A couple of weeks back, I read about the twitter project, #queryfail on someone else's blog. Intrigued, since I presently don't deal with an agent but had hoped to one day, I read all about it. Needless to say, I was a little disgusted by the attitude around it, more than I was by the overall idea behind it. The woman who started it *rubbed her hands with glee* which made the whole thing sound like a witch hunt, more than an exercise designed to show writers the types of mistakes that are likely to not only make agents laugh at you, but toss your query right into file thirteen.
A lot of writers were outraged by the idea. #queryfail was cruel, many said. Even if it was done anonymously, there was still the potential for some poor author to log in and see a mockery of their own query. Anonymous or no, the humiliation of rejection is often enough to put some writers off of submitting their work. Seeing their query get torn apart right there in front of thousands of Tweeters could do some damage.
So in response, #agentfail was set up to give writers a chance to talk back and address some of the problems authors have with agents. In an anonymous forum, maybe that would be better, because though authors can pick and choose the agents they deal with using a certain degree of choosiness, agents tend to hold all the cards in the writer/agent relationship. Many writers don't want to step on proverbial toes, get caught up in some web that is going to hold them back from even getting representation.
I think the whole thing is a little sad. I thought about starting a twitter movement called #youallfail. Why? Because more and more often, it seems that people are only happy when they are making other people miserable. The whole you stepped on me, I'll break your arm mentality is so high school, and I really did believe (probably foolishly,) for a long time that adults were different; the knew how to behave and get along with each other in ways kids didn't understand. Talk about naivete.
I write because it's my passion. It is all I have ever wanted to do with my life. I don't think about things like making agents and editors giggle when I write a query letter, I think about taking the next step in my career. I think about how it takes guts to slap your soul down on a three hundred and twenty page manuscript and then put it out there to be torn apart. Then I find myself thinking that it's no wonder there are so many writers publishing and podcasting their own books. The traditional medium has been such a joke for years that soon the snooty and persnickety may find themselves out of jobs. They may tune in one morning to check the book ratings and find a manuscript they took a dump on once is now a #1 best seller on the NY Times.
It doesn't matter if you're an agent, an editor or a writer. At times in my life I have been both on the writers end and the editorial end. I've had manuscripts fly across my desk with the craziest cover letters, and have seen so many writers who didn't even know there were rules, but I took a look at their manuscript anyway. There were times I was incredibly glad I did, because if I judged every manuscript that happened across my desk, before reading it mind you, on the cover letter or query that accompanied it, I'd probably pass up the opportunity to read and publish quite a few amazing stories.
The same type of garbage goes on in the music business, and the representation are the first people to start crying when they find themselves out of work.
In the end, it boils down to how we treat each other. Not just in the publishing world and the music business, but in every day life. I'm a bitch, I won't lie. I've been mean to people both on and off the internet, but I don't walk around looking for a fight. I don't push buttons for the sake of pushing buttons. Most times it's because I feel like I'm in a position that requires me to fight back. I'd just really like to see the world change, and for the better. It'd be fantastic to wake up one day and find people more willing to help each other, rather than crush each other on the ladder to the top.
Showing posts with label Music. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Music. Show all posts
02 April, 2009
23 February, 2009
When the Universe Speaks...
...Perk up your ears and have a listen. You'd be surprised how much you might be missing simply because you aren't paying attention to the signs. Yesterday I blogged about characters and their relationships to us writers, and for the last week or so my fabulously creative musician husband and I have been talking rather deeply about where inspiration comes from. We've also been talking about synchronicity. Of course, yesterday as I finished posting my blog on our relationships with our characters, I checked my blog roll to see what my fellow bloggers had to say. I was drawn immediately to a post by Matt Selznick, author, blogger and podcaster extraordinaire titled, All Creators Please Take Twenty Minutes to Watch.
So I did. And I called in my husband to watch it with me, because frankly we both felt like we could use a little creative advice from the universe right now. And it was exactly what I needed to hear. So now I want to share it with you, because I think that as creators we all come from this weird place that the so-called normal world can't identity with. We've all gotten the complimentary eye-rolls when we mention that we're writer or artists or musicians. You tell someone you're a painter and automatically they want you to help them coat the outside of their house. You mention that you're a writer and automatically everyone wants to know if they've read your novel. Musicians must come from famous bands or orchestras, otherwise how could they classify themselves as musicians.
Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love spoke at the TED conference earlier this month, and she put into words a lot of how many of us have felt for years. She also spoke at great length on the magic of the creative process. It was such an inspiration that I want to share that speech with you now. I hope you will take twenty minutes out of your day. I know sometimes it's hard to find twenty minutes to do half of the things we want in the span of a day, but this speech is well worth the listen.
We get so wrapped up in the daily motions of the world, in the rat race and that longing to simply belong that we sometimes forget to celebrate our creativity. I strongly believe that we all have a little genius in us. I hope your genius is doing its job, and I hope that you all continue to show up and do yours!
Please stop over and subscribe to Matt Selznick's blog. He's always got something interesting to say and you won't regret it.
So I did. And I called in my husband to watch it with me, because frankly we both felt like we could use a little creative advice from the universe right now. And it was exactly what I needed to hear. So now I want to share it with you, because I think that as creators we all come from this weird place that the so-called normal world can't identity with. We've all gotten the complimentary eye-rolls when we mention that we're writer or artists or musicians. You tell someone you're a painter and automatically they want you to help them coat the outside of their house. You mention that you're a writer and automatically everyone wants to know if they've read your novel. Musicians must come from famous bands or orchestras, otherwise how could they classify themselves as musicians.
Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love spoke at the TED conference earlier this month, and she put into words a lot of how many of us have felt for years. She also spoke at great length on the magic of the creative process. It was such an inspiration that I want to share that speech with you now. I hope you will take twenty minutes out of your day. I know sometimes it's hard to find twenty minutes to do half of the things we want in the span of a day, but this speech is well worth the listen.
We get so wrapped up in the daily motions of the world, in the rat race and that longing to simply belong that we sometimes forget to celebrate our creativity. I strongly believe that we all have a little genius in us. I hope your genius is doing its job, and I hope that you all continue to show up and do yours!
Please stop over and subscribe to Matt Selznick's blog. He's always got something interesting to say and you won't regret it.
14 February, 2009
I Pick Up My Books, I Read Bukowski
I've been reading a lot of Bukowski again, lately. It comes and goes. Sometimes when you feel like you've descended into a new place dirtier and grimier than any other place you've ever been, it's best to have Bukowski in your pocket. He's like a tour guide through Hell.
Not that I'm in Hell, or anything like that. It's just a dark state of mind to sink into when you're carrying old Buk with you everywhere you go. I think that so much of his work can be likened to this time we're having now, this endless depression, where all the stakes are changing once again... There are experts saying we won't ever recover from this if we collapse... that unlike Soviet Russia we have all tasted too much wealth to ever recover if our economy falls apart.
Well here's the thing. I grew up in a house with two brothers and a sister. We were only four children, but during the eighteen years I lived at home with my family, my parents were always on the verge of losing everything they had. That was why mother stressed the importance of not only dreaming, but standing on the tips of your toes until they break to reach those dreams. So that is what I do. That is what I will do all the days of my life.
Believe it or not, I've been places, seen things I hope to never be exposed to again in this lifetime. The first year we lived together, my husband and I shared a house with three other roommates. We spent an entire winter without heat and we rarely had enough food to get us by. We literally lived off of rice and ramen noodles for days and days on end, until some miracle presented itself and we were able to buy food. We spent a week on a bus going out to Arizona, where we couldn't get jobs because we had no place to live, and despite having enough money for an entire year's worth of rent, we couldn't get a place to live because we had no jobs. I was pregnant at the time, and desperately afraid of the kind of life I would provide for my child. In Arizona less than a month, we felt like we had failed, so we headed back to our hometown, and wound up living in squalor for about a month with my husband's friend.
It was the most disgusting place I had ever lived in my life. I should have known it would be bad. The guy's car had always been a virtual nightmare-you know, the kind when half a bag of garbage came rolling out whenever you opened a door. You had to arrange the garbage to make yourself comfortable in the back seat. Imagine how his apartment looked. He had a cat. An old Tom he'd found inside a car or something, but never got him neutered. The cat walked around and pissed on everything. Furniture, clothes, blankets, food.... anything he could lift his leg on, he did. And the guy we lived with chewed tobacco, so all over the apartment were cups, bottles and cans filled with putrid brown ooze.
I cleaned the apartment from top to bottom because I was not raised that way. How anyone could live like that and think it was normal, I never understood. Even after I cleaned it, he worked very hard to mess it up again. I remember an instance shortly after I had sterilized the apartment from top to bottom that another guy who was staying with us woke up because he felt something crawling on him... it was a maggot. Talk about never wanting to close your eyes again.
Shortly thereafter, my parents found out what kind of conditions we were living in and came to the rescue. Sometimes I think it was a miracle that we had their help, but we sacrificed a lot of what we believed in by going to stay with them. It was a year and a half that we stayed with them, and in that eighteen months, spirits were crushed, dreams were lost and our small family was nearly torn apart. But we made it through. We finally moved out into our own apartment, and while it wasn't exactly the Ritz Carlton, we made it into a home, and there we stayed for nine years.
During that time we struggled to maintain that which we felt was important to both of us, while also trying to keep up with our financial obligations. In order to provide the best family atmosphere for our daughter, we worked opposite shifts, so someone was always home with her. It wasn't until she started school that I actually got a day job so we could all be home at nights together.
After September 11, 2001, I felt like I'd been hit with a reality check. I was twenty-six, and still hadn't gotten any closer to achieving any of the goals I had set for myself throughout the years. I had no success with publishing, and even worse, had no idea where to start. Within weeks of September 11, I had decided to go to college. And I did.
The thing is, the quality of our life improved dramatically during the time I was going to college. Our finances were looking good, we had gotten rid of past debts and had finally started to save enough money to buy a house. Eight months before graduating, we bought our house. I had the promise of a college education behind me to help me get a better job, and it looked like some of the things we wanted in life were finally going to pay off.
Then the housing market took a dive. Our very first winter here was difficult, as my husband struggled to maintain his job. It wasn't until June that he went back to work full time, but come December he was right back on the same boat. The next year he didn't go back to work full time until July, and by the time September hit in 2008, they were already back to working three day weeks. He's been laid off since the second week in January.
Sob story? Not really, but after everything we've been through it's a real motivator, let me tell you. Not to go out and work nine jobs to maintain material happiness, but to step up our game and start doing some of the things we hesitated on in the past out of fear. Fear of failure, fear of loss, fear of whatever.
I know that so many of my friends are in this same boat. So many of us struggle from day to day to make sure there is food on our table, while our big bosses go on elaborate trips around the world, deny their employees security, claiming that the economy is bad. How bad can it be when they are out living it up like celebrities while the rest of us worry from day to day whether or not we're even going to get our next pay check. My husband's employer has sent the salesmen group every year on a week long cruise to the Bahamas as a reward for work well done... Well guess what, the salesmen haven't sold anything in months, but they leave to go on their cruise at the end of next week.
I very rarely talk politics, and I certainly don't like to blog about them because differences of opinion often tear friendships apart, but this bailout garbage is like trying to stuff a wad of chewing gum into a dam already about to burst. The same people who have always had it easy get another leg up while the world crumbles underneath them, while we're left down here at the bottom wondering NOT where our cruise to the Bahamas or our full-sponsored trip to Pokerfest 2009 is, but whether or not we're going to lose our home or have enough money after paying our mortgage to feed our family. Our jobs, which were propositioned to us as full-time employment just a year ago, waver in the balance, thin as spiderwebs about to break.
The thing is, and I know you're wondering what the hell does any of this have to do with Bukowski, Charles Bukowski defied odds during the depression, World War II, after the War... He painted accurate portraits of the world around him that we can look back on today. If you are a writer, a poet, an artist or a musician of any kind, now is your time. Catalog these days. Paint portraits of the world as it falls apart and rebuilds itself again. There is more than enough inspiration right now to go around. Draw on the misery around you and turn it into something pure, something beautiful.
I know that this blog was probably one of the more depressing blogs I've penned this week, but don't miss the underlying thread of hope glimmering within the darkness. We write our own future, our own destiny, and right now, as it seems like sky is falling, there's a pen or a paintbrush or a guitar waiting for you to pick it up and show the world what you've seen.
The Aliens, by Charles Bukowski
you may not believe it
but there are people
who go through life with
very little
friction of distress.
they dress well, sleep well.
they are contented with
their family
life.
they are undisturbed
and often feel
very good.
and when they die
it is an easy death, usually in their
sleep.
you may not believe
it
but such people do
exist.
but i am not one of
them.
oh no, I am not one of them,
I am not even near
to being
one of
them.
but they
are there
and I am
here.
Not that I'm in Hell, or anything like that. It's just a dark state of mind to sink into when you're carrying old Buk with you everywhere you go. I think that so much of his work can be likened to this time we're having now, this endless depression, where all the stakes are changing once again... There are experts saying we won't ever recover from this if we collapse... that unlike Soviet Russia we have all tasted too much wealth to ever recover if our economy falls apart.
Well here's the thing. I grew up in a house with two brothers and a sister. We were only four children, but during the eighteen years I lived at home with my family, my parents were always on the verge of losing everything they had. That was why mother stressed the importance of not only dreaming, but standing on the tips of your toes until they break to reach those dreams. So that is what I do. That is what I will do all the days of my life.
Believe it or not, I've been places, seen things I hope to never be exposed to again in this lifetime. The first year we lived together, my husband and I shared a house with three other roommates. We spent an entire winter without heat and we rarely had enough food to get us by. We literally lived off of rice and ramen noodles for days and days on end, until some miracle presented itself and we were able to buy food. We spent a week on a bus going out to Arizona, where we couldn't get jobs because we had no place to live, and despite having enough money for an entire year's worth of rent, we couldn't get a place to live because we had no jobs. I was pregnant at the time, and desperately afraid of the kind of life I would provide for my child. In Arizona less than a month, we felt like we had failed, so we headed back to our hometown, and wound up living in squalor for about a month with my husband's friend.
It was the most disgusting place I had ever lived in my life. I should have known it would be bad. The guy's car had always been a virtual nightmare-you know, the kind when half a bag of garbage came rolling out whenever you opened a door. You had to arrange the garbage to make yourself comfortable in the back seat. Imagine how his apartment looked. He had a cat. An old Tom he'd found inside a car or something, but never got him neutered. The cat walked around and pissed on everything. Furniture, clothes, blankets, food.... anything he could lift his leg on, he did. And the guy we lived with chewed tobacco, so all over the apartment were cups, bottles and cans filled with putrid brown ooze.
I cleaned the apartment from top to bottom because I was not raised that way. How anyone could live like that and think it was normal, I never understood. Even after I cleaned it, he worked very hard to mess it up again. I remember an instance shortly after I had sterilized the apartment from top to bottom that another guy who was staying with us woke up because he felt something crawling on him... it was a maggot. Talk about never wanting to close your eyes again.
Shortly thereafter, my parents found out what kind of conditions we were living in and came to the rescue. Sometimes I think it was a miracle that we had their help, but we sacrificed a lot of what we believed in by going to stay with them. It was a year and a half that we stayed with them, and in that eighteen months, spirits were crushed, dreams were lost and our small family was nearly torn apart. But we made it through. We finally moved out into our own apartment, and while it wasn't exactly the Ritz Carlton, we made it into a home, and there we stayed for nine years.
During that time we struggled to maintain that which we felt was important to both of us, while also trying to keep up with our financial obligations. In order to provide the best family atmosphere for our daughter, we worked opposite shifts, so someone was always home with her. It wasn't until she started school that I actually got a day job so we could all be home at nights together.
After September 11, 2001, I felt like I'd been hit with a reality check. I was twenty-six, and still hadn't gotten any closer to achieving any of the goals I had set for myself throughout the years. I had no success with publishing, and even worse, had no idea where to start. Within weeks of September 11, I had decided to go to college. And I did.
The thing is, the quality of our life improved dramatically during the time I was going to college. Our finances were looking good, we had gotten rid of past debts and had finally started to save enough money to buy a house. Eight months before graduating, we bought our house. I had the promise of a college education behind me to help me get a better job, and it looked like some of the things we wanted in life were finally going to pay off.
Then the housing market took a dive. Our very first winter here was difficult, as my husband struggled to maintain his job. It wasn't until June that he went back to work full time, but come December he was right back on the same boat. The next year he didn't go back to work full time until July, and by the time September hit in 2008, they were already back to working three day weeks. He's been laid off since the second week in January.
Sob story? Not really, but after everything we've been through it's a real motivator, let me tell you. Not to go out and work nine jobs to maintain material happiness, but to step up our game and start doing some of the things we hesitated on in the past out of fear. Fear of failure, fear of loss, fear of whatever.
I know that so many of my friends are in this same boat. So many of us struggle from day to day to make sure there is food on our table, while our big bosses go on elaborate trips around the world, deny their employees security, claiming that the economy is bad. How bad can it be when they are out living it up like celebrities while the rest of us worry from day to day whether or not we're even going to get our next pay check. My husband's employer has sent the salesmen group every year on a week long cruise to the Bahamas as a reward for work well done... Well guess what, the salesmen haven't sold anything in months, but they leave to go on their cruise at the end of next week.
I very rarely talk politics, and I certainly don't like to blog about them because differences of opinion often tear friendships apart, but this bailout garbage is like trying to stuff a wad of chewing gum into a dam already about to burst. The same people who have always had it easy get another leg up while the world crumbles underneath them, while we're left down here at the bottom wondering NOT where our cruise to the Bahamas or our full-sponsored trip to Pokerfest 2009 is, but whether or not we're going to lose our home or have enough money after paying our mortgage to feed our family. Our jobs, which were propositioned to us as full-time employment just a year ago, waver in the balance, thin as spiderwebs about to break.
The thing is, and I know you're wondering what the hell does any of this have to do with Bukowski, Charles Bukowski defied odds during the depression, World War II, after the War... He painted accurate portraits of the world around him that we can look back on today. If you are a writer, a poet, an artist or a musician of any kind, now is your time. Catalog these days. Paint portraits of the world as it falls apart and rebuilds itself again. There is more than enough inspiration right now to go around. Draw on the misery around you and turn it into something pure, something beautiful.
I know that this blog was probably one of the more depressing blogs I've penned this week, but don't miss the underlying thread of hope glimmering within the darkness. We write our own future, our own destiny, and right now, as it seems like sky is falling, there's a pen or a paintbrush or a guitar waiting for you to pick it up and show the world what you've seen.
you may not believe it
but there are people
who go through life with
very little
friction of distress.
they dress well, sleep well.
they are contented with
their family
life.
they are undisturbed
and often feel
very good.
and when they die
it is an easy death, usually in their
sleep.
you may not believe
it
but such people do
exist.
but i am not one of
them.
oh no, I am not one of them,
I am not even near
to being
one of
them.
but they
are there
and I am
here.
04 January, 2009
Musical Inspiration for Writers
I know I have talked about my writerly playlist in the past, but I will not deny the constant inspiration I have found in music. As I was reading through some of the work I wrote a few years ago, I was reminded how much the music of Sting had inspired several of my plotlines. While there was very little actual evidence for the average reader left in the story itself, I could clearly recall the mood and setting of certain scenes and the songs that I was listening to as I wrote them. It was as if the songs themselves had become associated with mine and my characters' memories of that time.
It reminded me of some of the earliest writing I actually produced, when I was about ten. That writing was heavily influenced by music I listened to at that time, and it seemed to become a trend I followed all through my youth. Many of the stories I wrote were responses to favorite songs which gave me a wide variety of interesting topics to write about, and it still does. Because a mood and atmosphere is already created by the song, I find myself wanting to reproduce the moment, or live through it myself in a way.
Music has been a huge element in my life since I was a little girl, and it seems that all along music and writing have gone hand in hand. I think that's something I need to bear in mind when I find myself frustrated with writer's block. To get the plot juices flowing, I need to find music that makes me feel connected to the story itself. For example, two of the novels I am working on the second drafts of now have soundtracks, if you will. One story is set in a small, farm town very similar to where I grew up and live currently. Finding myself in that place requires little more than queuing up Dierks Bentley and Toby Keith. The other novel is set in the Faerie underworld. Gary Stadler and David Arkenstone are just two of the atmospheric elements of my fantasy soundtrack. While I was writing about zombies, I found myself listening to a lot heavy music, dark, violent, but still atmospheric. I actually had a soundtrack I found on iTunes that was inspired by zombie films. It put me in the perfect mood to pull out the cricket bat and start whacking zombies.
Have you ever heard a song that compelled you to write? Has a character ever cried out from the chorus of a song and begged you to dive in and unearth their story?
Sting: When We Dance
It reminded me of some of the earliest writing I actually produced, when I was about ten. That writing was heavily influenced by music I listened to at that time, and it seemed to become a trend I followed all through my youth. Many of the stories I wrote were responses to favorite songs which gave me a wide variety of interesting topics to write about, and it still does. Because a mood and atmosphere is already created by the song, I find myself wanting to reproduce the moment, or live through it myself in a way.
Music has been a huge element in my life since I was a little girl, and it seems that all along music and writing have gone hand in hand. I think that's something I need to bear in mind when I find myself frustrated with writer's block. To get the plot juices flowing, I need to find music that makes me feel connected to the story itself. For example, two of the novels I am working on the second drafts of now have soundtracks, if you will. One story is set in a small, farm town very similar to where I grew up and live currently. Finding myself in that place requires little more than queuing up Dierks Bentley and Toby Keith. The other novel is set in the Faerie underworld. Gary Stadler and David Arkenstone are just two of the atmospheric elements of my fantasy soundtrack. While I was writing about zombies, I found myself listening to a lot heavy music, dark, violent, but still atmospheric. I actually had a soundtrack I found on iTunes that was inspired by zombie films. It put me in the perfect mood to pull out the cricket bat and start whacking zombies.
Have you ever heard a song that compelled you to write? Has a character ever cried out from the chorus of a song and begged you to dive in and unearth their story?
Sting: When We Dance
01 October, 2008
The Horror Pops
Whether it's Halloween or not, the Horror Pops rock! I have had this song stuck in my head for weeks, so I thought it was time to share the mind-numbing goodness:
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