Weekly Short Stories Contest and Company! discussion

It seemed to me that a writers’ group should have a thread about publishing.

What brought it to mind is that Guy’s poem “Blinded by the light” is one of the finalists this month in the Poetry group’s GR Newletter contest. It isn’t the first poem by Guy to be picked by the Poetry group’s judges, and not very long ago, Ajay made it to the finals over there, as well.

If you’re a member of the Poetry group, go vote!

I loved Guy's haiku 'Blinded by the light' and voted for it as soon as the poll came up. It deserves to win!

M, I think I've never made it to the finals. I don't even remember making it to the Honorable Mentions list. But I clearly remember that your's and Guy's poems have made it to the finals.

Thank you, Alex! I really, really appreciate your encouragement! I am very happy to just continue writing here at the W.S.S. How I wish mine were even slightly close to Guy's and M's poetry. They are up there with the very best.

Ajay, your writing is amazing. I'm stunned every time I read it (which is often why I don't comment XP) I think you should be a finalist every time, if not an honorable mention, along with M, Guy, and Al. You are all much better writers than I, and I absolutely love reading all of your guys' work.

A couple of years ago, I had poem that got picked, and there were comments like, "How did something this bad make it to the finals?" I wondered that, myself.

o.o Imma kill them. M, your writing is wonderful, and if others can't see that, they don't deserve to read it.

Kat, thank you. That’s very nice of you to say.

Thank you, Kat! That's very sweet of you. Well, I guess I haven't told you this before, I feel the same way about your work. You've got such a natural voice. Your poems were always memorable, they had that effect on me. I wish I get the opportunity to read more of your work, coz I wasn't around in the W.S.S when you were more active in it.

M, I just went across and read some of those comments. They upset my mood. I agree with Kat, they don't deserve to read it. I'l probably never understand as to why some people in the Poetry group are so rude in general. I can never get myself to blatantly attack someone's work in that manner, even if the other person is open and up for it. Those comments were completely uncalled for, in my opinion.

Ajay, I’m surprised you could find it! One of the guys who commented later got kicked out for being rude to the moderator.

I don’t know just what it is about Kat’s writing. Most writing, I read because that’s the chore involved in finding out what it has to say. When I was in college, there was a girl whose writing was a lot like Kat’s--the kind of writing that it’s nice if it has something to say, but the reason you read it is that it’s writing you love to read.

M, I'd actually read all the poems which have made it to the finals and the honorable mentions list. That was quite a while back, so it took some time to go back this time and find it again. I think I might have a vague idea as to who was kicked out.

Galveston Island is such a fine poem, I loved it! But, I'm unable to find the link for the other poem, 'Midnight Rain'. The link seems to be broken. Is it available in the W.S.S for us to read it?

Ajay, thank you! Mine is the one on the bottom. I thought “moss” was spectacular!

http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/4...

Thanks for the link, M! Yes, 'moss' was really good, but 'Midnight Rain' is much better, in my opinion. What imagery! Loved it.

Thank you, Ajay! When I wrote that one, I was living on a barrier island.

Midnight Rain is beautifully written, M. You have such an amazing ability to bring your words to life.

Wow, M! That explains the imagery. I am guessing it must have been a spectacle! Your poem clearly sketched it out for me, to live that moment. Now, it makes me want to live on a barrier island too. Though all I can manage for now is live on in a tropical land, called the Deccan Plateau.

*


M wrote: "Kat, thank you. That’s very nice of you to say."

You're welcome M. You deserve it.

Ajay wrote: "Thank you, Kat! That's very sweet of you. Well, I guess I haven't told you this before, I feel the same way about your work. You've got such a natural voice. Your poems were always memorable, they ..."

Awww, Ajay, you're too sweet. I guess I'm going to have to start writing more, just for you XD

M wrote: "Ajay, I’m surprised you could find it! One of the guys who commented later got kicked out for being rude to the moderator.

I don’t know just what it is about Kat’s writing. Most writing, I read be..."

M. I don't even know what to say. You are being way to kind.

:) Yes please, Kat! I'm pretty sure about this, everyone here will always look forward to your writing.

I just call it the way I see it.

This is the second thing I've seconded today - I second Ajay ;D

*sniff* You guys *sniffle* are amazing. *cries*

Late, as usual, to the party, Guy walks over to Kat with an only slightly used tissue and offers it to her.

I was reading the comments here. And it got me thinking how often the writers in this group have had their writing kicked by so-called know-it-alls in the other group. And I wonder, M, if there has been a natural separation or, perhaps, collection of more introverted/intuitive feeling/sensing people here than in the other group?

My writing, which has been nicely praised here — THANK YOU EVERYONE! — is, even when shortlisted, not popular with the majority of the population. Like M, it finishes last or nearly last. I have wondered about this, since reading CG Jung. Well, the MBTI has statistically broken down the general population by their MBTI types. And it strikes me that the kind of reactions M and Ajay and Al and I have received for our writing aligns with that kind of MBTI population breakdown.

And I clearly remember the impact of Midnight Rain, which wasn't well liked, but which just blew me away. And I Iove Kat's writing, too, how it tells the story with a gentle beauty. And it seems to me that, from how she describes her own writing, she has had it poorly received by the 'majority' of the world around her.

M, you're the MBTI guy. What do you think? And does this explain why, of the number I've times I've recommended the Haiku thread, only a handful have ever followed up on it? The most notable being Ryan and Ajay.

Thoughts?

I've never made the connection that quite a few people who are here came searching for a place where their writing would accepted. But it's true. That's basically how I ended up here. Insulting my writing before they even read it...... *rolls eyes*

Stephanie, I can’t imagine. Your writing is exciting! At least, I think it is.

Guy, I think it may be less a type-related problem than a symptom of a society in which introverted feeling has virtually no value. People who have introverted feeling as a superior or auxiliary function are discouraged from developing their type naturally and are encouraged, in various ways, to remake themselves in the ESTJ mold our society is modeled on. I don’t know many INFP’s who have introverted feeling that’s very highly developed. Where I encounter introverted feeling, it’s usually fake and shows itself as sentimentality.

Like I said, they hadn't even read anything of mine, which was the insulting and frustrating part of it all. Needless to say, I left that group.

Aha! Yes, you are right! I hadn't quite made the association, consciously. You have clarified my reaction to what I have called 'saccharine American sentimentality' in films. They are expressing, perhaps, two sides of that psychological observation: that those wanting to express feeling tend to express it with heavy handed sentimentality. And, just as interesting is that these creations may be, in the Jungian sense a compensatory behaviour for the heavy handed discouragement of introverted feeling. Interesting! I will be thinking about this now. Thank you M, as usual.

And in a bit of fushigi-like timing I recently watched a gentle love story called Lullaby for Pi. The movie became part of a Guy fushigi that I wound up posting. Why this is fushigi-like here is that it was a non-sentimental love story that contained a lot of feeling and the story line definitely presents plenty of options to be saccharine sentimental: and it has been seen by almost no-one. It is a Canadian-France co-production, and feels like a Canadian production in its sentiment and presentation. And when I say 'no one has seen it,' it has had a total of 0 critic reviews @ the Rotton Tomatoes movie critique site since its release in 2009. And despite it having the brilliant Forest Whitaker in a large supporting role.

Here's an interesting article I read. It's written by The Book Doctors, so full credit goes to them.

Declaration of Independence

2012 was proof-positive that this is indeed the greatest time to be a writer. The fastest selling book in history is now a self-published book. There are so many more ways to get successfully published than there were even five years ago—even more ways than there were when we started writing this sentence.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that the corporatization of publishing has caused enormous changes in the book business. Recently, Random House and Penguin announced that they were merging to form either Random Penguin or Penguin House, depending on whom you believe.

As publishing houses merge and corporations envelop them in their bureaucratic arms, there will be fewer publishing opportunities at the Big 6 houses (soon to be the Big 5, and possibly the Big 4 if Simon & Schuster and HarperCollins also merge.) That is why we are urging writers to investigate the wonderful world of independent publishers.

We, ourselves, turned down a much bigger offer from a large corporate publisher to have the honor and privilege to work with our independent publisher, Workman Publishing, on The Essential Guide to Getting Your Book Published. They are like a writer’s fairy godmother, granting wishes left and right. In fact, the newest version of our book (the first version was called Putting Your Passion Into Print) was at the suggestion of Peter Workman in light of the seismic, revolutionary changes in the publishing business.

And all of our upcoming books are with independent publishers. After doing books with Harper Collins, Penguin, Simon & Schuster, and Random House, our experiences with independents like Canongate, Black Dog and Leventhal, and Soft Skull, have resulted in our books being translated into multiple languages, and winding up on the front cover of the Sunday New York Times Book Review.

The even better news is, with the majority of independent publishers, you don't need an agent. And as any of you who have pursued agents know, it is very, very, very difficult to get a good agent, particularly at this point in history. Indeed, you may spend years of your life getting rejected over and over again by agent after agent. Food for thought.

Have a great holiday and may all your publishing dreams come true. See you at the bookstore!

Cheers,
The Book Doctors

Guy, I read somewhere--and it seems to me to be true--that sentimentality and brutality are opposite faces of the same thing; that where you find one, you’ll find the other. Your comment about the heavy-handed sentimentality of the times being compensatory made me think of that, especially since what’s compensatory is unconscious.

It seems to me that every era has its sentimentality, the sentiment that’s in vogue, that people buy into uncritically. With intellectuals (and I’ll admit that a certain private group comes to mind), it’s historicism, or perhaps the general, convenient relativism that allows one to be an absolutist while attacking, on the grounds that they represent absolutes, values or ideologies one disagrees with. Judicial activism and identity politics are frightening symptoms of the sentimentality of the times.

If the general level of consciousness keeps dropping, the United States really could become a Fourth Reich. The salt-of-the-earth people who, in ordinary life, have a simple, clear-cut worldview, would be the very ones manning the killing squads and and working as functionaries at the concentration camps. Lined up to be shot will be the introspective people, who tend to see things not in terms of absolutes, and who question things.

M, I'd heard that too, a long time ago before I was able to fully appreciate the truth of it. And your perception is one I concur with, but will extend a little further because of something I recently read from a Boston health organization on the numbers of American children facing hunger and significant malnourishment. Yes, a young man shooting children is a brutal act, but of an individual: a wealthy society allowing its children to starve with little or no comment while arming its military are the acts of a brutal society.

And I think that the quality of the republican presidential debates are dead canaries in the mine of what is more than a toe dipping into a 4th Reich mentality. And it's not just the USA, of course. Here in Vancouver, our leaders recently forced our transit "monitors" to become fully armed police. They have been given, in effect, the right to shoot people over transit fare disputes. What really hit home, to me, was seeing a news clip one day on TV covering some transit incident. Something about how this particular pair of transit police were standing and monitoring the crowd reminded me of the stereotypical Nazi soldiers standing manning the train stations in the war movies of the 50s and 60s. And I realized that I'm living in a para-military society, were even one's commute to work is under the watchful eye of a fully armed police force. These actions, by the society's leaders and accepted with little or not complaint by us, the compliant citizen, are just an extension of how militarized domestic travel has become with body searches, dogs, x-ray machines, and the increasing need for papers. Without being fully aware of it, we have grown into the very tyranny that was depicted in those movies as being an intolerabel evil.

As to your comment about the 'other' group, your observation is also correct.

Ah well, enough of that.

Stephanie, thank you for that post. This article has affirmed what I was very tentatively thinking about as regards to getting a book I am thinking of writing published.

Glad it helped. It gave me a little bit a different perspective on the issue so I thought I'd share.

Hey, guys, I just read a pretty helpful article and thought I'd share the link here. Enjoy!

How Long Should You Keep Trying to Get Published? by Jane Friedman