To which I commented  Monopolies are generally evil, and I hold no brief for Amazon.com– although why Amazon’s evil makes Barnes & Noble and Big Publishing into good guys is beyond me.  B&N with their end-of-the-aisle bribe stacks and books with a shorter shelf life than yoghurt.  Puh-leeze.

I personally have published with big publishers, small ones, university presses, and an independent co-operative press.  While I am, at least for the moment, still a member of the Authors Guild, I do not find them representing my interests.  AG works for  Scott Turow and  others who make a lot of money selling books.  I’m glad Mr. Turow and his ilk have a guild to represent them, but don’t let the Authors Guild fool you into thinking it does anything for people who don’t sell a lot of books.

So we’re living in interesting times.  Lean back and enjoy the ride.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/17/technology/amazon-rewrites-the-rules-of-book-publishing.html?ref=technology

In the Amazon business model, there’s no advance, and often no agent, although some agents are beginning to participate as publishers.  I have to say that my sympathy for the big commercial publishers  (not that Amazon isn’t or won’t be one soon) is very limited.  They dropped me unceremoniously 25 years ago– well, not entirely true, that was Scribner’s.  My last big publisher was HarperCollins for the Marco kid books, and that was only fifteen years ago– anyhow, the bottom line is, Conventional publishers dropped me and a lot of my friends– mid-list and literary writers of high repute and great accomplishment– and we’ve been scrambling ever since.  I’ve used small presses, nonprofit presses, university presses, cooperative presses:  I’ve published with all of these, as well as with Scribner’s and HarperCollins, and had Sc & HC been more nurturing of me when I was not a best seller for them, I might be less ready to embrace the Great Change going on now with ebooks and self publishing.  There are myriad problems including, at the very least, who are the gatekeepers, but also vast opportunities.  And for me, a lot of fun too.  The opportunities include simply being able to make books available to people who who might want to read them– miniscule numbers beside what bestseller oriented publishers except, but human beings, readers, communication.  I have been having a great time with my various ventures.

Anyhow, I like novels that include a lot of life other than writing.  If there are no writers in the story, I’m happy as a clam. But this is different.  I’m doing something wonderful that most people will never have the opportunity to do, which is to revisit, simultaneously, my adolescence and my thirty-something self reflecting and recreating our adolescence.

And I’m doing this because of the necessity of digitalizing our literature.
I have a couple of books that are in one-book-at-a-time print format that don’t have digital versions.  First published between 1979 and 1983 or so, they were scanned in, but never made digital until now.  The immediate impetus to make e-books of my Blair Morgan novels, but who knows what else in the future– but whatever the else, is, it will be digital.

I paid a company to scan Higher Ground in as doc file, and they did it for what felt to me like a pretty reasonable fee (I hondled, which is the oldest of commercial transactions– I can’t afford your price what can you do for me?–and one of the things this experience is teaching me is how many words and phrases I’ve substituted with Yiddish or standard English– have lost a lot of West Virginia).
So I got the raw .doc file, and I’m going through the manuscript looking for ‘s turned into asterisks, and page numbers and page breaks I don’t want– you can pay the company to do this too, but it seemed like an opportunity to look for other kinds of egregious errors.  What’s happening, though, is not so much that I’m finding errors, but that I’m getting this wonderful sense of being with myself thirty years ago and with myself forty-five years ago– the self that wrote the novel, and the teenager whose experience was the material the novel was made of.
My thirties self was before Joel, during my years of pretty intense psychotherapy.  I was relatively close to my teen years, especially to the language and imagery I used at the time.  I really got the intense ambition that was expressed by wanting to be a princess AND a class officer– also the painful and embarrassing class-ism, which is one of the subjects of the novel.  The ambition, though, surprises me.

I was also excited by some of the stories I didn’t write:  I found myself wanting to do a story about Bunny, not told through Blair’s alternatively envying and condescending eyes, but really about Bunny.

In the actual language, I find a lot of overwriting, and I’m cutting passages that just get overblown.  I’m cutting sentences and phrases but only rarely adding anything.  I don’t want to change it, but to tighten a little.  Some of the tightening that I wouldn’t do then because I wouldn’t type again.

And, along with all this, I had just forgotten a lot of the story.  I’m more than half way through– in the middle of the teen part– and I feel sort of stunned by the power of the past come to life like this.
Thanks be to the Digital Gods for this opportunity.

Interesting stuff– I’m on the writers’ side of course, except that I want all information to be free, live long, and prosper.

What is  more real and engaging than a real time image of a California hummingbird sitting on her nest, chasing off a marauding gecko, spearing and disposing of a non-viable egg?  Real reality, happening now, and a crowd of chat commenting on the hummingbird’s little life.

Of course the production values aren’t all they could be with the shaking rosebush making the nest waver, and suspense isn’t built up very well: suddenly there’s the lizard, in the corner of the screen, and then the hummer’s shadow, then the lizard’s gone.  The hummer’s needle nose appears, and the bad egg is gone.

But thousands of us are following this real reality show.  It’s lots of fun, and a healthy use of technology, of course.

So what’s the connection to novels and stories?  Personally, I’ve always read at least partly to learn about living.  What can a writer offer that the Phoebe webcam doesn’t? What do written stories do that Phoebe the hummingbird’s webcam doesn’t do?

Writers shape reality of course– not that the webcam by its very choice of angle and subject doesn’t shape reality too.   But stories , in my opinion, have a richer context and more connections– a web of relationships in many dimensions.  We have, by telling the story in that bland concatenation of symbols that is the written word, the advantage of igniting the reader’s imagination, we hope, so that the reader, not overwhelmed by the realness of the experience (as we often are with visual media like the movies) is allowed to make even more connections.

Clearly the people watching the hummingbird are identifying with it–anthropomorphizing and giving personality as if it were a Disney character.  This is probably a mistake.  In novels and stories, we are required to participate in the building of the work.  The hummingbird doesn’t need watchers;  the story needs its reader.

The irony of course is the hundreds of  people who want to write novels, and are they reading novels? The National Book Critics Circle blog Critical Mass has a nice meditation on the difference between reading blogs and really reading, and Shelley Ettinger pointed me toward an article in the blog on the state of publishing, Moby Lives, about who is actually using e-books at the present time (more men than women, higher income than lower).

She also gave me the link to an article in Poets and Writers magazine about the Espresso Book Machine .  This hundred thousand dollar plus machine will print a digitalized book instantly– they’ve been in development for a couple of years, and this article touches on several issues about the future of reading:  the instant hard copy books but also e-books  (and the fascinating fact that one of the developers of the Espresso is Jason Epstein who was also part of the development of paperback books in the early 1950′s!).  I like the possibility of small independent bricks-and-mortar stores around the world that have access to all the books–  I’m visualizing a little coffee shop place with only a few hard copy books, but free wifi and one of the Espresso Book Machines, and people reading and writing, and maybe even looking at shelved books.  Nice, don’t you think?  Or at any rate, not bad.

Universities have been picking up on the possibility of  instant books much  faster than the dinosaurs I mean the publishing industry, which is busy justifying their high prices as in an article in the March 1, 2010  New York Times. They don’t mention that part of the overhead for their books is not just underpaid editorial staff but also the corporate CEO’s Lear Jet.  See my article reviewing The Business of Books.

I tried hard– I went for years avoiding the Internet  (I started using a computer more than twenty years ago), insisted on a black and white  (or actually bronze and tan) screen monitor instead of color.  But email was too convenient.  Having links to my work available online was too wonderful.  Experimenting with giving free writing exercises was too empowering.

And, I tell myself, back in the day, there were distractiuons, too, weren’t there?  Pencils to sharpen?  Coffee to make? And, especially, angst to experience– the high drama of writers’ block!  Now, instead of suffering, I answer email.

Or blog.

In the mid nineteen-eighties, my husband Andy Weinberger and my brother-in-law Internet Guy David Weinberger brought me not quite kicking and screaming but muttering a lot into the world of computers. At first, my Zorba was for nothing but writing without having to retype. Well worth learning the stupid Word Star codes to avoid retyping. For a long time, I refused even to have a color monitor. I wanted my computer to be a writing machine.

But now, more than twenty years later, I spend at least an hour a day doing business by email; I keep three websites and upload to others. I do a Constant Contact e-newsletter for my local Integration organization; I write a newsletter on books that I email and post on my web page; I teach an occasional writing class online. I have also been blogging in a desultory fashion for a while, mostly posting an edited version of my private journal.

Now I’m going to try this blog, using WordPress on my web site, and I’m going to focus on what is happening to the written word in the social networking online world. Some of it is an unmitigated good– lots of small online zines for poetry, not to mention Garrison Keillor’s rich-mouthed daily readings at Writer’s Almanac– and some is scary. Book sales are way down– and for us so-called midlist writers (Gad I had that term)– book contracts are more and more difficult to find. It’s a moment when we stand at an abyss– unless, if you look at it a different way, it’s a vault to the stars.