Month: May 2005
Moorishgirl pal and sometime guest blogger Jim Ruland has a piece on NPR’s Day to Day, called “Vets? No, But They Write What They Know.” In addition to being a fine writer and punk rock enthusiast, Jim is also a Navy veteran. In his most recent incarnation, he is teaching a composition class for Santa Monica Community College. He designed the course specifically for veterans, except that part was left out of the catalog description, resulting in an unexpected enrollment: most of the students were teenagers, most of them were female, none of them were vets. Listen to what happened next.
Over at the Herald, Alastair Mabbot discusses first books and their importance in the artist’s career.
It’s the music business cliche known to everyone: an artist gets his whole life to write a first album, but a few months to write the second.
That’s usually true of books as well. There’s a unique quality to debut novels, most of which were written with as much passion, intensity and conviction as an author can hope to experience, but usually without any hope of being published.
“This is something they might well have been working on for as long as they can remember,” says Pru Rowlandson. “Whereas, the second book, most of them manage to get out in a couple of years. It is also likely to be the most autobiographical thing you ever write.”
I guess I went about it the wrong way, then. Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits isn’t autobiographical in the traditional sense (I’ve never tried to cross the Mediterranean on a boat, never hustled for a job, etc.) while the novel I’m working on now is much more personal. One of the two main characters is a Moroccan woman who comes to the United States to study, for example, and the other is a man with a very conflicted relationship with his father.
The Daily Telegraph ran a piece about lit blogs a couple of weeks ago, and now it’s finally online. It features several popular and deserving blogs, among which The Elegant Variation, Maud Newton, Edrants, and, of course, The Complete Review, whose proprietor I’ve had a huge online crush on for a while.
Over at the Lit Blog Co-Op site, editor Reagan Arthur talks about the selection of Case Histories for Read This!
So, no, CASE HISTORIES was not lurking shyly in the corner, waiting for someone to notice it but I can tell you that despite all that good news and good fortune, it has not hit the New York Times bestseller list, and its sales, while certainly respectable, are not so stratospheric that the Read This! recommendation is the blog equivalent of sending coals to Newcastle. I get the sense that some readers are disappointed enough in the book’s success and its corporate publisher that they’ll give it a miss on principle, and that old maternal stand-by comes to mind: don’t cut off your nose to spite your face! Borrow it from a friend, or the library — I’m not interested in boosting our sales figures, only, like the estimable folks behind the LitBlog Co-Op, in sharing the rare satisfaction to be found in reading a great book.
Agree? Disagree? Hit the thread with your comments.
BTW, while this doesn’t have the same weight as the hallowed NY Times bestseller list, the selection seems to have at least some impact on online sales. Over at Powells.com’s bestseller list, Case Histories is currently at #21.
Please take a moment to visit FreeThemNow.org, a new website that seeks to bring world attention to the plight of more than 408 Moroccan POWs–the world’s longest-held prisoners of war. Captured in the early days of the conflict in Western Sahara between Morocco and the Polisario Front, these people have been held for nearly 30 years. Senator McCain, a former POW, has recently joined the Free Them Now group.
Frequent Moorishgirl contributor Dan Olivas has joined La Bloga, a group of kick-ass Chicano bloggers posting on all things literary. Something to add to your bookmarks.