Ben Peek's Blog, page 20

Making a Living

I don't make a living from writing.

It's important to remember that for when I say that, I do make a living from writing.

Today, it occurred to me that I am now a professional speaker, and have been for a while, and that I am paid to speak about fiction. I am paid, in part, because I have a few too many degrees which give me a fancy title, and because I have a reasonable list of publications. When I am introduced, I am done so in rather nice terms, which you can all pretend to imagine are being said to me (depending on who you are you might have to pretend really hard). But the money that I get from public speaking is, in no way, comparable to the money I make from writing--which is to say, public speaking will allow me to pay my rent, and writing will allow me to take my girlfriend to a movie. But since being an author is what allows me to speak, it is still the author who makes the money.

A lot of the time, I hear authors complain about how they don't make enough, or get enough, and it's a fair complaint. Publishers don't really pay that much, unless you're well known, or working for high profile publications. But it's also true that you can make a living as an 'author' if you're a little bit creative about it, if you look around at all the venues by which you can go to, and say, or be, an author. Afterward, you go to to a quiet place in your office and you type type, because the work needs to be done, but it's important not to think that money only comes from a publisher if you're an author. There's lots of ways to make cash. It's not all glamour: some of the things you can do for money by actually writing are a bit shit. Some of the things you can do while being an author are likewise. I'd be happy, for example, if I never had to look at another badly structured essays for the school system ever again.

But being an author is a business, and a good business is always seeking to be diverse, be multifaceted, being out there in different ways. Or so I was once told.

The Satanic Verses and Joseph Anton

Soon enough, the language of literature would be drowned in the cacophony of other discourses—political, religious, sociological, postcolonial—and the subject of quality, of artistic intent, would come to seem almost frivolous. The book that he had written would vanish and be replaced by one that scarcely existed, in which Rushdie referred to the Prophet and his companions as “scums and bums” (he didn’t, though he did allow the characters who persecuted the followers of his fictional Prophet to use abusive language), and called the wives of the Prophet whores (he hadn’t—although whores in a brothel in his imaginary city, Jahilia, take on the names of the Prophet’s wives to arouse their clients, the wives themselves are clearly described as living chastely in the harem). This nonexistent novel was the one against which the rage of Islam would be directed, and after that few people wished to talk about the real book, except, usually, to concur with Hermione Lee’s negative assessment.

When friends asked what they could do to help, he pleaded, “Defend the text.” The attack was very specific, yet the defense was often a general one, resting on the mighty principle of freedom of speech. He hoped for, felt that he needed, a more particular defense, like those made in the case of other assaulted books, such as “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” “Ulysses,” or “Lolita”—because this was a violent attack not on the novel in general, or on free speech per se, but on a particular accumulation of words, and on the intentions and integrity and ability of the writer who had put those words together. He did it for money. He did it for fame. The Jews made him do it. Nobody would have bought his unreadable book if he hadn’t vilified Islam. That was the nature of the attack, and so for many years “The Satanic Verses” was denied the ordinary life of a novel. It became something smaller and uglier: an insult. And he became the Insulter, not only in Muslim eyes but in the opinion of the public at large.

I love Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, but I came to it many years after it was first published, and long after the fatwa was announced. In fact, at the age of fourteen or fifteen when the book was first published, I can honestly say I have no recollection of hearing about any of the resulting attacks or drama, but that was the kind of teenager I was. What I did know was that it was one of two books that were kept behind a counter in a bookstore that you had to ask for. The second was Brett Easten Ellis' American Psycho. The latter of the two was also wrapped in plastic.

After I had finished The Satanic Verses, I must admit that I was a little confused about the fatwa. To me, the book had very little to do with Islam and rather a lot to do with being an immigrant, about living in a multicultural world. I thought perhaps that the truth was that I didn't know enough about Islam to understand the threat, but no one I knew who had read the book really understand the insult, either. Eventually, I understood that the fatwa really had nothing to do with the content of the novel, but had everything to do with religious fanaticism, with persecution, control, and everything else that extreme religious views take on to replace a balanced view of reality. Of course, by then, Rushdie was back, floating around in society, and the threat against his life appeared to have gone, so I continued to talk about The Satanic Verses as a book that is about race and culture when I talked about it to my friends.

Rushdie's new book, from which the excerpt above is taken, is called Joseph Anton, and details his life after the publication of The Satanic Verses. The New Yorker has a long section of it up to promote it, and I reckon it was pretty good, and have linked it for you.

Link.

Closing In

I'm busy trying to get this novel finished. It'll be about two months, with work and editing, but a pretty full on two months. I'm keen to get it finished so I can begin finding a new agent, writing something else, and letting my head space be something new.

There is a point, in writing anything of any length where you just want to be done with it. You know everything that needs to be done and you can see the final shape before you. It isn't what you first envisaged, but the new version of it is not so different that you cannot recognise the original. Just as you cannot notice that the final version is stronger and more robust than the first ideas. Originally, when I started making writing this book and making notes, I had the idea of a world with dead gods strewn through it. There would be no gods, I said, but of course that proved ill conceived: you can't have dead gods and then not talk about them and not have their presence be influential (which is, of course, the metaphor I like for it as a whole). In changing that, I also embraced a very strong plot based narrative, something that I wouldn't say my previous books (or even a lot of my short fiction) was about. I had done it in Below, however, and thought that it worked reasonably well there, and figured that it would be worth a second go, despite the frustration of working out every little twitch. Given the space I had for a novel (I estimated 120, 000 words, and it will break out around there) there was a lot more space for twists, foreshadowing, betrayal, and plots within plots. I was a bit surprised by the amount of rewriting, tweaking and fixing that that would require, but in the end, I reckon it has come out pretty well, even if, as before, it was frustrating as all get out some days.

But, I am at that point where I am just done with it and will be soon. It's a good feeling. Hopefully, everything that happens after does so in a good fashion, rather than what happened three or so years ago, where everything did not; but it is a different world and I am a little more realistic about the business side of publishing, for good or ill.

Anyhow: back to the file.

Like A Virgin, But Without the Blood and With All the Experience

I thought Vagina Whitening Cream was pretty weird, but this has that all beat.



I don't quite know where to begin with all that is wrong with this. Really, I don't.

The Grief Show

Last week, it was reported that five Australians were killed in Afghanistan. What began after that, was the sickening grief show that nationalism inspires.

It wasn't new, really. The Prime Minister got up and said, "Australians will be shocked by these deaths." Other politicians said we should leave the war. Media commentators repeated that five had died, that the number of deaths for Australians was too much (it is 38, apparently). Military commanders got up and said that the soldiers were upset. The last one was the only honest reaction out of it all, but it was short lived. Images of coffins draped in flags were shown later. The Grief Show continued to make sure we understood the terrible tragedy that was unfolding. Five Australians were dead. The cost was huge. How could our nation continue to take part in this war?

In 2011, 967 Afghan civilians were killed.

1,586 were injured.

These are numbers are from the United Nations, but the link will go to a BBC site with a rundown and link to a report. According to another site, the number of Afghan civilians killed by August 2010, was 8,813, while 15,863 people were seriously injured. By all accounts, the violence has risen in the last year, so that number is likely to have gone up as well.

Please note, the number of Afghan men and women and children killed are not listed under soldiers, or combatants. They were just people living, or trying to live, in a situation that can be best explained as difficult.

Not that we talk about that, no.

What we talk about, instead, are the five Australians who died. Five. It's sad, yes, but it is no less sad than the hundreds of men and women and children who have died around them--and the colour of their skin or their religion or their nationality does not change that. Dead is dead. But when we stand up and beat our chests and lament five Australians, what we are doing is saying that these five were, somehow, worth more than the hundreds and thousands who have died during this conflict that are not Australian. It's a childish, immature, and wholly abhorrent stance to take on the situation, and one that we should be ashamed for taking.

I am, frankly, offended each time that the media and politicians begin their show, the way that they somehow manage to put a weight on nationality, as if your birth place makes you more valuable than another human's.

What Was Once Old Is New Again

The other day, I was flipping through old files, looking at old short stories, the unfinished ones, the ideas I never saw through.

There's not a whole lot, really. Most ideas don't live long enough to make it to a file, to be honest. If I have a dozen ideas, maybe one has enough in it to turn into a whole story, and maybe a couple can be combined, but most just drift away, as they should. I've always found that question people have--"How do you get ideas?"--to be a strange one. If you read enough, watch enough, pay attention to enough around you, then you'll have more ideas than you can possibly use. For example, when my girlfriend's cat was brought into the country and spent a month in quarantine, I had a whole idea for an illustrated kids book set in an animal quarantine facility, which I suppose if I was in the position to know an illustrator and have an easy line into illustrated kid's books, I might do for fun. But I don't, so whatever. But the fact still remains: all I did was go somewhere different, and I had this idea, and maybe one day I'll do something with it, and maybe I won't, and such is life.

But I was amused by these old files. One story was a complete rewrite of another story, but with the settings and characters changed. It was the same story, much in the way that Gus Van Sant's remake of Psycho is the same as the Hitchcock version. I thought that it might make something interesting, but it wasn't, and so it sits in its file, never to be seen. There's a couple of files full of notes for sword and sorcery short stories, which was an itch I had for a while, but I moved on; maybe one day I'll return to them. There's a couple of files for notes on novellas as well. These I set aside because I thought it would be hard to sell them, and figured if I was going to work on novella length pieces that would be nothing but a hassle to sell, that I might as well spend the time on a novel. One of them, entitled 'Convicts', I still like. It was an idea I carried around for a while, trying desperately to shrink it down, turn it into something that wasn't so large--I think, at the time, I was a bit burned out on writing, on selling, on the business and people of art, and that impacted how I was approaching it, but times change, and all of that, and the idea is still pretty sweet. A couple of new ideas have attached themselves to it already, which is probably a bad sign.

But who knows.

As an aside, here's the two trailers for Psycho.

Paying for It

This week, there was a bit of a scandal when the New York times wrote about self published authors paying for reviews. It's interesting, and on a certain levels, shows the kind of money invested by authors who want a successful book if they're doing it themselves. But mostly, I was a bit confused by all the outrage. Of course self published authors are doing it: part of the struggle for authors who self publish is getting that sealed stamp of legitimacy, which has for so long been connected with publishing houses. For decades now, vanity publishing has been the last port of call for the desperate, for those who wrote, but lacked the talent and perseverance to sell their book for a pittance to a major publisher. Vanity publishing, now independent publishing, or self publishing, still is that, and it will always have an element of that, but there's more diversity to it now--but there's barely any recognition of that and so ventures like this exist. And it's not just this fly by night joint, either. The respectable Kirkus does it as well, though not as cheaply, and will not promise a 'good' review; but they'll still take the money off these authors and then run away laughing.

In many ways, the situation is one that the publishing industry created. We can all get worked up about the fact that someone sold cheap, highly rated reviews, and that's fine, but we should probably also be worked up that someone felt it necessary to toss a couple of thousand dollars to the dude just to be consider legit. Self publishing is not the dead end of publishing, just as major houses are not--and this, as with the other, was always true--the gate keepers to art and credibility.

A Hoop in the Tree

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This is from Glebe Market, where we run our stall.

There's more, including images of myself typing. Creation is not very photogenic is my opinion (or, I'm not, and I need a body double for these moments).

Elite Squad: the Enemy Within

I don't know how I came across Elite Squad: The Enemy Within, but I did, and despite the terrible name of the film, I'm actually glad of that.

Set in Rio de Janeiro, Jose Padilha's sequel to the 2007 Elite Squad is a violent, relatively intelligent but fatalistic crime film that explores the nature of systematic corruption through various levels of life in Brazil. It opens with the film's narrator, Colonel Nascimento, played by Wagner Moura, leaving a hospital, only to be attacked while on the street. During that attack, he explains how he has reached this position, beginning with what is, honestly, an excellent stand off in a prison between gangs, military police, and an activist, Diogo Fraga, played by Irandhir Santos.

In an early part of the film, Nascimento states that Fraga calls him as a fascist, and it is this conflict, between the desire for Nascimento to use a violent, military trained organisation to remove drug cartels and corruption, vs Fraga's intellectual awareness that crime does not emerge empty handed, but is funded in economics and need and greed, that forms the backbone of the film. After the botched killing of the inmates, political pressure forces politicians not to fire Nascimento, but to promote him, allowing him to create a larger force that he can use to sweep through the sections of Rio controlled by drug cartels. His theory is that if you squeeze the cartels, you squeeze the corrupt cops, and so on and so forth, which results in a cleaner system--however, this isn't what happens. Instead, the corrupt cops kill the sellers, and take over the neighbourhoods, selling cable TV, gas, and etc, bringing in more money, more control, and a new corruption. All that Nascimento has succeeded in doing is cutting off the low end of the corruption, and in a reoccurring statement throughout the film, the system (the corruption) adapts, fixes itself, and continues to exist.

The true success of the film is its ability to convey the system, and to convey it in a manner that doesn't link it to one individual. From corrupt cops, to corrupt politicians, to both Nascimento and Fraga themselves, the system takes in everyone, and it is much to Padhila's credit that he manages to maintain that, even to the end, when Nascimento sees what he has created with his organisation and tries to bring it down.

It's not a badly made film on all levels, actually. Moura's aging, uncompromising Nascimento makes a fine centre of the film, and his transition from utter belief to the realisation of what he is against is well done. Other characters around him tend to suffer a little from not having enough space to develop. Santos' Fraga has a great introduction to the film, but he falls to the sidelines as the film progresses. Likewise, Andre Ramiro's Mattias, who forms an emotional core of the film for Nascimento, relies heavily on the previous film to demonstrate their bond (this would be the one thing in the film that suggests you watch the first, but it's still not necessary) and while the second emotional core, Nascimento's relationship with his son, is better developed, there's not a whole lot to do with it. And, the one female character in the film, Nascimento's ex-wife, really isn't defined by much more than her status as the ex and mother of his son. So, there are problems with the film in that regard.

But ultimately, it's a good film, put together well and with a touch of style. Worth a look if you're curious.

The Scam

Lately, the concept of author scams has been on my mind. It is probably motivated by the fact that I was asked to read someone's book the other week and, I thought, "This is it, this is my chance to open my dodgy author appraisal business where I drink whiskey from a draw in my desk before going down to the bar to drink." Sure, my dream of a bad author appraisal business is very similar to my dream of a bad detective business, which is also surprisingly similar to my bad animal import business, and that business I run ensuring marriages for men who you marry just because you need a visa and refugee status takes too long.

But it was just a dream, really, because author scams are so plentiful. A lot of the time they're run by lower level authors and editors (like myself, lets face it) who think it's a good way to take cash. You may not I didn't say make. Sometimes, you know, it's what you have to do to make money, and I don't begrudge anyone that: I myself have lied and cheated and taken advantage of people when I've needed to pay bills, but I've always understood that that is exactly what it is, and that its been short term. I also try to do it in different fields, such as paid research, medical testing, and helping your self esteem. But that doesn't change the fact that for a lot of new authors, a lot who are just starting, it's easy to get scammed.

How do you avoid it, then?

Well, there's one simple rule: money flows to you, not away.

Which means the following are scams:


Paying someone to edit/read your manuscript.

Paying an agent to represent you.

Paying to meet an agent so you can 'pitch' to them.

Paying to submit your work.

Paying to have your book published.

Paying to meet a publisher.

Paying, paying, paying. If you're asked to pay for something before you do it, it's a scam, it's gouging you, it's fucking you over.



During the course of your 'career' as an author, plenty of money will flow away from you without you ever having to pay someone anything. You'll lose it in hours spent at a keyboard, you'll lose it in travel to conventions, time spent doing interviews, etc, etc. You don't need to be giving money away to people that, really, you could get worked out for free, on your own, and based on your own skill. Sometimes, it's actually nice to pay people cash if they do something for you--cash is love, after all--but that ought to be up to you, and ought to be decided on your own free will and your desire to do that. The scam of those who take your money is in what you are promised and what you believe will happen because of that promise. Anyone promising publication, for example, is giving you shit.

Now, if you excuse me, I'm going to go and create a miracle cream I can sell to authors.

You'd be surprised how many would by that.