KaBooM Writers

Holy Cow

Once upon a time, I translated the entire Egyptian Book of the Dead from hieroglyphs. It took me about 10 years. I was asked by my then father-in-law if I thought I would be able to make a profit of $40,000 a year through my writing. I have to say up front, I’m not married to his son any more, and I was never in this business of writing and translating for the money. I was in it for the long haul, because it is through language and thinking about language that I process and experience the world.  (For more on why writers really write see Lynn Pruett’s Nov 18 post.)

This afternoon, however, I found a letter in my mailbox from the current publisher of my book Awakening Osiris (1988) asking me if I would amend my contract with them. They’d like for me to give them the rights to sell my work as an e-book for 15% royalty.

This is one of those times that thinking about money rather than words might be a good thing. You see, I distrust e-books.  (See my previous KaBoom post on the issue.) I am, by goddess, a hard-core paper and ink kind of writer. I realize that in our digital days/daze more people are reaching for their Kindle. Most of them buy their e-books from Amazon.com.

And I don’t really like it when Amazon starts to sell hardback copies of my NEW book –just released a month ago—at a discount price that is so steep I can’t afford to buy it at that price because the shipping and handling costs me nearly 100 times more than the royalty I’d earn from the book.  What sense does this make?  If there is relatively little cost to the publisher to produce an e-book, what advantage do I, the author who spent 10 years writing it, have to give away the pittance of royalties I do make? The e-book takes money out of my pocket and seems to put it into theirs.  (See a literary agent’s calculations of the actual cost: http://andyrossagency.wordpress.com/tag/royalties/)

Might there be a copyright infringement problem with e-books down the line? Heaven knows I already see much, too much of the inside of my books on Google Books or Amazon’s “Click Here to See Inside” feature.  Heck, I can even search my own text and footnotes faster online than I can by going to the bookshelf right next to me and looking in my own book.  So I am not sure I like this new publishing world. It worries me. It should worry any author.

Let’s face it, Gutenberg all but ruined the beautiful illuminated text of the Middle Ages.  Then what about all those beautiful hieroglyphs that got turned into hen scratches which became the demotic and Greek alphabets.  I realize, of course, that writing as a product changes as the world that produces these texts changes.  I just don’t want to let go of my paper and ink just yet, or my royalties. Sadly, even the paper and ink money is about to bite the dust.  All money is virtual anyway.

But wait… Isn’t my contract written on paper, and doesn’t my signature need to be in ink. There must be some value to paper and ink after all, right?  Okay, if it were your book, what would you do?

Yes, you’re looking at a photo of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, a photo I took last week. I rose early in Salt Lake City to stand in line for the Sunday broadcast of “Music and the Spoken Word,” program #4284. The show dates back to 1929 and is the world’s longest continuing network broadcast.

I didn’t need to arrive early to ensure a good seat. The tabernacle has no bad ones. Although it was built in 1867, the building has acoustics that permit a pin dropped on stage to be heard from any seat in the house. My early arrival gave me plenty of time to consider that any art, whether music, performance, or the written word, shares a common process.

Choir members, all of whom are volunteers, go their separate ways during the week and labor over the next Sunday’s selections on their own. They reconvene at the tabernacle in Salt Lake City for a Thursday night rehearsal. Even this first attempt at coming together is open to the public, the trials of producing a thirty-minute live performance laid bare for hundreds of witnesses.

The group returns to the tabernacle early Sunday morning for a dress rehearsal prior to the actual broadcast. I heard the program twice through, heard the choir members warned against rattling their music during the organ solo. I heard how conductor Mack Wilberg’s feedback on the spiritual “Walk Together, Children” resulted in a crisper rendition the second time round, the voices ascending as if held aloft by a host of balloons.

“Now would be a good time to cough,” joked the announcer just before the live broadcast began. Members of the choir and audience laughed, then dutifully rehearsed coughing.

How hard this business of rehearsal and revision, yet how necessary. Revision brings us one step closer to the perfect product, the product that matches our goals. How amazing the longevity of the choir and its sustained energy, the constant drive toward honing craft, the role of coaching, the awareness of an attentive and unending audience.

I’m sure the choir has its critics, but I believe the performance is made the best it can be through sheer dint of hard work and revisioning. The end product delighted the assembled group of diverse ages and nationalities, who by the end of the polished performance were ready to receive the closing message: “May peace be with you this day and always.”

If you’ve never heard of it before,  National Novel Writing Month—also known as NaNoWriMo—sounds like utter insanity.  Produce 50,000 words in the month of November?  Well, the banner on their website does bill the undertaking as a “thirty days and nights of literary abandon.”

And founder Chris Baty admits in his 2004 book No Plot? No Problem! that writing a novel in a month can seem like a “dumb idea.”  Yet hundreds of thousands of people are signing up for this craziness every year.  Something seems to be working.

Why do it in the first place?  Says Baty:  “If there’s one thing successful novelists agree on, it’s this: The single best thing you can do to improve your writing is to write.  Copiously.” There is a secret, he claims, to accomplishing this: the deadline.  For those of us who mean to write and never quite get around to it, being “forced” to produce sheer quantity really does matter.  Pushing ourselves to write when we think we can’t requires that we blast through a lot of the static in our heads and lives.  Those who stick with it to the end discover ways to focus and press on.  The end result inevitably surprises.  Most of us already know this, or at least part of us does.  NaNoWriMo simply discovered a way to shine a mega-watt high beam on the process.  And provides a turbo charged kick in the pants to get with it, already.

In fact the deadline and commitment work so well other creatives, inspired by the site’s success, have applied them to genres other than novels.   Manga artists sign up.  Poets commit to writing everyday.   Two years ago on this blog Susan Brown shared her discovery of journaling guru Dawn DeVries Sokol’s project NaNoJouMo or  “National Nonstop Journaling Month.”  Sokol says she’s doing it again this year, providing a prompt everyday.

Intrigued? Check out one of these sites.  What the online supports provide are inspiration,  focus, and virtual companions on the outrageous journey.  (At NaNoWriMo there are even regional meetups, if you really want to find others in your locale who are likewise committed to literary abandon.)  There are as many different ways to approach this challenge as there are folks who take it up.  Last year when a fellow writer talked me into committing to at least writing everyday through the month of November something shifted in my writing, and my life’s priorities.

This year I plan on using the site to access the site’s “Pep Talk Archive.”   Within it I’ve found a treasure of a page by Linda Barry, one of my favorite cartoonists.  She says: “Dear Writer, Reconsider your hand. Reconsider writing by hand. There is a kind of story that comes from hand. Writing which is different from a tapping-on-a-keyboard-kind-of-story.”

Barry says writing this way demands we engage not only our imagination, which is pure thought, and not the planning part of our minds.  Instead, she says, writing by hand requires we use our physical bodies as we move pen across paper and couples that with our accessing a capacity that is neither all the way inside us or all the way outside of us—it’s a “between” place where stories “happen” as part of the “image world.”

Of course I’m fortunate enough to practice my crafting in the midst of this group, KaBooM.  I’ve found myself looking back to Mary’s May 16th post on “The Power of the Pen,”  and was tickled silly to be reminded that the previous post here was Normandi’s on “Swift Words”!

Here’s to your finding a path to the swift words that flow from your pen in the upcoming weeks.