writer's life

I'm having so much fun. A friend gave me a laptop and now I'm wifi. I think I just made my first internet error (at least one I know about) by subscribing to dadamobile.com for ringtones after seeing an attractive ad on my blog. Now I can't get through to the company and it looks like they're set to charge me 10bucks a month for a service advertised for free.

But I'm having such a good time! Choosing all those fun options (homestarr runner, the bhaghavad gita, the NYTimes) for my front page. I love how writing is evolving so rapidly that it's leaving traditional publishing spinning and shaking.

Really the industry now treats authors the same way they treat pop-star would-bes, and the author who builds a catalogue, progressing toward finer work and slowly building sales is non-existent.

This from The Author (journal of the Society of Authors, UK) in an article by Nicholas Clee: an author sold 18000 copies of a novel in paperback, not enought to cover the advance - but a respectable figure. 'The author's at work on his third,' the agent said. 'I haven't the heart to tell him not to bother.' The publisher had written him off and planned not to promote the second book (presumably, the author didn't know that either).

Can you imagine the bewilderment, the shame, humiliation, anger and even guilt that author will feel when he figures out the game that's been played? Books is the music industry now.

That's why I'm loving this tech stuff so much. In the same magazine, Danuta Kean talks about books-to-mobile phones - called iCue. But it's expensive. And the way publishers lag behind with websites. And the way they haven't figured out blog culture yet. Part of me reads that with a perverse glee. Part of me wants them to pay for being so short-sighted they see only the bottom line and not the glorious opportunities that exist for writers in cyberspace.

As a person who loves alternative culture, I'm excited about the ways that authors no longer have to play the big-books game. The cost of self-publishing is rock-bottom - and going down. You'd have to put your advance into publicity if you wanted another shot at the big cherry anyway, so an author who self-publishes and arranges professional publicity often makes more than with traditional publishing and all its middlemen.

We can publish instantly on the Internet. Turn up your noses - call us 'pajama writers', but look at how the music industry - wedded to vinyl, cassettes, and lps - lost out to the kids who dowloaded millions of dollars of music and sent those multi-million dollar musicians to rock bottom.

Will Barnes and Noble suffer the same kinds of shocks as the libraries did at the advent of dvds and vhs?

I love books. But I'm not wedded to books. I'm wedded to writing and the joys of writing. In The Right to Write by Julia Cameron she says: What if there were no such thing as a writer? What if everyone simply wrote? What if there were no 'being a real writer' to aspire to? What if writing were simply about the act of writing?

That's our future. That's cyberspace. There will always be room - and a need - for the person who's put in years crafting, making deadlines, and reporting responsibly. For the novelist who redrafts 16 times. But its an expansion that's taking place, a making room for many voices.

Today, we can all be writers.