New Publisher Listing: Happy Yak
firstwriter.com – Monday January 16, 2023
A publisher of innovative preschool concepts, laugh-out-loud picture books, and illustrated nonfiction titles. If you have a book idea in one of our focus areas that you’d like to share with us, we’d love to hear it.
George Saunders on how a slaughterhouse and some obscene poems shaped his writing
npr.org – Sunday January 15, 2023
George Saunders is one of the most acclaimed fiction writers alive, but he didn't grow up wanting to be a writer. In fact, he didn't start seriously writing short stories until he was almost 30. So kids, if you want to end up winning a MacArthur Genius Grant and the Man Booker Prize, put down the notebooks filled with angsty poems and take off the turtleneck and go work in a slaughterhouse for a while.
My five New Year’s writing resolutions
irishtimes.com – Saturday January 14, 2023
As the word ‘resolution’ is everywhere these weeks, I looked up the meaning to see what all the fuss was about and this is what I found – ‘a firm decision to do or not to do something’. Sounds a bit Shakespearean to me. And also – ‘the act of solving a problem or finding a way to improve a difficult situation’. That sounds a bit more like it.
The difficult situation being the idea of coming up with some writing resolutions for the new year that I will actually stick to and not get bored of within a week.
New Publisher Listing: Korero Press
firstwriter.com – Friday January 13, 2023
A London-based publisher with a love of lowbrow and kustom kulture. List is mainly made up of pop culture, street art, erotica and horror titles. Publishes illustrated books only. No novels.
Free virtual writing workshops and literary events to check out this January
lithub.com – Wednesday January 11, 2023
If your New Year’s resolution was something along the lines of: attend more events or be a better literary citizen, I have good news for you! Here are a handful of virtual events you can enjoy from the comfort of your couch/bed/bathtub without spending a dime. (Because you’re probably also resolving to spend less money this year, and I feel that.)
New Publisher Listing: Sentient Publications LLC
firstwriter.com – Wednesday January 11, 2023
Looking for well-written manuscripts with something new to say, particularly in the areas of holistic health, alternative education, and embodied spirituality. Submit by email. Including information about yourself and your ability to publicize your book is helpful. If you use snail mail, include a self-addressed envelope with sufficient postage if you want your submission returned. Can take several weeks or more for response.
On Writing A Mystery That Defies Rationality
crimereads.com – Tuesday January 10, 2023
When I started writing my debut novel, Liar, Dreamer, Thief, I knew two things. First, I wanted a mystery to form the novel’s core. Second, it was important to me that at least some of the main revelations—which, in a mystery, often form touchstones for the character’s internal journey—not be entirely rational.
The urge for this probably came from not being able to relate to the average mystery protagonist: an intellectually brilliant, cool cucumber whose only weakness usually takes one of two forms: a chemical addiction, like House and his pain pills, or a personality too abrasive to form close relationships (save whoever the Watson stand-in is). Either way, a sleuth’s fatal flaws (I mean flaws as written, because both of these issues can actually destroy you as a human being) can’t impair their ability to make rational deductions, because in the mystery novel, reason—of both the deductive and inductive varieties—is king.
And while I’m sure there are real people out there who embody these traits, with my protagonist, I wanted to dig my teeth into someone messy, someone whose logic was flawed and whose emotional world was more important than their intellectual one. I also wanted a plot in which the engine forward sometimes escaped rational explanation—and where the who, what, and how were only part of the reader’s experience.
AI is the end of writing
spectator.co.uk – Tuesday January 10, 2023
The computers will soon be here to do it better
Unless you’ve been living under a snowdrift – with no mobile signal – for the past six months, you’ll have heard of the kerfuffle surrounding the new generations of artificial intelligence. Especially a voluble, dutiful, inexhaustible chatbot called ChatGPT, which has gone from zero users to several million in the two wild weeks since its inception.
Speculation about ChatGPT ranges from the curious, to the gloomy, to the seriously angry. Some have said it is the death of Google, because it is so good at providing answers to queries – from instant recipes comprising all the ingredients you have in your fridge right now (this is brilliant) to the definition of quantum physics in French (or Latin, or Armenian, or Punjabi, or – one memorable day for me – Sumerian).
Others go further and say ChatGPT and its inevitably smarter successors spell the instant death of traditional education. How can you send students home with essay assignments when, between puffs of quasi-legal weed, they can tell their laptop: ‘Hey, ChatGPT, write a good 1,000-word A-level essay comparing the themes of Fleabag and Macbeth’ – and two seconds later, voila? Teachers and lecturers, like a thousand other white-collar professions, are about to be impacted, in bewildering ways, by the thinking machines.
New Publisher Listing: Fitzroy Books
firstwriter.com – Tuesday January 10, 2023
Publishes children's books, middle-grade and young-adult fiction. Send a query letter, a one-page synopsis of your story, and the first three chapters of your novel or the first fifty pages, whichever is more, via online submission system.
That’s Not Typing, It’s Writing: How T. S. Eliot Wrote “The Waste Land”
lithub.com – Monday January 9, 2023
When an interviewer said in 1959 that he’d heard that TS Eliot composed on the typewriter, he received a qualified reply. “Partly on the typewriter,” Eliot responded, and offered an insight into his recent play, The Elder Statesman, saying that it was initially produced in pencil on paper, before he transferred it to the machine. “In typing myself I make alterations,” he said, “very considerable ones.”
The early poems of the Prufrock years were mostly begun in manuscript and occasionally transferred to typescript (Conrad Aiken possessed a sheet produced by Eliot in splendid purple italic on a Blickensderfer). But for the poems of the “French” style—the Hogarth, Ovid and Knopf editions—and for the period of The Waste Land—a run of five years and perhaps sixteen poems—Eliot appears to have altered his approach.
In August 1916, he told Aiken that he was composing on the typewriter and enjoying lucidity and compression as a result. Most likely, he was thinking of his prose when he wrote this, but it may not be a coincidence that from that moment no draft manuscripts at all survive until the pages of The Waste Land in 1921. Some papers may have been written and destroyed in the act of transfer onto the machine, a moment which, to Eliot, marked the end of their practical value; but the condition of some initial typescripts—many in states of reasonably heavy revision—suggests that at this time Eliot was making his first drafts directly onto the typewriter.
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