke up; it was a crazy time to leave. For the first time in our marriage, I wasn’t working or going to school, and my husband had agreed to support me while I finished my manuscript. But guilt crept in as it seemed like I was taking his money under false pretenses, at the end of a marriage I no longer felt committed to. I left, but without any means of support.
My post-divorce apartment, a space intended for a single person—all that I could afford—was crowded on the nights when I had custody of my two daughters. I longed to create a comfortable second home for them, not just so that we would have more room, but also to show them that leaving a bad marriage did not condemn one to a life of penury.
When I wasn’t waiting tables, I wrote every chance I could. I had a secret about writing that I didn’t share with others, which was that a good day of writing gave me a feeling of ecstasy, a buzz that I sometimes recognized as sexual arousal. I would have thought I was crazy, but reading Alice Flaherty’s The Midnight Disease, which explained the brain chemistry of writing, made me feel a little less of a loon.
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I had also begun a long-distance quasi-romance. He was an old boyfriend from college I’d run into on my last trip back to Seattle to visit my parents. He had owned a successful business for 20 years, had never married, and said he was ready for a change. What better challenge to a writer is that? What are words for in a relationship if not to change someone, I reasoned. Of course, words hadn’t changed my husband during our marriage, but this was different. I wasn’t out to change this man: I was out to win his heart.
And so, following the great literary tradition of Abelard and Heloise, or Henry Miller and Anais Nin, we began a correspondence (email) full of desire and longing. It’s more accurate to say that I sent him long, erotic letters full of sexual details. He read them. My goal was to get him on an airplane. Instead, he told me that my talent as a letter writer was a money-making opportunity that I should find a way to exploit.
I researched the erotic book and magazine market, and discovered that while porn is a multi-billion dollar industry, it’s not the writers who are getting rich. If writers were paid at all, the amounts offered wouldn’t even pay for a single bag of groceries for something it would take hours to write.
I needed to brainstorm something new. In the back of literary magazines like the New York Review of Books or political magazines like The Nation, one could find in the “personals” section, requests for company. These personal ads featured intellectual folks who were lonely, and who, for whatever reason, didn’t want to use the internet dating sites that had started popping up in that time period. The idea struck me that instead of writing stories for a lot of people, perhaps I could take my talent for erotic letter writing and offer it to individual clients.
In my mind, I identified my ideal client as a woman like me: someone who wanted to woo a man. I knew that many women felt uncomfortable talking about sex, and I imagined that I could become their amanuensis. They could talk to me, and I could translate their language for them. I imagined writing birthday presents for boyfriends, or anniversary gifts for husbands—the kinds of sexy surprises a guy might not expect from a wife who had not been raised to talk about what it was she wanted in the bedroom.
I thought a lot about what I would feel comfortable writing about. Could I write about the types of sexual practices I had not engaged in myself? I’m heterosexual, and I’ve never made love to another woman, but my writer’s imagination envisioned a plethora of scenarios I might be asked to describe. I wouldn’t be relying on my experiences in order to write the custom erotica; the idea would be to ask questions of my clients, get them to tell me of their experiences so I could write them down. I would provide the artistry—provide turns of phrase that would create erotic tension—but I wouldn’t be responsible for imagining new situations.
It came as an enormous surprise that my first response—and every response thereafter—came from a man. In the time that I wrote private erotica for clients, I never once had a woman contact me.
When I was in graduate school, I had been fascinated by the figure of the female courtesan. Women like Veronica Franco, a courtesan in Renaissance Venice, had been among the most highly educated women of her age. She had entertained men in intellectual salons, and she had written on the role of the citizen in Republican Venice. It was her ability to manipulate words—her control of a pen—that had tarnished her reputation. Her knowledge of the world, which had come through reading and writing, opened her up to criticism for being too worldly—which was a coded way of saying that she was too promiscuous and therefore, a whore. A woman who could write well and knew too much could not be a well-behaved, demure wife. Veronica Franco had occupied a liminal space in Venetian society.
For me, writing about sex for money brought me to the borderline. Was I engaging in sex work? And if I were, did it matter? I never spoke to these men on the phone or met them in person. All of my interactions with them took place through email. They only knew me through a nom de plume, and they paid me through an anonymous PayPal account. They had no idea who I really was. For all I knew, the names they used to contact me with were also fake.
I had established boundaries of the types of writing I would not do: no rape fantasies. Nothing that involved children. And, after a single inquiry that I got rid of with a one-word response, nothing that involved dogs. But I was happy to write about anything that two consenting adults were willing to do with one another.
What surprised me most about my male clients is that they did not want me to write the types of rough, non-lubricated penetrative sex that dominates so much of pornography these days. Even in many R-rated films, couples are shown engaging in a sexual intercourse that involves no foreplay, but always suggests that female partners are perpetually soaked and ready for their ever-tumescent lovers. (Young women have even complained to me that the young men they sleep with—denied sex education in school, and reliant on internet porn to teach them “what women want”—often try to replicate the violent interactions they see on their computers. When the young women object, the men see that as part of the sexual experience, as much of porn features women who say “no” before saying yes.)
But in the erotica that I was asked to write, especially by the men who had been with their wives for a number of years, I wrote about the tenderness that men felt toward the flaws that so many women focus on in mirrors. I wrote about scars, and changing bodies, soft bellies, breasts that bore the stretch marks from childbirth, and other intimate details that only a couple who had been sleeping together for a long time would know about each other.
Rather than women asking me to express their sexual side to their partners, again and again, I was asked to help men break down the barriers between their emotions and the language that got in the way. They wanted me to write down their most intimate feelings, offerings to their partners who might not otherwise hear words like these spoken by a man.
One of the things I did with my clients was to encourage them to use the piece I had written for them as a template for ongoing correspondence with their partners. It was my hope that once these things had been spoken, the men would continue to speak them to the women they loved. And the feedback was very good. One client told me that his wife kept her letter in a jewelry box by the bed, and that he’d seen her reading it several times. Which is why he was asking me to write another one—this time a fantasy to mark the occasion of their youngest son moving out of the house and going off to college.
Most of the stories were based on an intimate moment in the past that the lover wanted to have a narrative snapshot of. Since no photos were available, I was asked to write stories that used all of the senses. This was not the erotica of subtle suggestion—although that was included—many of these stories were a more literary version of the “letters” that used to run in Penthouse. I learned more couples’ euphemisms for genitals than I knew existed, and I also drew on my knowledge of Victorian erotica to revive some of the old terms.
For the time that I worked as a “literary courtesan,” my sense of the world heightened. I paid attention to the tiniest of details—the way my cat’s fur stood up if I stroked her the wrong way, the trembling of the Quaking Aspen leaves outside my kitchen window, the taste of real maple syrup on the tip of my tongue—and I copied words and phrases down into a . In spring, I noticed that the number of shades of green on the hillside exceeded my ability to name them all, and so I worked at finding ways to put sensory detail into language.
Eventually, my ongoing job search paid off with a full-time faculty position. I decided it was time to put away my persona as a writer of erotica. I was afraid that someone at the university would find out, and while I wasn’t ashamed of what I had done, I knew enough about academic politics to know it wouldn’t be considered work toward tenure.
Now that I’m no longer teaching, I’ve been thinking of my days as a literary courtesan. It’s ironic to me that I was helping men to find their voice when it’s women who have always been the ones silenced. But I’d like to think that, for some couples at least, I helped men to own the feelings that our culture tells them are shameful. A little tenderness goes a long way in strengthening the bonds that tie us together.
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February 14, 2017
Boom! Debuts Kids’ Graphic Novel ‘The Not-So Secret Society’ This Summer
Best known for such bestselling children's and YA graphic novel series as Adventure Time, Steven Universe and Lumberjanes, indie comics house Boom! Studios is looking for a new hit with The Not-So Secret Society, an original middle-grade graphic novel that will be published by its children’s comics imprint Kaboom in Summer 2017.
The Not-So Secret Society is the story of a group of five ordinary 12 year old friends that go to school, hangout after class and have “awesome adventures,” said Arune Singh, v-p, marketing Boom! Studios. The book features a diverse group of young characters in “adventures that celebrate the value of teamwork, embracing difference, exploration and learning and lifelong friendships,” Singh said.
Produced in collaboration with Macrocosm Entertainment, a creative production house that produces comics and other media, The Not-So Secret Society is written by the team of Matthew Daley and Arlene Daley, cocreated by Trevor Crafts and Ellen Crafts, with artwork by Wook Jim Clark. The book will go on sale for $9.99 in July.
Singh said the release of the standalone graphic novel will feature a “multi-level launch that will help to define the Boom! Studios program for the book market.” The book’s publication will be preceded by the release of 25 weekly digital mini-comics, available for free online at TeamNS3.com beginning January 31.The 25 weekly comics will also be collected and included in the book.
In addition, the book will feature supplemental educational content—including a science and technology component—as well as other educational activities aligned with Common Core standards. There’s also a newsletter that will be updated regularly with new educational and entertainment activities.
Cocreator Trevor Crafts said The Not-So Secret Society will be the first book in a series: “We have plans for two more graphic novels featuring the Not-So Secret Society.” He said that the weekly digital mini-comics will introduce the book’s main characters—Madison, Aidan, Emma, Dylan, and Ava—and give their backgrounds.
Singh said the book was Boom’s latest effort to celebrate and deliver diversity to a comics marketplace that is demanding a wider variety of material, particularly aimed at children and young adults. “The Not-So Secret Society reaffirm’s Boom’s commitment towards broadening the comics readership with a diverse array of high-quality storytelling that crosses all genres and demographics,” Singh said.
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5 Ways to Write Romance With Respect
Romance is a rich, diverse genre with a loyal following of readers and a firm place at the top of the genre fiction market. Since the explosion of self-publishing, new authors who write romance have been coming to the genre every month, providing those of us who love romance novels a wealth of choices and the opportunity to lose ourselves in new stories, unique characters and timeless happily ever afters.
But sometimes there’s one thing missing: respect.
Long-time readers and veteran authors of romance know that respect is key to success in the market. Seeing someone who doesn’t respect or understand the genre trying to capitalize on its loyal audience can be incredibly frustrating to an editor.
So here are my five tips on how to write romance with respect, for those looking to break in.
This guest post is by Angela James. James is the editorial director of Harlequin’s digital-first imprint, Carina Press.
Follow her on Twitter .
1. Respect the Happily Ever After:
Some people might leave this rule for last, but to me it’s paramount. You may have heard people say that romances are predictable because readers demand one thing in their books: a “Happily Ever After” (HEA) or a “Happy for Now” (HFN). But the truth is, this guaranteed ending is what makes romance work. It generates comfort, satisfaction and positive feelings within readers. And while readers might know there’s a happy ending on the way, romance is anything but predictable. The journey, the conflict, the story, the characters and the words are limited only by the author’s imagination. Readers are willing to take a chance on each new story and author because they know a happy ending is guaranteed. Kill off a protagonist, pair him or her with someone else, or leave things unfinished, and you’ll have readers who feel you’ve disrespected them and the genre. In their eyes, you may have written a love story, but you haven’t written a romance.
[Four Tips for Writing for the Romance Market]
2. Respect the reader:
This goes hand in hand with my first point, but let’s dig a little deeper. Respecting your readers isn’t just about meeting reader expectations for an HEA. It’s also about showing the reader you care about their reading experience, appreciate that they’re spending their hard-earned money on your book, and want to deliver them the best possible product. That means writing your best book every time. Hire an editor. Use beta readers. Deliver a quality story that’s as error free and enjoyable as you can make it. Invest money in your product to create a superior reading experience.
3. Respect your brand:
Showing respect to the reader with a quality product will have a direct correlation on the strength of your author brand. Your brand is a promise to readers that they can count on something—quality, voice, great dialogue, unique characters, fantastic world-building and an HEA/HFN—every time they pick up one of your books. How you develop your brand is up to you, but respecting it by always delivering on a promise of quality will help you grow a faithful audience who will not only buy your books without hesitation but will recommend you to their romance-reading community.
4. Respect your fellow authors:
There’s room in romance publishing for those who long to create, write, publish and, yes, make money. It’s natural to feel a sense of competition, but one of the wonderful things about this genre is the willingness of romance authors to mentor, support and cheer on their fellow scribes. More work in the market might mean more competition, but it also means more variety for readers to choose from. And more books in the market means more readers noticing romance and more readers buying romance, and therefore more readers for everyone. Instead of comparing your work to others or claiming that it’s “better than the other smut out there” or “elevating the genre,” respect that your fellow authors are not only putting in the same effort you are, but are also your best resource for industry knowledge, advice and promotion.
5. Respect diversity:
This feels like it should be the easiest point (and one that shouldn’t need to be stated, in a perfect world), but it is perhaps the hardest one of all. Following social media hashtags such as #weneeddiversebooks and #ownvoices will show you only a small part of the conversation about diversity in fiction and how crucial it is for authors to respect it. Do your research; utilize sensitivity readers when appropriate; ask others for opinions and feedback; avoid cultural misappropriation, clichéd cultural depictions or offensive characterizations; and, if you make a misstep, own your mistake, apologize and strive to do better.
Keeping in mind these five tips will lay the groundwork for a successful romance career. Offering respect to your readers, your brand, the issue of diversity and your fellow authors builds an environment where creativity is rewarded and everyone can achieve their ultimate goal: to build a passionate, devoted base of readers who will loyally buy their books for years to come.
Agents are hungry to sell romance to publishing houses. The How To Make Your Romance Hot Enough For An Agent onDemand webinar will teach you:
The specific elements of a romance novel agents look for
Common red flags to avoid in your romance novel
Places to go to get your work reviewed and critiqued
How to make an accurate list of legitimate agents who rep romance novels and how to approach them successfully
And more!
Click here to download your copy ASAP.
You might also like:
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Daniel Handler on the Best Writer You Don’t Know: Rachel Ingalls
The fiction of Rachel Ingalls has haunted me for years, but faced with the task of introducing her work I’m not sure what to say about it. Yet one wants to shine a light. Mrs. Caliban, her best-known book, is not very well known; the highest profile her work has received is that it has been adapted several times into films you likely have not seen. But while she does not loom large on the literary landscape her work is indelible in the brain. It is easy to read and hard to forget. The plots are dramatic, even exaggerated, but the books themselves are quiet and short. They are largely about women in trouble. The language is plain but curious. One finds eerie coincidence and comic irony, a touch of the macabre. When called upon previously to describe her work, the word that came out of my mouth was “psychological,” which seemed utterly meaningless the moment it was out loud. Psychological. What work isn’t psychological? A better word might be “spooky,” although that sounds too cheap for an author who often conjures a genuine sense of the unearthly.
Gathered in Three Masquerades are three works of hers. She has been published irregularly, in different configurations, and this is another one. Two of these works are frightening and one less so, although I sometimes change my mind about which one that is. I haven’t even been sure what to call them—novellas, maybe, or long short stories, that little phrase “long short” ringing as ridiculously as “psychological.” So I decided to write to Ingalls—through an emissary, as she prefers—asking her a bunch of questions that come up when I think about her work, and wondering if she had a title in mind for this newly-cobbled trio. She didn’t reply, and then she did. Her introduction is better than any I could muster up.
Dear Mr. Handler,
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Please forgive the delay in answering your letter. Since the collapse of my Amstrad years ago, life has not been the same and until I acquire a laptop that prints from dictation, I’m stuck with an old machine I can’t control and a printer I don’t understand.
I’m delighted that Pharos will be publishing me, that you want to write an introduction and that you first came across my writing when you were very young—I always hope that someone out there would be reading me besides the 40 or 45 people I imagined would have heard of me.
Thank you very much for your kind words about my work. It does seem that there is some difficulty about finding a category for my books. For a while I was put in the Gothic slot but probably I’d say that a combination of fable, fairytale and Romance would fit. Maybe that is Gothic.
As for feminism, I don’t consider myself a feminist because it’s a subject about which I feel ambiguous (as about so much else). I don’t think that women have harder lives than men, only different, although I’m incensed by institutional misogyny which is obvious and political and, of course, unfair.
But—my main literary interest is narrative: stories, patterns and the movement of thought. I do also love movies. When in Jaws II (3-D) a group of underwater scientists manage to kill a vicious whale and then find that another much bigger and fiercer whale is coming at them for revenge because it’s the mother of the first one, I light up with the recognition that this is Grendel’s mother from Beowulf. Yes, I value pulp as well as other literary forms currently discounted by many critics. Melodrama, for instance, seems to me an interesting way of examining the social basis of certain emotions by exaggerating them. And farce is an ingenious method of depicting our deepest fears about identity and misunderstanding. Almost all of those 1950s films are good and I grew up with them. My favorite is The Incredible Shrinking Man, although naturally The Creature from the Black Lagoon is also close to my heart. I think ‘masquerade’ might be a good word for one of my interests. Not quite the same word as fiction, but close.
My childhood literary influences were: being read to by my father, being told stories by him on our pre-Sunday-lunch walks, reading on my own, listening to the radio and going to Saturday morning movie shows. The radio in America used to be marvelous—full of soap operas and jokes and lurid advertising claims. And the school I went to was wonderful, the teachers and the curriculum too.
My first ambition as a writer was to be a poet (isn’t most writers’?) but after a sequence of 154 sonnets (and they all rhymed!), I had to admit that poets are born and that the sound, image and idea come to them in an indivisible bundle that cannot be constructed. It really is a gift. Great poets think like Einstein. Most contemporary poets write broken-up pieces of prose sometimes very good and interesting and memorable, but Cole Porter or Country and Western lyrics are often better than that without pretending to be The Real Thing. My top favorite literary idols are playwrights: Shakespeare, Euripides, Ibsen.
I’ve never given much thought to my place among contemporary writers, nor about readers. I write because it’s a compulsion. There are many, many other writers I hold dear, some living and some dead, but none of whom (after the experiments of adolescence) I’d try to emulate or imitate. When asked about writers who have influenced me, I used to cite a few but the real answer should be “all the ones I’ve read.” I write long stories because it seems to be the length that fits what I have to say. And I know how incredibly lucky I was to find the best agent in London and the best publisher, to have anything written in novella length taken on at all and to have nothing of mine ever changed except misspelling or perhaps, very occasionally, a difficult bit of punctuation that I’d usually fight for. My books didn’t sell. I was virtually carried. The only real money I’ve earned came from Hollywood.
So many people keep asking why I don’t write a novel. Well, all that business with the subplots—it’s in classical ballet too: the tragic noble love and the happy village wedding. It’s even in the big symphonies. But you have to know how to make that larger idea work without dissipating the original notion or ruining the shape. Victor Hugo, Charles Dickens, Joseph Conrad—they succeeded. But War and Peace? Big, heroic, terrific read and yet what a mess. And Anna Karenina should be two separate books.
Writers who are good at publicity are good because they like it and it’s easy to enjoy what you are good at, easy to be fairly good at what you enjoy. My sister tells me that a thriller writer in Boston (Robert Parker?) goes around to the bookshops there whenever he’s published and he meets his fans, who adore him, and talks about his books and the characters in them and he signs books. He has a great time and so does everybody else there because he’s good at social gatherings and being spontaneously entertaining. Writers like that are fun to meet. I’m not exactly a hermit but I’m really no good at meeting lots of strangers and I’d resent being set up as the new arrival in the zoo. (You see? Not a good attitude to start with. I wouldn’t want to meet with that myself.) It’s just that that whole clubby thing sort of gives me the creeps.
My life in England? I had a great-aunt living here for the first 11 years or so and her son’s family and a few of my friends who came over on visits and then introduced me to people they knew. I didn’t try to go to ground in any way. And there was always Shakespeare.
Sorry, I’ve left out travel but I hope this is enough. Thank you again.
–Rachel
The post Daniel Handler on the Best Writer You Don’t Know: Rachel Ingalls appeared first on Art of Conversation.
Love and Terror in Pasternak’s Russia
On October 6, 1949, a group of armed men stormed a small apartment in Moscow. The men belonged to the MGB, later to be called the KGB; they were Stalin’s state security men. The apartment, located on Potapov Street in Moscow, belonged to a woman named Olga Ivinskaya, who lived with her two children, mother, and step-father. They were not the reason that the MGB were at her door.
Ivinskaya was, at the time, the mistress of Boris Pasternak; even then one of Russia’s best-known poets, he was working on his epic masterpiece Dr. Zhivago. Ivinskaya and Pasternak had met at the offices of Novy Mir, where she worked as an editor. Despite their better efforts—he was already once divorced and re-married; she was already twice widowed—the two fell in love. He was the country’s most beloved poet, and she, also a poet, albeit a new and struggling one, was in turn his beloved. When the MGB arrived, she was sitting at her typewriter, typing out a poem for Pasternak.
Ivinskaya would never finish it, but the man who inspired the poem was the reason that she was arrested and carted off to Lubyanka Prison. The Russian secret police knew that Pasternak was in the midst of writing Dr. Zhivago, the story of a young Russian doctor who is at first infatuated with the Revolution only to become disenchanted and devastated both with and by it. In Ivinskaya, Pasternak had found a champion for the novel; with her support, he had begun giving readings of portions of it at literary salons in Moscow. In carting away his muse, the means of his emotional support, the MGB calculated, the progress of this incendiary and anti-Russian novel could be arrested. And so they did just that. The charges against Ivinskaya were “expressing anti-Soviet opinions of a terrorist nature.”
The use of the terrorist label to shut down free speech has some particular resonance in the contemporary United States. The Trump Administration signaled its eagerness to lock itself in a fitful embrace with Russia, and the reluctance of the usually abrasive President Trump to criticize Vladimir Putin has been duly noted and dissected. Authoritarian flavor has also featured prominently in the attempted Muslim ban, with which the Trump Administration has tried and failed to bar nationals from seven Muslim countries into the United States. The justification given for this—and the imminent designation of the Muslim Brotherhood, a pro-democracy Islamic political party prominent in the Middle East—is terrorism. The caustic taint of the label, its ruthless application of collective blame, and its insistent denial of due process, all seem aped from the Russian playbook of both then and now.
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The anti-terror Russia of then did not spare Ivinskaya. On the night that she was carted off, her family, two children, relatives and neighbors were all detained in the living room of the apartment on Potapov Streeet as officers went through every scrap of paper for evidence. Other officers sat chain smoking in the living room, interrogating the friends and relatives gathered there. Olga’s daughter asked if she could go into the kitchen to feed a pet fish. She was not permitted to do so.
Ivinskaya’s own fate was far worse. At Lubyanka prison she was stripped, all her belongings including her brassiere were taken from her, and she was put on suicide watch. Even still, Ivinskaya was so traumatized that she tried to kill herself in the solitary cell, after which she was moved to another unit where she was housed with several other women. Pasternak himself did not learn of what had happened until early the next morning. He knew that it was his writing for which she would pay.
Indeed, as Lara, a recently published book by Anna Pasternak, Boris’s great niece, reveals, she did pay. Stalin’s state machinery had calculated that it would be too risky to imprison Pasternak. There were a number of reasons for this, some more esoteric than others. Earlier in his career, Pasternak, whose bread and butter was the translation of English works, had translated some of the Georgian poets that were beloved by Stalin. Later on, even as Pasternak began turning away from the literary establishment which had been co-opted into producing works that skirted pro-Stalinist propaganda, Stalin refused to act against him. Pasternak, however, never did turn away completely; his wife and family were housed at a state-provided dacha at Peredelkino, and he tried not to take any overt positions against the regime.
Ivinskaya’s imprisonment, and her eventual sentence of five years in a Russian labor camp, did not have their desired effect. Even as the man who held it was wracked by guilt at what he had wrought on his beloved, Pasternak’s pen did not run dry. It could well be that her persecution made a danger that had seemed proximate but abstract suddenly real and present. Even though Pasternak himself was not arrested. Ivinskaya’s imprisonment likely lent a heretofore absent urgency to his finishing Dr. Zhivago. The chapters her wrote during this time bear some clues as to the relationship between Pasternak’s love and his work; Dr. Zhivago’s separation from Lara mirrored his own from Olga; its emotional devastation was real and not simply imagined. Furthermore, any remaining loyalty Pasternak may have had to the Russian state evaporated as it became the perpetrator of unwarranted punishments and cruelty on the woman he loved. If the hero’s guilt at betraying his dutiful wife—tempered by the passion with which he loves Lara—animated the earlier chapters of the book, his forced separation from her presaged what would come next.
As author Tim Parks noted in a recent essay for the New York Times, persecution can whet great creativity: “Does someone want to silence us? Are we at war? Nothing is more exhilarating for a writer than to feel that simply putting pen to paper is an act of courage and a bid for freedom.” So it may well have been for Pasternak, whose 126th birthday was last Friday and whose book, since its publication in 1957, has been translated into innumerable languages and inspired several film adaptations. But as Parks also notes, it is not simply writers who get caught up in the fever, but also readers; the very act of reading becomes consequently imbued with refracted heroism. He views the equation with skepticism, however, and whether it will recast itself in the American literary sphere cannot be known. The answer may depend on whether those most wronged, those suffering not in an abstract sense but in a real one, those banned or imprisoned or interrogated, can be heard over the din made by the loudest and most privileged.
Pasternak’s connection to suffering was in this sense ideal, proximate but not prohibitive. On March 5, 1953, while Ivinskaya was still serving her sentence in the labor camp, Stalin died of a heart attack. It was the miracle required to procure her freedom, which came the following month following the commutation of sentences of political prisoners. She returned to a weakened Pasternak, who had recently suffered a heart attack, but their passion and love, they discovered, remained undiminished. Pasternak continued work on the book; Ivinskaya continued to support him, moving eventually to a little house not far from the “big house” at Peredelkino. A bridge separated the two and Pasternak crossed it every evening at six o’clock, when he took his handwritten pages for Olga to type. Dr. Zhivago was published outside Russia in 1957, helped along by the CIA, who quickly had it printed in Russian to hand out to Russians at the World’s Fair in 1958.
It was in that same little house across the bridge that Olga Ivinskaya was waiting on May 30, 1960, when she learned that Pasternak had died. She ran across the bridge and into the big house where Pasternak’s body lay, Pasternak’s wife had not permitted her there as long as he was living. Kneeling next to his bed, she wept for a long time. Her suffering, which had galvanized and insulated a work of literary genius, was not over. On August 18, 1960, she was arrested again. Pasternak’s counter-revolutionary book, his alternate history of a revolution that Russians had been taught to revere, had disgraced the country. Pasternak was gone, but Olga remained, and she would have to pay.
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Sourcebooks Signs Author of Wattpad’s Most-Read Story of 2016
Sourcebooks has acquired worldwide English rights to Chasing Red, an adult novel by Canadian author Isabelle Ronin, which was the most-read story on Wattpad last year. According to Sourcebooks, Chasing Red had over 126 million reads by the Wattpad community in 2016.
After making some revisions and adding new content, Sourcebooks will publish Chasing Red in two volumes, releasing the first part of the book this September and the conclusion in November.
Sourcebooks cited the continued buildup of interest in the book as the reason it acquired the title. Ronin originally serialized her story, but once it was completed in early 2016 interest in Chasing Red grew even more, Sourcebooks said. “The numbers alone for Chasing Red are extraordinary. This story has touched millions of readers and is attracting new reads every week,” Sourcebooks CEO Dominique Raccah said.
Ashleigh Gardner, head of partnerships for Wattpad Studios, noted that rights to the book have also been acquired by Hachette Livre, HarperCollins Germany, Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial, and Mondadori.
Chasing Red tells the story of “cynical straight-A college student Veronica “Red” Strafford,” who is offered a place to stay by “notorious basketball player Caleb Lockhart” after she gets kicked out of her apartment, Sourcebooks said. After she moves in “their close quarters create a problem when he pursues her, and she is far from ready to open up about her painful past.”
Sourcebooks first partnered with Wattpad in 2013 when it began publishing its authors under the Sourcebooks Fire young adult imprint. Recent books by Wattpad authors released by Sourcebooks include two young adult titles by Natasha Preston. The Cellar and The Cabin have had solid runs on young adult bestsellers lists and have sold hundreds of thousands of copies.
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Rondine: Poetic Form | WritersDigest.com
As regular readers of this blog can attest, I love me some French forms. And this week’s poetic form is a French form: the rondine.
Rondine Poems
If the term “rondine” sounds familiar, almost like rondeau, that’s because it’s very similar to the rondeau. In fact, I’m thinking of calling it the little rondeau, because it’s kind of like a mini-version of the rondeau.
So here are the basic rules:
12-line poem
2 stanzas
7 lines in the first stanza; 5 lines in the second
8 or 10 syllables per line, except in the 7th and 12th lines
7th and 12th lines are a refrain
The refrain comes from the opening word or phrase of the poem
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Learn how to write sestina, shadorma, haiku, monotetra, golden shovel, and more with The Writer’s Digest Guide to Poetic Forms, by Robert Lee Brewer.
This e-book covers more than 40 poetic forms and shares examples to illustrate how each form works. Discover a new universe of poetic possibilities and apply it to your poetry today!
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Here’s my attempt at a Rondine Poem:
If I Were You, by Robert Lee Brewer
If I were you, I’d not be me;
instead, I’d be a complete fake
or, perhaps, I mean to say flake
as in snow dissolved in the sea
as in something that’s hard to see
and still there’d be nothing to take
if I were you.
For instance, remove my name Lee
from anything I plan to make
and insert your namesake
and replace all traces of me
if I were you.
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Okay, so my example doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but you should get the idea of how the form works now, right? So now you know, and as you know, knowing is half the battle.
So now get poeming!
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Robert Lee Brewer is Senior Content Editor of the Writer’s Digest Writing Community and author of Solving the World’s Problems (Press 53). Follow him on Twitter @RobertLeeBrewer.
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