Cat exploded? Make good art.

Illumination by Clive Hicks-Jenkins for Thaliad

Life is sometimes hard. Things go wrong, in life and in love and in business and in friendship and in health and in all the other ways that life can go wrong. And when things get tough, this is what you should do. Make good art. Husband runs off with a politician? Make good art. Leg crushed and eaten by a mutated boa constrictor? Make good art. Cat exploded? Make good art. Someone on the internet thinks what you are doing is stupid or evil or it's all been done before? Make good art. Do what only you can do best. Make good art.  --Neil Gaiman

Alternatively, spend some time with good art....

Never shave a cat until May and other morning thoughts

The problem for a woman in contemplating how she feels so very out of sorts with her own time is knowing that in order to succeed in any other time, she would have had to be a man of a certain class, and also to possess a certain amount of luck in escaping bacteria and viruses. Maybe she doesn't want to be a man, despite the helpfulness of the right body parts in most eras. And maybe she doesn't have a time machine, anyway.

*

I'm grateful to Dickinson for staying home and for avoiding publication and the tidying-up of her work to fit the times. How terrible it would have been to have had the sharp edges ground down. How terrible to have a Mrs. Emily Dickinson Somebody who died in childbirth and never reached the ecstatic heights of later years.

*

When I woke up this morning, I read John Simon's post on rhyme, which I recommend to anyone interested in the subject. He left out the crazy freedom of rhyme, though, and I find that people generally do leave out rhyme as way to freedom. Following rhyme is like swinging out on a trapeze bar with the choice of innumerable other flying trapezes to grab--at its best, the chosen one will sail the poet away into new thoughts and new places never dreamed in free or blank verse philosophies.

*

The last steps before sending out a manuscript are the easiest and the hardest. The writer already feels done with the book after grinding through it many times, and so it's hard to push through one more time to check for errors introduced in revision and small, overlooked problems. No book has ever matched the fire in the head (though I suppose a downright narcissist might believe in that burning achievement), so a final read is inevitably a mixture of pleasure and pain.

*

I shaved the blue persian for spring but now it is winter again, and the poor Puffcat is chilled. Meanwhile, Theodora, the long-haired calico with prodigious whiskers, knows a shaved cat is wrong and bites her. Now the Puffcat spends all day on my bed, curled in the down coverlet, or else pressed close to a little radiator. Theodora hisses and spits, still indignant, and bounces out of the bedroom. The Puffcat is now a quarter of her former size. She seldom moves from her nest in the coverlet, and I wonder if she is, in fact, dying. She does, after all, have a heart murmur. Or is she just cold? She has always been a cat of little brain (though her heart is full of love) with a liking for sleep. I feel a bit guilty. Never shave a cat until May.

Saturday morning with cats--

Insane puffcat picture
taken by my youngest on his phone

Cats on each side of me, staring. Evidently I must wake, despite the morning concert of musical snores coming from all parts of the house. People are celebrating Saturday morning in familiar style.

The blue Persian gift-horse puffcat is contemplating the well of nothing. She is a very Zen creature, always peacefully floating in the abyss and often forgetting where the bathroom might be. The tippy-most bit of her tongue is often barely out of her mouth, giving her an addled look that is not belied by her behavior.

The beauteous and intelligent but grumpy Theodora is contemplating that I'm over the hill and yet have seen no woman as president. Why should a cat bother with such things? Like a lot of grumpy beings, she is political and sometimes bites. She tells me that H. Clinton will have Benghazi blow up in her face if she runs. She guesses a woman as president won't happen in her lifetime.

I tell her that a cat's lifetime is not all that impressive, especially if one subtracts the hours spent napping. She flicks my words away with her tail and says it won't happen in my lifetime either. I tell her that it's Saturday morning, and I don't care to think about politicians, many of whom appear to have specialized in nothing but running for office. But try telling anything to a beautiful long-haired calico with exceptional whiskers!

The brainy one. Phone picture by RBM.

She ignores me and adds that it's boy cats who spray. Tom cats, she says. She confides that they have barbs (surprise!) in unexpected places. Despite her complete, sweet virginity, she rolls over on her side, pulls in her paws and purrs, looking like a furry odalisque.

With a long, demanding stare, she reminds me that she has a pronounced penchant for Hartz Hairball Remedy Plus. Whether these wished-for pellets actually work is at yet unclear (alas), but my ongoing desire for the absence of giant hairballs faithfully leads me toward the nearest kitty snake-oil remedies.

I obey. Bottled-up eagerness and then joy comes to cat-world. And now, back to home archaeology.

"Death and taxes," or, The problem with cats--

photo by Rebecca Beatrice Miller

The house at 5:00 a.m.: it's finally a day when I can sleep late. I am sleeping dreamlessly, not remembering my name or face or that my husband and youngest are hiking into the Grand Canyon today. Then Theodora the beauteous (but like many beautiful, long-haired creatures, sometimes grumpy) calico decides it is surely the right time to wake . . . and chase her tail. To go all merry-go-round on the end of my bed, mind you.

So I wake and immediately remember taxes. This is slightly better than remembering death, but I manage to be like Woody Allen and think about that too, having a list of things To Do that must be done, sooner or later. Much later for the latter, please. Taxes today.

The cat, all silky and purring as though the queen of innocence (rather than the queen of hairballs and enormous white whiskers and sproinging! eyebrows) jumps down and sharpens her jaw on the corner of the dresser. She comes back and snuggles, purring so loudly that the dead just may waken. She has done her work, and believes the world is in the very finest fettle.

I lie there in semi-comatose state listening to her purr until it occurs to me that I may as well put up the next Lady Word of Mouth post, which is late because one of my gmail addresses is evaporating the incoming mail. (Why? What should I do? Get a new one?)

And so here it is, this time an announcement of a recent novel, Tiffany Trent's The Unnaturalists. Lady Word of Mouth is calling our names.

* * *

Meeting me elsewhere: excerpts from 2012 books (A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage, Thaliad, The Foliate Head) at Scribd. Thaliad at Phoenicia Publishing. See page tabs above for review clips and information on those brand new books plus The Throne of Psyche from 2011, and more.

The House of Words (no. 9) Zephyrus side note to 8:1

Photograph of spaghetti courtesy of sxc.hu
and Marcin Jochimczyk, Sosnowiec, Slaskie, Poland.

zephyr said...

i wonder:

how many writers were successful enough to not need a job in the era when editors could focus on art and publishing houses were individual, home owned entities? Perhaps more novelists, poets, essayists were published but how well did all those books sell? How many were remaindered?

Are there fewer successful writers--writers who did not need to supplement their income from advances-- now that publishing has changed so much?

i wonder.

It seems to me there have only been a few in each generation in each of the arts who get to do what they want and not need another source of income (perhaps in the form of a spouse who brings in the cash). Clearly publishing has become a very icky business and fewer writers get published...but does it mean fewer get to do what they want for an income?

It is clearly harder to get published, but is it harder to succeed, financially, with one's art?

i don't know. But i think it would be interesting to see those statistics.

Dear zephyr,

Perhaps you could breeze about and find the answers! What a lot of questions, and the answers not always all that clear.

Historically, citizens of this country haven't been that good at finding great writers or presenting them with a living wage through book purchases, either because of international pillaging of texts and copyright problems or lack of promotion. The states tended to be more concerned with survival early on. In fact, the U. S. didn't have much interest in a full-time writer until Charles Brockden Brown, and he didn't make it as a writer for long. Cooper, Twain, Helen Hunt Jackson, and William Dean Howells in the nineteenth-century were certainly more successful (and Melville started out with a good seller, though descended into obscurity later), but plenty of others were rewarded less--and books like Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple were the bestsellers of their century. I have read Charlotte Temple, and I know whereof he spoke when Hawthorne complained of the "damn'd mob of scribbling women." (Actually it wasn't that bad. I have encountered worse. And Hawthorne didn't think all writing women belonged in the mob.)

I think most literary historians agree that the modernist era saw supportive houses rise. Editors had famously large roles in the lives of writers, even if the authors were a bit feckless--like Thomas Wolfe, say. The late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century saw plenty of magazines that paid writers, a help to Fitzgerald and Hemingway and many others. And as time went on, even less popular writers like I. B. Singer could count on some income from a publisher who might be a tad stingy but who took pride in his stable of writers. Anecdotes of the pre-war publishing world are full of stories of writers who camp out at their publshing houses or at magazine offices and are bailed out of fixes. Editors didn't depart, as they often do now, at a hat-drop.

All these things are in the realm of fairly common knowledge. We can tell suggestive anecdotes, and I bet you could check the most recent edition of that big fat reference book, The Literary History of the United States, and find a decent overview.

The issue today is not that fewer writers are not being published--we are publishing more writers than ever. And self-publishing has added to the spate. The number of books published per year has burgeoned in recent years. But I believe that fewer books are being properly edited, marketed, and distributed.

This erosion means that fewer writers are being sustained financially. That tendency is impossible to deny simply because of the great influx of the self-published, but I also think it true of national publishing trends because of what I read but also because of what I see happening in the writing community. I have a good number of friends who have been flattened by publishing events--the implosions of HarperCollins or MacAdam Cage, the lack of loyalty by a house to writers whose editors depart, and so on.

Now that writing is also MFA business, we produce more writers capable of a certain level of achievement. Here I remember Flannery O'Connor, who approved the squashing of young writers:  "Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher."  The more desirable programs are capable of funneling students into the publishing world and establishing contacts and sometimes contracts for them. The route from the pages of a dreamy young writer to finished book has changed for many.

You ask about "doing what you want" for an income. A mid-list writer who wants to break out and be self-supporting is going to work hard and do a lot of ancillary business. For example, writer Jeff Vandermeer went independent a few years ago, and with his wife he regularly cranks out the anthologies. As he is in what could be called literary speculative fiction, he crosses boundaries and has a foot in several worlds. That's helpful. Recently he published Booklife, a rather unusual how-to manual for writers, speculative, literary, and otherwise. Jeff is attached to various summer writing programs, and he has an outgoing nature and the energy to go on tour repeatedly. He is willing to try new ways of getting the word out; he collaborates with bands, filmmakers, and artists. He throws out all sorts of spiderlines and in the process makes a larger web for himself. The end result is that he can catch a greater number of flies and be more visible. But it's not easy, hiw way, not for the timid or those unwilling to work with others.

The current trend toward commercialism (or shall we say, seeking greater profits in a tight market) is hardening the lead-book strategy--more focus on lead books, less on the list as a whole. So I hear and read, anyway. That means a large publishing house is looking for a reasonably well-written commercial prospect. I might not call the whole enterprise "icky" as you do, for I have had many good experiences in New York, but I do feel sorry that finances thrust some of our historically fine houses toward the commercial. Of course, we Americans don't own them any more so it is difficult to pull away from the demand to increase profits.

In addition, the window of opportunity for a book to gain an audience keeps shrinking. The common wisdom used to be three months. You had to get your reviews well within that narrow window because bookstores would be returning stock after three months, and because the world moves on quickly. Changes in tax law so that publishers were taxed on stock-on-hand meant that U. S. publishers had an incentive to remainder quickly and keep books moving out of the warehouse to stores and then into remainder bins. The law of unforeseen consequences kicked in, as it usually does when the government (bunch of lawyers! let's have some farmers and shopkeepers!) is involved, and backlist books no longer were kept on hand as they had been previously.

Of course, the digital age is changing all this--easy to keep backlist in stock if it's just digital. But if one yields digital rights, other things become problematic. What about that house that wants to reprint my novel but wants to accompany a printing with digital downloads? But my digital rights are lodged elsewhere... Etc. (A good many people are avoiding the whole issue by going publisher-free, and we'll look at that later, as well as the small press world.)

The idea of the publisher's current list (minus the lead books, of course) as a mound of spaghetti that is flung at a wall to see what will stick is an idea I have seen over and over and over again. And I have heard editors say or write the same. It seems to be the metaphor that clicks and fits for a lot of people.

Here, let's try it!

I love home scientific experiments.

Okay, back from the kitchen with an extra-large colander of still-warm pasta: I drag out one of our three colorful, powerful home catapults (traditional Cooperstown 6th grade project, associated with Medieval Day.) The cats are interested. The brainy calico, Theodora, is wary. The incredibly sweet, rabbit-dumb, and now-shaved-for-spring (and to get rid of dreadlocks that culminated in her resemblance to a felt hat on peg legs) Blue Persian looks at me lovingly and rubs up against the catapult.

Ready? Bate your breath, people!

I launch the spaghetti at the wall.



Courtesy Brandy at clker.com

Splat!

It's publishing all over again.

What happens is that the bulk of the pasta immediately tumbles to the floor. Some clings for a while, waving feebly. A strand hangs from the wall, half attached.

Hope that helped. Kitchen science at your service, zephyr. I am perfectly willing to be wrong about any of the above (except the pasta--that the cats and I saw with our own eyes, right?) and guarantee nothing. No statistics here, but I'd be happy if somebody dug up the numbers and shared them.

Meanwhile, I'm going to fetch Susquehanna the dog. She wags her tail for spaghetti.

Good cheer,
Marly

Transformation bookshops

http://www.miragebookmark.ch/most-interesting-bookstores.htm

Point no. 1: Now I may waste one of my precious wishes by wanting to go to Portugal and Brazil for the afternoon. Point no. 2: Note that the Borderlands Sphynx cat reveals a map to a labyrinth on its forehead (Photograph by massdistraction Flickr.com.) Point no. 3 Definition of disgrace: dis-grace, or turning an altar somewhere in the Meuse-Rhine Euroregion (or most any other part of western Europe) into a tea shop. Additional points may be deposited in the comments box.