How Do I Know What I Think Until I See What I Say?

Long story short--ebooks will not replace regular books. "But Jay," you may be saying (if you are not Anonymous), "ebooks are soooo much more convenient." Or "oh Jay, you Luddite, ebooks are the wave of the future, like the internet to news." Or even, "oh, Jay, books are sooo twentieth century and ebooks are the new thing!" Yeah, I don't buy it. And it's not just because I often prefer paper to electronic. I send paper cards instead of ecards (despite the fact that I work for one of the largest providers of ecards in the world). It's not that ecards are bad--they aren't. They're super cute, in fact. They have music. They have animation. They have sock puppets . I send them all the time. But for the important occasions--your birthday, Mother's Day, to say thank you for something--you're going to get an actual card or, depending on the circumstances, a handwritten letter !* I don't think ebooks are going to...

Agent Jessica, of Bookends LLC , has a post here about getting rejected by your own agent. An author apparently sent a manuscript to her* agent, who didn't like it. That's gotta suck. I don't look forward to it, myself. But I have to say that I totally expect it to happen. By that I don't mean that I have low self-esteem and that I will inevitably be rejected. (Believe me, I have issues, but low self-esteem? Not one of them.) It's just that, like when I was querying agents and expected to be rejected, I fully expect that someday I will send something to my agent and he'll be like "nah, I don't think so. What else you got?" I don't know where I got that expectation--whether I picked it up by osmosis from the Internet or it was just something I assumed--but when it happened to a friend of mine, not too long ago, I wasn't at all surprised. Disappointed for him, because, like I said--SUCKS--but not, like, shocked . I think this kind o...

I don't like non-fiction generally, because it is usually boring.* It's reminiscent of history textbooks, to me, all first this happened, then this happened, blah blah blah , can't something explode already? Jeez! But, no, it can't explode, because it didn't explode in Real Life, Jay, and this is non -fiction. YAWN. That said, though, good writing conquers all, because there are some writers who can make me read stuff I would never otherwise read (Atul Gawande's Complications ) about subjects I don't even care about (Michael Lewis's Moneyball ), and David Simon's Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets is one of those books. By now, you're probably familiar with David Simon--he's the guy who created infamous HBO series The Wire , which was proclaimed, like, the Savior of All Television, Espcially HBO after The Sopranos went off the air,** but this book is where it all starts. The book is basically a recount of the entire year of 1988 wit...

Over at Mysterious Matters (it's a good blog! I imagine it's probably even a better blog if you actually (a) read mysteries or (b) write them), the author (he doesn't identify himself) in an entry about pet peeves talks about using description in an effective way . I, like Mysterious, don't care a lot about highly descriptive passages. While I'm reading, I'll actually think something like "blah blah blah the rolling fields, great, move ON ," unless there's something about the description that the author has convinced me I need to see. Maybe that's why I don't have a lot of description in my books. I'll throw in a couple of lines about the character somewhere near the front of book (without having him or her look in the mirror, thank you very much!), and that's pretty much it. My books take place in high school, so I guess, on some subconscious level, I thought "everyone knows what a high school is. why bother?" But t...

1. I love that cheesy VH1 show The Pick-Up Artist . It's a joke, as far as relating to women goes, and I can't believe that women actually sleep with that Mystery guy, but the guys who are on the show are endearingly clueless, and it's nice to see them gain the confidence to actually speak to a girl. I don't endorse it, but I do enjoy watching it. (And I'm totally picking Simeon for the win, in case you're interested.) 2. A little I in parentheses, like this -- (i) -- is called a romanette. If you didn't know that until just this minute, don't feel bad. Until November 11th, neither did the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court . 3. I really don't think it's possible to over-estimate the joyfulness of stickers. When I taught, I would always give out stickers to kids who got a perfect score on the pop quizzes, and they were always sooo excited. Girls put them on their faces. Boys kept a collection of them on their folders. They were visibl...

There's been a lot of discussion lately about the dire state of the publishing industry. (For example, see Maya Reynolds' always-useful summaries here , and Nathan Bransford's imploring here ). Apparently, like the auto industry and the banking industry and the real estate market and retail industry and pretty much every other profession you can think of (except, of course, for funeral homes), the publishing industry is seeing declining sales as people try to keep more of their money in their pockets. These are hard times economically for a lot of people, and that blows. But I don't really care. Or...that's not exactly right. I care. I wish people were doing great and, as relates to the publishing industry, I wish people were buying lots of books. Tons. Scads . What I mean is, despite the fact that I just got an agent and haven't made a first sale yet, and despite the fact that, in a market that's turning downward sales might be harder to make and advances a...

When I was in graduate school, we got to create our own curriculum for the freshman English classes. We had to have our syllabii (syllabuses?) approved, of course, but the approval standards were not that strict, and we were all English majors, and so, therefore, skilled at the bullshit that professors liked to hear, so we pretty much got anything we wanted approved. One semester, I did a whole freshman comp class on tropes in horror fiction. Another semester, we spent all 12 weeks on The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom . (It hardly seems fair, does it? :) ) One semester, my friend Joe, a fellow graduate student, decided to do a whole semester on the theme of the unreliable narrator, and the first book he chose for the class was American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis. All the rest of the graduate students were like, "aww, man! I should have thought of the unreliable narrator!" (That semester I was doing E.M. Forster--as an aside, I learned the important lesson...