Remarkably Similar Situation

Nothing in Publish, and your book will probably perish was news to me, even though the Globe and Mail article was about the publishing situation up north.

Yesterday I wrote to a friend's daughter who is interested in getting into illustration. Today I'm wondering if I should be directing people like her to articles like the Globe and Mail's . I don't want to discourage anyone, but I also think people shouldn't go into writing and illustrating expecting a whole lot. Go into it because you enjoy a booky or inky lifestyle, not because you hope to see your books on the front tables at Barnes & Noble.

Though a family member did tell me tonight that he saw Three Robbers at his library yesterday. I'm happy.

And Then You Die

I have an obsession with Beowulf, perhaps because it's the only epic I think I understand. To me it expresses the most basic fact of human life--We achieve when we are young and strong, then grow old and die. "Come in what shape it may, death will subdue even thee, thou hero of war." (Hinds' version.) This to me seems far more profound then what little I got from The Odyssey--Men are pigs.

I first became aware of Gareth Hinds' graphic version of Beowulf two years ago, and just stumbled upon it on the new book shelf at the library this past week. I can't tell you how satisfying it is to read something that grabbed my interest once upon a time, because usually I just forget about these things.

I think you have to have read a traditional version of this story to really appreciate what Hinds has done here in terms of telling the tale with so little text. Yes, there are pages with larger narrative boxes then we usually see in a graphic novel and there are no dialogue balloons at all. But there are far more wordless pages, pages that take us through entire battles. This Beowulf really demonstrates how a graphic novel can show action.

The overall visual impression is stunning, and the narrative sticks to the original storyline. There's no sex in this Beowulf the way there was in 2007's movie version. You can't pretend that Beowulf got what was coming to him because he did the nasty with someone he shouldn't have.

In this graphic Beowulf, just as in the original old text, Beowulf got what is coming to all of us.

Writing Glimmers

Today a family member was telling me about how his e-mail in-box is always empty. As soon as something comes in, he deals with it. Job-related messages go immediately to their appropriate folders, other items are responded to and filed or deleted, junk is trashed. Everything is taken care of right away, he told me. No build up. In-box empty. All the time.

I almost said, "Ya gotta point?"

He inspired me to try to read some of the Glimmer Train Bulletins to which I subscribe. (Glimmer Train is one of the many fine publications that have turned down my short stories over the years. Yeah, I know. Some day they will all be sorry.) About fourteen of the things were languishing in my in-box. Now I'm down to twelve. Good work, Gail!

I found a couple of interesting things:

Crossing the Blank Page Fearlessly with a Roll of the Polyhedral Gambling Apparatus by Brian Ames

Yes, I was shaken by the appearance of the word polyhedral, too. But what Ames has done is create a chart for generating ideas from magazine articles. In the past I have been very turned off by the idea of using charts while writing. But a couple of years ago, I decided to try using a spreadsheet, and now I'm much more open-minded.

Plus, I do get a lot of ideas from magazines. And I'm trying to come up with an idea a day for the 365 Story Project. (Actually, I prefer to come up with several ideas at a time, so I know what I'm going to be doing for the next few days.) So I may give some variation of Ames' idea a try.

The Importance of Journaling by Cynthia Gregory

I hate using journal as a verb. Nonetheless, Gregory says something very interesting about writing in journals. "Write knowing that your journal is not about you...Rather, it is like a Polaroid camera that you aim at everything around you and with which you snap a photo...It is a recording."

Be sure to read the next to the last paragraph, in which she talks about her ex-husband's grandmother's journal. That sure sounds like an idea for a novel to me.

A History Of That Wimpy Kid

All you need to know about the wimpy one's history, as told at Oz and Ends. And he's got some other wimpy stuff, too.

Show And Tell

Skeleton Creek by Patrick Carman, which will be published this month by Scholastic, is described as a multimedia ghost story. The term "multiplatform" was used in a Publishers Weekly article. The idea is to mix both traditional text with video--the reader reads for a while, then is directed to a video on-line that continues the story for a few minutes, then goes back to the text, back to another video, etc.

It's like the hybrid novel/graphic novels I was seeing a couple of years ago, but the graphic novel portion has been replaced with video.

I wasn't wild about Skeleton Creek's basic story. (See A Year of Reading for a very positive response.) Though the text definitely has an eerie atmosphere and an interesting protagonist in the fearful Ryan, his portion of the novel is done as a diary. One of the reasons I'm not a fan of diary books is that it's very easy for the writing to fall into a "tell" mode, and that seems to be what happens a lot in Skeleton Creek. We're told that the town is weird. We're told that something odd is going on. But the only odd, weird things we see occur on the videos.

You really are getting both show and tell in Skeleton Creek.

The multimedea format, though, is intriguing. I found myself frustrated several times because I reached a portion of the book directing me to the Internet to check out the video while I was reading in a place where I couldn't do that. (I was reading in bed, okay? And while, believe it or not, I do have a laptop in my bedroom, it's not one of the three computers in our house with Internet access.) However, the book isn't all that long, so I imagine children engaged with the story and with time on their hands could just sit close to their Internet connection. And if this format were to catch on, in future years Internet access will probably be more...accessible...through cell phones and other techie devices. (Forgive my vagueness on this subject.)

What I find most interesting about Skeleton Creek is all the questions it raises and possibilities it opens up.

For one thing, in the Publisher's Weekly article, Patrick Carman says, "In the past, when technology has been included in one of my book projects, I’ve never felt like it was deeply connected to the story. A web-based add-on that has no meaningful connection to a book often feels hollow for readers, as if it’s been bolted on as a bonus rather than essential to the experience." And later he says he asked, "Was there a story that could be told in which the printed word and online videos could contribute equally?"

I think what he means is that the technology needs to be integral to the story. For this format to work, there has to be some legitimate reason for the video to exist. In Skeleton Creek, there is. Ryan's partner, Sarah, does with video what he does with his journals. I'm wondering, though, how many story lines can authors come up with in which that happens? I'm sure there are more, but will coming up with logical reasons for the video to exist limit the number of stories you can use this format with?

And once you add video, you can run into some problems you don't have to worry about with text alone. For instance, what if a reader doesn't like an actor in the videos? What's that going to do to the whole reading experience? What if a reader has committed to the character on the page and is disappointed when s/he turns up in a video? (For the record, when Ryan appeared I thought he was perfect.) The actors in the videos are going to have an impact on the readers. For instance, I liked the actor who played the ranger in Skeleton Creek. But I didn't think he played the ranger as particularly weird and creepy the way Sarah kept telling us he was. I felt he was more...annoyed. Not that I blamed him.

But if you can overcome those problems, you've got some interesting possibilites. Carman is interested in using technology to "enhance the appeal of the printed word to today’s young readers." Of course, that's important. But I'm thinking about the creation of a whole new genre and what could happen with it in the future. Why shouldn't this format make the leap to adult novels with far more video so that you can merge a dvd with a full-length book?

How many people do you think would look forward to spending a weekend with that type of novel?

She Almost Had Me Convinced.

Mitali Perkins' post last month on authors using social networking was very convincing. The numbers of people who showed up at her book parties would be good anywhere, forget about a town where she didn't live. (A few years ago I had lunch with the author of a collection of literary short stories. He told me that he'd had a signing scheduled in the town where he lived. No one showed up, so he went home.)

I was truly considering trying a social network after reading Mitali's post. But when I was talking about it at dinner, a family member who is all too aware of my work habits, asked, "But when will you write?"

He asked the same thing tonight when I brought up the possibility of teaching a writing course.

I think he's quite right about the course, by the way. Given how slowly I do everything, a writing course could take a big bite out of my writing time.

What? Me? Work?

Well, my taekwondo class went quite well this morning, considering we were sparring, not my best skill set to say the least. And at the end of class, the blue belt who teaches art at a local community college asked if I'd be interested in teaching a children's writing class at his school.

Yikes.

I'm just to think about it, and I'd need to submit a plan for approval and all that. Nothing would happen before fall if then.

But...this sounds an awful lot like regular work. You know what I mean. The kind of thing where you go somewhere at a regular time and...work.

This guy was telling me about how much he likes teaching winter session classes, every day for two hours for three weeks. I could feel myself getting lightheaded.

However, I thought it might be fun to sort of tinker around with class ideas here, so I'll be doing that a couple of times a week.

Where Do Brands Come From?

Yesterday I found (and read) Advertisements For Yourself by Jill Priluck through Blog of a Bookslut. It deals with the subject of whether or not authors can and should become brands. Then this morning I got on the treadmill and what did I find on the bookrack but last fall's SCBWI Bulletin, which I'd been pretending wasn't there while I read other stuff. It included an article called BRANDING--To Be Part of the Herd? by Tim Myers.

So, I've been thinking about branding these last twenty-four hours.

I started reading about branding probably last year. Usually I would see it in relation to bestselling authors. The idea was that they had become "brand names" in the sense that they had a large following of readers who were such fans that they would buy anything the authors wrote just because they wrote it. These buyers associated the authors' names with a certain type of writing that they liked, just as other buyers associate names with a certain type of detergent or food they like.

Thus, if you can somehow make yourself a brand name, you'll then have a following that supports your new books. But how can an author do that?

Priluck says, "Traditional branding—a mix of ads, media appearances, and book tours-is dying." But when discussing James Patterson, whose name frequently comes up in book branding articles, she says of his books that they are "practically encoded with unifying, Patterson DNA—from the title to the packaging to the hook and hanging cliffhanger." Isn't that something totally different from advertising?

Is branding something that has to be in the writing, which can then be advertised?

Myers in his Bulletin article suggests that branding is simply a distinctive style that makes someone recognizable, giving Tomie de Paola and Bob Dylan as examples. Branding, therefore, could occur naturally for such people. And once it did, it could then be marketed.

I wonder if today's brand writers aren't similar to your old-time cult writers, who had small followings that could be counted on to buy books and turn out for readings. A brand writer's fan base is a lot larger and has more money, of course. And is more mainstream. And a brand writer gets a lot more publicity. And while cult fans probably enjoyed their status as the lonely few who understood their favorite authors, brand fans may enjoy being part of a large, excited group turning out on publication day.

But except for all that, they're kind of related.

Hannah and Brandon Get Some Attention

Ames Public Library blogs about A Girl, a Boy, and a Monster Cat and calls the book's humor "perfect for 2nd and 3rd graders."

Remember, I did not say that. The wise and discerning people at Ames Public Library did.

Yeah, that's right. I've been ego-surfing.

Random Reading

The Chronicle Books spring and summer children's catalog arrived last month. I only had time to browse, but Classic Western Stories, compiled by Cooper Edens, caught my eye because I'd recently recommended a western novel for YA readers. Plus, I've wondered in the past if kids would read western.

Chronicle Books publishes a lot of art books, including art board books.

Then back while I was on vacation (can you believe I'm still talking about that?), I bought a copy of that week's Sunday New York Times, a treat that goes back to my college days and one that I rarely have time for. That issue included an article called Hapless Boy Wins Eager Friends, about the popularity of the Wimpy Kid books by Jeff Kinney. I've only just read the article because I was on retreat from all kid reading while I was on vacation.

I have not yet read any of the Wimpy Kid books because they're written in diary format, and I have trouble getting enthused for reading those kinds of books. However, I hear a lot about them when I go into schools. Kids love them. The diary format doesn't bother them one bit.