Ki Longfellow's Blog, page 3

Cooking the Books

I've neglected my poor wee blog for so long now, I must relearn whatever it was I learned before.  Think I'll noodle about for a bit, get a feel for the old place before really diving in.  How interesting that the first thing that comes to mind is: "the writer is a lonely hunter."  Or: "I write, lonely as a cloud." Or: "lonely as clod" if the words will not come on a given day.  Or  the terribly obvious: "I write, therefore I am."

This is what feels best to me: I AM, therefore I write.

Over the last two years (two years since I've blogged! at this rate, by next month I'll be ready for my first walker) things have changed radically in the world of the writer.  For a hundred years or so, the publisher has been mightier than the pen. A tremendous industry grew up around us.  They told us what we could write and how to write it.  They designed our covers.  They pushed us into bookstores.  Or out.  If we would not or could not comply, we simply weren't published.  That is, unless we dared to publish ourselves.  And oh, what an outcry from the "industry".  Vanity press, they called it.  Conceit and folly!  Only worthless writers need publish themselves, said they.  Writers like Walt Whitman, Virginia Woolf, Mark Twain, Edgar Allen Poe, T.S. Eliot, Deepak Chopra, Margaret Atwood…and other such worthless ilk.  They sneered, they laughed.  And we bought it.  Everyone bought it.

They broke our hearts.

And for those they "allowed" to join them, those they considered "real" writers?  They cooked the books.

Wee sidebar: I'll never forget being shunted into a rather shabby, rather useless little room at the London offices of Harper Collins (my first publisher) and being told by the receptionist, oh so secretly: "They think you writers are nuisances.  We're told to keep you in here so you won't wander about and bother people."

But ah, the internet has changed all that, oh lordy has it.  The industry that lived off us for so long is scrambling for its very life.  Just as the music "industry" went down, the publishing industry is going down.  One by one, they disappear, or get bought by Bertelsmann, the German behemoth.  I think there are seven majors left.  As I write this, we could be down to six.  We writers are supposed to mourn this.  And I do admit the cache of being under the wing of Random House or Doubleday (I've been there; it's cold) still has its hold on an unpublished writer's mind.  But that will pass.  It's passing now.  And all because of the internet which spawned amazon and those who would be amazon like Barnes & Noble.  It gave birth to the ebook.

Without fear of snide remarks, we can publish ourselves.  We can promote ourselves.  Bedad, we can design our own covers!  In the day of the Big Publisher, we weren't allowed a single word about how our book would look.  I always thought that how my books looked meant that the door in a big publishing house with a sign that read: Art Department opened into a broom closet.

If our work is worthy, we will sell.  Maybe not quickly, maybe not to the masses, but it will pass into the hands of that truly beloved person out there waiting, a reader.  And maybe it will sell quickly and to the masses.  You never know.  If it's not worthy, we can still look at our work, bound or kindled or nooked, and know that we wrote it.  It's ours.  No one can send us those horrid letters writers used to paper their walls with.  "We're sorry, but your book isn't suitable for us at this time."

As I said, the industry built on our hope and our dreams and our talent once had the power to break our hearts.  Only our writing, published or not, read or not, could mend it.  But now their power is waning.  Publish and be damned.  Publish and be blessed.  But bloody hell, you can publish.  And they can't stop you.

Good ol' Blackie

Everyone knew the horse they called Blackie.  Day after day, year after year, he stood in a huge green grassy field on the way out to Belvedere California.  Belvedere California in the County of Marin is one of the richest towns in the United States.  The people who drove past Blackie were rich enough to own Seabiscuit.  They sailed yachts and drove foreign cars.  The clothes they wore were the real thing, not knock-offs for the hoi polloi.  And when they drove past the only horse on the...

Singing skunks

As two books wait on whatever it is that causes me to allow them years of my life, other ideas for other tales beckon.  Once living in Malibu, I looked down into a deep and hidden valley of incredible human riches and imagined one of those landscaped mansions belonged to Steven Spielberg, a man who has found a way to Pasteurize the Land of Faerie.  Just as Disney did.  Tinkerbell instead of Titiana.  Singing skunks instead of the Lord of the Hunt.  Cute aliens.  Cute cute acute cut.  What if...

To believe or not to believe…

I believe that beliefs are what we live by.  More, they're what we live for.   But no matter how we value them, they are just that–beliefs.  We think it is so.  We assume it is so.  We bloody hope it's so.  As for Truth itself, well…truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, is another matter altogether.  These days, truth is like Einstein's Theory of Relativity…what's true is very much dependent on where you stand.  I think this is called "postmodernism," or some mouthful like...

It's crowded in here…

Deep into the world of the Magdalene again…writing about her life after the death of Yeshu and her loss of his gallant brother Jude.  In "The Woman Who Knew the All" she is still so young, perhaps 22 or 23, and the world she knows is more troubled than ever.  Caligula sits on the throne of the Roman Empire.  In Alexandria, Egypt, Greeks have turned against Jews.  There is talk of a man named Paul of Tarsus, a Jew who seeks out and kills his own.  And I am there once more, walking with the...

Will the real Hypatia please speak up.

Dear you and me,

Since we barely know ourselves, it's hardly surprising to find we don't know anyone else at all.  We pretend we do, but in our hearts we know we don't.  And just as we create ourselves on the fly, we create others; those we invest the most in are those who make us feel very good or very bad.  To some we give all the wonder we deny ourselves.  And to some we accord all we think ourselves guilty of.  Could there be anyone worse than Hitler?  Surely he was the very...

Somewhere I Belong

October 6, 2009

Dear you and me,

I want to write mysteries like Raymond Chandler wrote mysteries.  Chandler created an LA I look for even now in the shabby streets of Hollywood.  Or in the oiled ooze of Long Beach or La Jolla's shadier sections…not that La Jolla has any.  His world isn't there.  It never was.  But I see it anyway because Chandler made us all see it.   I want to write mysteries like Agatha Christie wrote mysteries.  Sneaky little puzzles right out there in the open, winking and...

Writers work in silence.

Writers work in silence.

Writers work in silence.

Writers work in silence.