Andrew Scott's Blog, page 38

Pretty excited that this anthology (something I’ve wanted...

Pretty excited that this anthology (something I’ve wanted to edit since 1999) is going to the printers on Friday. It will be ready in time for AWP, so look for Press 53 at Booth 766 on the main floor.

Stories included:

Lee K. Abbott, “As Fate Would Have It”

Rusty Barnes, “Barely Light”

Victoria Barrett, “Better as a Wish”

Robert Boswell, “Sleeping in Bars”

Karen Brown, “Beautiful”

Eugene Cross, “Hunters”

Jennine Capó Crucet, “Men Who Punched Me in the Face”

Murray Dunlap, “The Black Oyster”

Roxane Gay, “Girls at the Bar”

Becky Hagenston, “Good Listener”

Holly Goddard Jones, “The Right Way to End a Story”

Victoria Lancelotta, “In Bars”

Sarah Layden, “Marv’s 11 Steps”

John McNally, “The Memoirist”

Kyle Minor, “The Navy Man”

Debra Monroe, “Have a Ball”

Darlin’Neal, “Once Upon a Time on Bourbon Street”

Michael Parker, “Muddy Water, Turn to Wine”

Victoria Patterson, “The Alcoholic Case of Miss Violet Louise Stokes”

Andrew Roe, “Lonely Man Sitting at Bar”

Jared Yates Sexton, “A Man Gets Tired”

Chad Simpson, “Tell Everyone I Said Hi”

Anne Valente, “Where There is Rain”

Richard Yañez, “Good Time”

"Sometimes Sonny felt like he was the only human creature in the town. It was a bad feeling, and it..."

“Sometimes Sonny felt like he was the only human creature in the town. It was a bad feeling, and it usually came on him in the mornings early, when the streets were completely empty, the way they were one Saturday morning in late November. The night before Sonny had played his last game of football for Thalia High School, but it wasn’t that that made him feel so strange and alone. It was just the look of the town.”

- Larry McMurtry, The Last Picture Show

On Self-Promotion

Dear Authors:

Please stop apologizing for letting me know about your forthcoming book. Chances are, I’m excited about it and happy for your success. I may have pre-ordered it online, or I may have plans to buy it in person at your upcoming reading[1].

Authors need to promote their work. Nobody should be more invested in this process than you. I say this as an author, as an editor, as a book reviewer, and as someone who tried to bring attention to short-story collections via Andrew’s Book Club. Booksellers, reviewers, newspapers and magazines, literary websites, et cetera, all want access to authors. If you’re not willing to make a little effort now, don’t be surprised later when nobody buys your book. And when nobody buys this book, it will be much harder to place your next book. 

If you have a book on the way, the publisher has invested in you. Maybe you received a $100,000 advance from a big publisher, or maybe the editor/publisher of your small press has devoted hundreds of hours to editing, shaping, and designing your book—often without pay—not to mention those hours tending to your delicate sense of self.

This isn’t a matter of artistic integrity. Shakespeare had to promote his work. Nobody expects you to become a marketing genius, but you have to make an honest effort. If you have a publicist, either your own or your publisher’s, please heed their advice. If you’re working with a small press that has successfully marketed its books, listen to your editor/publisher.

If you’re embarrassed by all of this, you must get over it. 

Take the time to answer interview requests. If you’re invited to write a guest post for a literary blog, find something smart to say in seven-hundred words. Additionally, if you have been insistent about your book’s cover design or any element related to how the book looks, then your publisher expects you to be at least that invested in the process of telling potential readers about your book. 

Your friend and reader,

Andrew

[1] Many authors worry about the indignity of self-promotion, but are unconcerned about how Facebook friends or Twitter followers might consider their constant updates about a manuscript (“I wrote 1,400 words today…”), or their nonstop requests for attention in other ways. Some of these types also apologize for posting about their forthcoming books, but by then, I’ve already unfriended or hidden them, which means I’m not likely to buy those books, anyway.

"No news except I now get $2,000 a story and they grow worse and worse and my ambition is to get..."

“No news except I now get $2,000 a story and they grow worse and worse and my ambition is to get where I need write no more but only novels.”

- F. Scott Fitzgerald, to John Peale Bishop, 1925

"The only thing you should have to do is find work you love to do. And I can’t imagine living..."

“The only thing you should have to do is find work you love to do. And I can’t imagine living without having loved a person. A man, in my case. It could be a woman, but whatever. I think, what I always tell kids when they get out of class and ask, “What should I do now?” I always say, “Keep a low overhead. You’re not going to make a lot of money.” And the next thing I say: “Don’t live with a person who doesn’t respect your work.” That’s the most important thing—that’s more important than the money thing. I think those two things are very valuable pieces of information.”

- Grace Paley

"Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know."

“Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.”

- Ernest Hemingway

Year-End Blah, Blah, Blah

I’ll click through a slideshow of Top Ten Bacteria, if someone bothers to post it to Facebook. But as a writer and editor, I’ve become increasingly frustrated with “best books” lists that ignore titles from smaller/university presses, tend to favor books and authors already touted by other reviews and publications, and generally seem to echo each other. Some lists attempt to counter that sameness, but are so expansive as to seem all-inclusive, which is not the point of a list.

The thing is, I’ve bought many of the books on the 2012 year-end lists: Beautiful Ruins, Billy Flynn’s Long Halftime Walk, Dear Life, Life Among Giants, This is How You Lose Her, et cetera, and I will read them. But not yet. I also dislike lists that champion “overlooked” titles, a designation which is always a backhanded compliment.

Here’s my own meager contribution to the noise.

Favorite novel: Myfanwy Collins, Echolocation

My wife, Victoria Barrett, published this book (Engine Books, represent!), and Ms. Collins has become a friend. Oh, you thought these lists were free of localized influence? I recently started working as an editor at Engine Books, too, so I am completely not biased, as you can tell. Whatever. I don’t care. It’s a great book, both elegant and disturbing, and should be made into a movie. I might write the screenplay if you send me some money, Hollywood.

Favorite novel by a writer I was *this* close to swearing off forever: Richard Ford, Canada

His post-Independence Day titles have been somewhat disappointing, none more so than The Lay of the Land, which I stopped reading and even removed from the house. Canada, however, is something of a return for Ford. It’s more like Rock Springs, for which I am thankful.

Favorite story collection: Eugene Cross, Fires of Our Choosing

He’s a great writer, and he’s damn sexy. These are just two reasons Eugene Cross makes me jealous. Read my review.

Favorite novel read in 2012 that was first published in 2008: Matthew Quick, The Silver Linings Playbook

I also enjoyed the movie (though the book is way better) and his YA novel, Boy21.

Short-story collections I might have chosen for Andrew’s Book Club this year: Michael Nye, Chad Simpson, Claire Vaye Watkins, Karen Brown, Jennifer Spiegel, Eugene Cross, Jensen Beach, Alix Ohlin, Ted Sanders, Fred Arroyo

2013 titles that I have pre-ordered or whose ARCs I hope will magically appear in my mailbox soon:

Robert Boswell, Tumbledown

Rus Bradburd, Make It, Take It

Michael Dahlie, The Best of Youth

*Bryan Furuness, The Lost Episodes of Revie Bryson

Elliot Holt, You Are One of Them

Owen King, Double Feature

Allison Lynn, The Exiles

Benjamin Percy, Red Moon

Matthew Quick, Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock

Evan James Roskos, Dr. Bird’s Advice for Sad Poets

*Jared Yates Sexton, An End to All Things 

Laura van den Berg, The Isle of Youth

Paul Yoon, Snow Hunters

* Release date is 2012, but after today.

10 Gifts for Writers

Time.
Bourbon.
Hugs. And, if it’s not too much trouble, you could whisper: “It’s going to be all right.” 
Paper.
Maybe an ink cartridge. Seriously. That shit adds up.
A tarsal massage?
Maybe you could read one of the pieces they’ve written, especially if it’s free and online, and you spend half of your stupid time playing games on your phone, anyway?
If they have published a book, you could buy a copy, which is really a gift for yourself. Am I right?
One of those fancy pens that Neil Gaiman swears by.*
When in doubt, send money. 

*But make sure it’s not one of those pens that turns people into Scientologists, OK?

In Which the Author, Unsure of His Own Awesomeness and Certain No One Has Heard of Him Before, Reacts to a "Best Of" List Making the Rounds Online

I generally don’t like “Best of” lists when it comes to writers and books.

I say this as someone who owns every edition of Best American Short Stories stretching back to 1988 (as well as the Best American Short Stories of the Eighties anthology). Of course, I haven’t been buying them since then. 1988: The year Raymond Carver died, “Sweet Child O’ Mine” was inescapable on American radio waves, and I finished my first year of middle school.

I’ve written elsewhere about the scourge of “Best Writers Under [a certain age],” and why even the backlash against such a list—which often aims to include seemingly overlooked writers—is likewise problematic.

But this new list, “Ten Awesome Authors You’ve Never Heard of Before,” is troubling because its insult is built-in. Several of the authors on the list have commented this week about the back-handed compliment.

Here’s the list. These writers are generally awesome, it’s true. But who is the “you” in this list’s title? It can’t be me, can it? I’ve heard of these authors, for starters.

Matt Bell
Tina May Hall
Craig Davidson
Holly Goddard Jones
Kyle Minor
Roxane Gay
Benjamin Percy
Lindsay Hunter
Alan Heathcock
xtx

I have exchanged e-mails with six authors on this list. I published one of them in the online journal I edit. Three authors from the heart of this list are included in 24 Bar Blues: Two Dozen Tales of Bars, Booze, and the Blues, an anthology I edited that will be published ahead of this year’s AWP Conference. I have attended public readings by six of these authors. I own books by eight of them. I own (or have pre-ordered) more than one book by four different authors on this list. One of them had her story included in a collection of Leo Tolstoy’s stories (!) as a cross-promotion. One is adapting his own novel for the screen, to be directed by a fancy-pants director. Two of them are among the new crop of important literary editors. Just this week, one of them dropped a 94-point word on me in a game of Words with Friends (“freshens,” if you must know), while another convinced me to give my Lodge iron skillet a try and use it to make fried chicken.

So either I AM THE MOST CONNECTED PERSON IN THE HISTORY OF THE LIT-BIZ, or this list isn’t worth its pixels.

Most of these authors already have respectable audiences. As the authors remain awesome and perhaps even become more awesome, those audiences will grow. 

This column at LitReactor is called Storyville. I admit that I have never heard of this column. When others posted the list this week, I thought it was from the Storyville app. A slightly newer, but similar, list cropped up this week, too, but I won’t link to it*.

I am almost certain that readers who haven’t heard of these authors won’t learn about them via LitReactor, which aims to be “a destination for writers to improve their craft; a haven for readers to geek out about books; and a platform to kickstart your writing goals.” Two of those three are goals explicitly aimed at writers. Writers have heard of most of these authors. 

*Inexplicably, Alan Heathcock made both lists. Listen, people. Volt was reviewed in something like 40-50 outlets, which is ten times as many reviews as most authors receive. People have heard of him. 

hobartpulp:Brian Oliu on New Girl & Creative Writing

hobartpulp:

Brian Oliu on New Girl & Creative Writing