C.M. Mayo has posted her talk “The Manuscript Is Ready—(Or Is It?)—What’s Next?” from the Writer’s Center’s recent conference on publishing, and what a boon it is for writers in the pre-publication process, trying to decide if self-publishing might be for them and what to expect on the road to the finished book. Great links and resources abound!
From the intro:
“So you've written your first book. Now what to do with it? It might appear that you're about to enter the labyrinth, but no worries, we're going to take three easy steps, and then a bird's eye view at what is less a labyrinth than a conveyor belt. Finally, for those looking for commercial publication, we'll look at three key areas to consider working on immediately, if not already.”
And all laced with good humor:
“Similarly, a writer who aims for a place in the literary pantheon with Edgar Allen Poe, Edith Wharton, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Eudora Welty, and so on, had also better be prepared to do an unholy amount of revision. Readers, even the most cultivated ones, rarely guess at how many times a quality literary novel or memoir has been revised. The reason is simple: when the writer goes out on tour to flog their book, they have zero incentive to confess how much work went into it, no more indeed than the leading ballerina dancing the Sugar Plum Fairy would halt, mid-twirl, to shout to the balcony, "AYYY, my bloody feet!!!!"
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Talk about short: the six-word story (Hemingway’s famous example: “For sale, baby shoes, never worn.” Fleeting Magazine is holding a no-fee contest for a six-word story, and the prize is a night at NYC’s Algonquin Hotel, where Hemingway came up with his gem. Deadline is September 30, 2012. More details are here. (Thanks to Meredith for the link.)
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From “THIS LITTLE CEMETERY WANTS TO GROW”:
Hurt things continue.The frost last night singedthe roses, but they'llbrave it out a bitlonger till wintercloses tight….
Read on. And be sure to look at Michelle’s fascinating “Story Behind the Poems”:
…These poems are likely to appear in my next collection, Million, Million (which I'm aiming to finish this summer or fall); in it I explore how poems can enact huge shifts in time and scale, and so reorient us suddenly, shifting where we are and how we got here. A million million equals a trillion; a trillion seconds ago is 34,000 years ago when the human race was painting on cave walls, when rhinoceroses lived in Europe, and the proto-Indo-European language was being developed. …
