HelenKay Dimon

Like the title of the post? Yeah, it’s extreme and a bit dramatic. It came to mind while I was reading this article by Melanie La’Brooy concerning chick lit and the amount of anger and derision that seems to be heaped upon it these days. La’Brooy is the author of Romantic Fiction and Love Struck.

She’s clearly fed up. She tells the story of what someone she knew did with one of her books:

Then an acquaintance boarded the plane. Torn between fidelity and the desire to keep his highbrow literary reputation intact, he didn’t hesitate: Love Struck was shoved unceremoniously into an air-sickness bag, where it remained throughout the flight.

She ties the attitude not just to literary folks who believe chick lit is beneath them and worthy only of contempt, but also to feelings on feminism:

This story neatly illustrates an apparently prevalent view as to where all chick lit belongs. Yet critical contempt for this newly emerged genre seems to have less to do with its quality of writing than with the perceived politics and nature of the genre. In 1998, Time magazine asked “Is Feminism Dead?” before concluding it was, with specific reference to the popularity of Bridget Jones’s Diary. In Britain, renowned writers such as Beryl Bainbridge have condemned the writing and reading of chick lit as a waste of time. Doris Lessing has referred to “instantly forgettable books” and regretted that “it’s a pity that so many young women are writing like that”.

An interesting article for those looking for something non-holiday related.

Got the okay to show the cover for my August 2006 release – yeah! Here is Viva Las Bad Boys. The Kensington art department did a really nice job of capturing the feel of the book. I like the eye-catching look. Not hard to tell this one doesn’t take place in Kansas.

It’s not on pre-order yet, but it’s never too early to set aside some money to buy 40 or 50 copies.

[Big thanks to Alison for taking a good portion of her evening and valuable writing time to help me upload this photo so that it wasn't so freakishly large and scary.]

There appears to be a tendency among writers to marry other writers. Look at Tabitha and Stephen King. Jonathan and Faye Kellerman, Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman, and there are others. The careers don’t always launch at the same time. Many times, one partner is more successful than the other. Now we have a new husband/wife writing household. Zadie Smith – if you haven’t heard of her, I have no idea where you live because she’s everywhere – is married to lawyer Nick Laird. Laird has left the practice of law (good for him) to write full time. His single title debut Utterly Monkey comes out soon. Elle describes it as:

…fast-paced and action-packed, buzzing with sex and drugs and thrown punches. With a title drawn from a hilarious scatological inside joke, Laird’s yarn celebrates the sacred, intimate, and often flawed history of lifelong friends who know far too much about each other – for aren’t they the best kind?

Scatological hilarity aside, I’ll buy it because I like the title. But imagine that household – wife is a literary darling and husband is stepping into the limelight on his own. No pressure.

For those who love reading Harlequin’s Signature Select and those trying to write for Select, I have some bad news – it’s shutting down. The line will publish through June 2006 then no more. Admittedly I never really understood Select or what was supposed to set it apart from the rest of Harlequin’s program. Select didn’t appear to have an identity like the rest of the lines. It was more of a showcasing issue, but the marketing on that was never clear. Since it’s good to have as many legitimate and positive opportunities for writers as possible and since only a few publishers welcome shorter romance fiction, this is a loss. The good news might be, since Signature Select allowed for books that would easily fit elsewhere in Harlequin’s program, all is not lost. Just know not to expect good news if you’re waiting for an editor response on a Select submission.

I came across a book called The Tent by Margaret Atwood. Came across in the sense that I read about it in Elle. While you may not think of Elle as a repository of book knowledge, let me tell you it highlights some interesting stuff.

The fact Atwood has a book coming out is not news. She seems to have a new book come out every month. It’s the description of this one that grabbed my attention: “…a slim gem of collected occasional writings…” Occasional writings? What the hell are those? I’m guessing they’re not short stories or, well, they’d be called short stories. According to the publisher’s description, some of the writings are only a paragraph long.

Exactly how important and influential do you have to be as an author to have your every thought be worthy of a book. I write useless paragraphs all the time. I also write shopping lists and emails. I’m guessing no one would pay to read those. Atwood’s thoughts must be a bit more worthy than mine – worthy enough to demand $18.00 for 160 pages.

The Funeral Planner by Lynn Isenberg was one of those books I kept looking at and finally bought. For some reason, the cover stayed with me. Yesterday I was checking in at Chick Lit Books and saw an upcoming release by Leslie Carroll called Spin Doctor.

I’m thinking these covers looks awfully similar. The question is whether or not this is a good thing.

If I live to be 108 (and I kind of hope I don’t because that’s just too long), I will never understand the whole “John Smith writing as James Patterson” thing. Unless I missed something, James Patterson is a living, breathing author. Sure, there might be some debate on the author part, but take that as fact for a moment. Why is someone writing as him or for him? Is Patterson really that busy that he can’t write his own books?

I guess the good news in this Publishers Marketplace deal report is that one of Patterson’s minions is now writing his own books under his own name and earning a crap load of money to do so.

Fiction: General/Other: Co-author with James Patterson of five books (three billed on the jacket) Andrew Gross’s individual debut THE BLUE ZONE, about a young woman on the hunt for her missing father — a successful businessman forced into the Witness Protection Program who has suddenly disappeared — who comes to question who he really is and whether either of them can come out alive, to David Highfill at William Morrow, in a major deal, rumored to be well into seven figures, for three books, for publication beginning in 2007, by Simon Lipskar at Writers House (world).

Wonder if Patterson is looking for a new mentee…

Every now and then I come across a book or series of books that normally would not appeal to me and, well, decide for whatever reason that I simply must read it/them. This time it’s books by author Lauren Willig. Everything I know about Willig I read in three minutes on her site – a site that appears to be outdated since she has a December 2005 release that isn’t even on there. I’ve become obsessed with her books The Secret History of the Pink Carnation and The Masque of the Black Tulip despite the fact they’re historical romances. My usual way is to only read historicals under protest and while whining. There are some exceptions, but those are rare.

I’m thinking the covers are partly to blame. There is something about them that stands out. Could also be that B&N has listed one or both books on the “coming soon” romance list for what seems like forever. Whatever it was, it worked. I’m hooked.

I am a big believer in the idea that some authors are more prolific than others, and that the difference in productivity does not say anything about their respective talents. Having said that, I do have to admit that there was a romance author I avoided in 2005 specifically because she had so many releases. You may be thinking these theories contradict each other. Yes, I know. But the idea got me thinking, can an author have too many releases in a year? To find the answer, I googled Alexander McCall Smith, the author of The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series and about a billion other releases over the last few years. In my great search – yeah, the one I used as an excuse not to finish chapter 3 – I stumbled across this article.

The cons of the prolific author seem to be:
1. Everything starts to sound the same – or reviewers insist everything sounds the same…
2. Market saturation.
3. People assume you’re a hack – that one isn’t specifically in the article but I see bandied about, so I thought I’d throw it in the mix.

The article points out that the standards may be different depending on whether the writer is of the literary or genre variety. In one circle it’s acceptable, in another, well, see previous comment on hack.

There is an acknowledged double standard in how we view a prolific genre writer and a fruitful literary author. Musing on the seemingly inexhaustible John Updike, David Foster Wallace once asked, “Has the son-of-a-bitch ever had one unpublished thought?” Updike’s absurdly prodigious output — in the form of novels, as well as short stories, travel writing and literary criticism — has undermined his stature in the eyes of Foster Wallace, as well as many fiction readers. It hearkens back to this notion we have of how “serious” novels are created — that every sentence is the result of years of contemplation and agonized toil. Anything less is deemed half-assed — or purely for a commercial audience. Atkinson acknowledges the stigma. “If a Jonathan Lethem produced something like The Fortress of Solitude every year and a half, I think he would be lauded a lot less,” she says.

And yet, there are some literary authors whom we embrace for their prodigiousness. Humorist P.G. Wodehouse wrote somewhere in the neighbourhood of 100 novels, but has never been viewed as a mere word factory. (Even by Foster Wallace, who has provided gushing blurbs to a number of Wodehouse reprints.)

There is also that exceptional breed of literary author who not only produces obsessively but does so in a wide range of styles and with a staggering commitment to quality. Joyce Carol Oates (Them, Zombie) is the most prominent representative of that tiny pantheon. Neal Stephenson (Cryptonomicon, the Baroque Cycle series) and William T. Vollmann (Butterfly Stories, Royal Family) each average a novel a year — each typically the heft of a phone book. Stephenson‘s three-part Baroque Cycle numbers over 2,500 pages; Vollmann’s Rising Up and Rising Down — a seven-volume treatise on the history of violence — weighs in at 3,352 pages. Writers like that don’t invite scorn so much as unmitigated envy.

Does this answer my question? No, not really. But, for the record, it was a nice procrastination tool.

Writers get asked all the time where their ideas come from, as if there is a big book of story ideas out there somewhere and we all get to pick ten. That’s not true, by the way… On Sunday The Washington Post highlighted a book that proves ideas come from everywhere. PostSecret: Extraordinary Confessions From Ordinary Lives by Frank Warren easily wins the how-to-make-money-without-really-doing-anything award. It’s brilliant. Warren wrote a book by doing the following:

The Germantown artist asked people to mail him their deepest secrets anonymously on postcards. The book collects hundreds of responses, which range from intimate confessions to dark humor to heartbreaking expressions of regret.

It’s just one of those books I need to pick up and page through to see for myself. One review warned that “some of the submissions are really, really creepy.” How can I resist that?