August 31, 2010

On Getting Your Name Out There, Part 2: The Story That Sells the Story

For the first part of this series on authors, author sites and author blogging, go here first.

When approaching an author site, what I find least interesting is a sort of bland, safe, risk-free aesthetic, a headshot with links and the sense that I’ve been handed a corporate resume. It just looks like you didn’t try. Just because Apple assures you can do the site yourself doesn’t mean you should (unless you do know or have time to learn how to do these things). If you’re not interested in a web design sideline, set aside part of that advance and make yourself a site with a professional’s help. And with that person, make something that’s fun for you and your reader at the same time. What I want as a reader is to be, well, fascinated. And with fiction in particular, I don’t want to see the writer’s face first—I want to see something else. I believe that writers of fiction are people who are deeply uninterested in themselves and are much more interested in other people. I think readers of fiction are people anxious to be transported, taken away from the world they know. The best sites understand that yes, of course, something of the author’s personality is involved in making the sale, but they do not make it like a facile job ad or personal ad. Unless of course, it is somehow hilarious and satirical.

Some more of my favorite author sites, that I found instructive also:

Keep reading →

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August 31, 2010

Yield, by Lee Houck

About 8 years ago, I received fan emails from a young man and his librarian mother. Both had read my first novel, both loved it, both made a point of writing to me. Both emails were among the most lovely and literate of appreciations. I was very charmed by them.

Over the years I’ve kept in touch with the young man, also a young writer, and encouraged him periodically, and even worked with him privately as a writing tutor at one point. Now he’s published his first novel, Yield, a sort of erotic thriller as memory play, out from Kensington Books today. I’m incredibly proud of him and happy for him. You can get your copy here.

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August 20, 2010

On Getting Your Name Out There: Author Blogging

There is a great deal of pressure for writers to blog, for themselves and for others. Typically, whoever’s asking you has the presence of mind to be a little ashamed: “We can’t really pay you for this, but you’ll get your name out there.” This of course is disheartening for people like myself. I worked as a waiter while finishing my first novel, and being paid nothing for what I write is only going to send me back there.

Still, I’ve been blogging for six years now and during that time have watched while many writers who were print stars see their fortunes decline for not having at least a site, much less a blog presence, while blog stars get signed to books and given preference in the surviving print mags. I’ve even been paid for online content (!). I’ve also seen many badly done blogs, people who, it was clear, were blogging because someone told them to do it, and not because they wanted to, and that is, of course, the wrong kind of getting your name out there.

I began blogging to get over burnout after the publication of my first novel. I had debut author fatigue and had lost a sense of writing as being fun in any possible way, and this was alienating to me. Also, I had many former students and was tired of answering their questions via email one by one, and the blog seemed like a good place to put the answers to the FAQ.  I shut down that first blog and opened this one a few years ago, and what I have learned is that keeping a blog has helped me more than it has hurt me. It’s helped me get teaching jobs, kept me in touch with people and introduced me to new people I would never have met, people I wanted to meet. Also, it’s helped me drive traffic to online sites posting my work. All the same, there were many times I thought of just shutting it down in exasperation, like when I printed my first blog after closing it and discovered it was 723 pages long (one friend even said it had a narrative arc).

The first and most basic lesson I’ve learned is that in the current market, you can take some control over your fortunes via a well-made blog and website. Jennifer Egan is getting a lot of attention this week for her excellent website, for example. Tayari Jones’ site is warm and brings you in to the variety of interests she has, and her readers have come to feel like she’s their friend. The love is mutual. In the case of a writer like Tayari (she’s a friend, I can call her that) one thing her blog does is give her a way to give back to her fans, in appreciation for their support. As Emily Gould has said, the internet is basically what you think it is, whatever you think it is. It can be amazing or horrible, depending on how you treat it.

The basic thing you need to keep in mind is that a site should take a moment’s interest in you—whatever it is that made them google you or click a link with your name—and quicken it into a lasting interest. And it should make it easy to do so. Here are what I think of as the basic 8 things to keep in mind. Keep reading →

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August 17, 2010

New World, Again

1.

Oh horrifying new world, where every site I visit wants me to have a profile and to receive mailings. I have over 600 messages from them unread in my gmail account, and this is because I resent the time it takes me to even delete them. I don’t want to die thinking, “Good thing I deleted all those emails.”

Worse, with Facebook, events now send me emails. Events I never wanted to be invited to, from people far away, who believe networking and spamming are the same thing.

Yes, I am aware of your brand now. Your brand is indelibly marked in my mind as “annoying spammer”.

I continue to believe, meanwhile, that networking is what people who can’t make friends call their attempts to make friends.

2.

Meanwhile, no one apparently told Rand Paul about the meth problems in Eastern Kentucky. But luckily, the entire state is pitching in.

3.

I took my new iPad to a meeting with my editor, and after accidentally erasing notes because of an unwelcome and unexpected “undo/cancel” prompt, she said, “You’ve basically confirmed for me the value of a pen and paper.”

This is also what it did for me.

So far, on my iPad, I can pay more money to watch Hulu than when I watch it for free on my Macbook. I can stream Netflix films instead of leaving the discs unmailed in my apartment for years. I can download extremely beautiful digital versions of some of my favorite comics. I can read Twitter like it is a poorly thought-out magazine (see under Flipboard). When the face isn’t glowing, it is usually a smeary looking thing, like a window in a children’s classroom after recess. I bought a special iPad issue of Mac Life that claimed to have 200 books on disc for free for me, and when I opened them, found them to be badly designed Gutenberg Project copies of public domain items. Misshapen classics. It was like I’d left them in my car’s back window and they melted (Book people! Do not do this!). The ban on Flash leaves you feeling like you are inside a gated community of some kind, banned from viewing things everyone else can see on their devices. I am glad ebooks are booming, especially given what I wished for back in 2007, but I feel like I’ve been sold something that, for now, does less than both my phone and my computer. I can’t make calls with it. I can’t visit sites with Flash and even know what is on there (this is many sites).

A friend asks me if she should get it for her husband for his 40th. Before I answer she says, “I feel like it isn’t special enough.” Yes, I tell her. It isn’t special enough. Not yet.

4.

As far as I can tell, the iDevices in general are designed by people who think of writing as something you for to create a text message. You cannot drop a cursor into the middle of a word on my iPad or iPhone except in their sad little Pages program on the iPad—instead, you must delete the entire word or hope the autocorrect dictionary offers the right word and that you do not accidentally erase it.

Relying on “autocorrect” is like relying on a unregulated corporation to do the right thing. It is soft paternalism applied to language.

5.

I found this over on The Morning News’ Editor’s Desk Tumblr* — Colm Toibin, on the Catholic Church after the sexual abuse scandals:

The idea that the Church authorities simply don’t understand what is going on was further emphasised when the Vatican last month outlined its opposition to the sexual abuse of minors by members of the clergy and to the ordination of women in the same document, and threatened greater punishment for those who got involved in the latter than in the former. Indeed, the document went further in its unwitting indication of how deep the Catholic hierarchy is in denial. It made a change in the way allegations of sexual abuse would be handled, doubling the statute of limitations from ten years after the victim’s 18th birthday to 20 years. It is clear that the Church still believes that it, more than the civil authorities, has a role in handling such cases, and that its rules about the statute of limitations remain somehow relevant.

The Church now has a strange ghostly presence in Irish society. Its hierarchy still meets as though it represents something, including power; and to some extent it does still represent power. Catholic parish priests still control the majority of primary schools: they appoint the teachers and chair the boards of management, despite the fact that in the most recent opinion poll only 28 per cent supported their control of schools. Orders of nuns in Ireland still own convents and schools and have control over some major hospitals. This might seem amusing until you need to ask for advice about abortion in one of those hospitals, or seek genetic counselling, or, indeed, try to get promotion as a doctor who has spoken out on these issues. The bishops, priests and nuns are sinking, but have every intention of putting up a struggle before they drown.

*Tumblr, of course, is for when you need to say more than Twitter and less than wordpress. Be sure to check me out at mine, Rebellitor.

I will return to the Manga series shortly.

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Filed under animal savagery, media, politics, product, writers, writing

August 9, 2010

“What needs to be true in this world for this story to be true?”

While I was watching Manila Skies, I kept being reminded of a favorite comic, Battle Angel Alita.

Battle Angel Alita is a Japanese Manga title featuring an assassin cyborg who looks like the average Japanese school girl fantasy—just built with a plasma laser in her fingers, and legs capable of running along her opponent’s chain-link weapon while he’s trying to hit her with it, so she can then kick him in the face.

Alita’s first issue is devoted to her discovery in a junk yard by a gentle robot scientist named Ido, who finds her decapitated but still beautiful cyborg head in deep hibernation amid the trash piles that surround the floating city overhead. Earth has been divided steeply into haves and have nots, and in this future, the haves live in a city above the surface of the world, where they are apparently free from conflict and disease and poverty, all of that being on the Earth’s surface, along with the rejects from that world, who will never be able to enter or return—Ido being a former inhabitant of this paradise.

When I teach comics, I begin by asking my students of the text, “What needs to be true in this world for this story to be true?” All comics pose as alternate realities where the world is like this one except for ______________. So, for example, to believe in Superman’s story, you need to believe that an alien race that seems to exactly resemble humanity would, under our sun’s radiation, give that alien specimen invulnerable skin, heat vision, x-ray vision and flight, as well as amplified hearing and breath.

This difference creates a gap, between our world and the comic’s, in which the story is possible. But that gap is also a rear-view mirror.

What needs to be true for Alita to be true is that humanity is freely willing to attach its human parts to machines in order to survive. And that there is a permanent underclass.  The open question of Battle Angel Alita’s stories is, yes, “How much ass can she kick this time?” (Answer: really a lot). But also, the other open question is “How much of my humanity can I lose and still be human?” Keep reading →

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Filed under graphic novels, manga

July 21, 2010

Park Lit, Today

Tonight I’ll take a break from unpacking my boxes (I just moved) and read in New York City at Park Lit at 6:30PM, as a part of the series organized by Open City and on behalf of Guernica Magazine, with two writers I greatly admire, Terese Svoboda and Joshua Kors. I think I’m going to read from a new story, as of this writing. I can never decide, of late, until moments before a reading. I’ve started showing up with three selections and choosing in the last moments.

If it isn’t the new story, in other words, it’ll likely be from a novel in progress.

In case of rain, we’ll be reading indoors at Bar 82 instead. Free of charge. Hope to see you there either way.

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July 21, 2010

“The System Is Broken”

The other night, in the company of Sonya Chung (author of LONG FOR THIS WORLD), my boyfriend Dustin and I went to see the opening feature presentation at the Asian American International Film Festival. There was a moderately full crowd in the theater, but I wondered where “everyone” was, as the Taiwanese delegation, celebrating the presence of many Taiwanese films in the US for the first time, finished their speeches.

I also felt I knew where “everyone” was. For some time now, major American cultural venues privilege the experiences of international writers, artists and film-makers over Americans of color in their quest for being diverse, and so a magazine or a festival or a news outlet looking for diversity will more often place an Asian or an African immigrant, 1st generation, before placing an Asian American or African American in the same spot. People of color, people of different ethnic backgrounds, are treated unconsciously, in the US, as minor regionalists of a kind, even perhaps “half-regionalists”, and so we find that Multiculturalism has oddly given us a world in which our cultural work is treated as being slightly less important than a regionalist—we end up belonging to a region that doesn’t quite exist in people’s minds, instead of to the world. I’ve addressed some of this over at the Asian American Literary Review’s forum in the last year, but what I admired in the festival’s name—Asian American International Film Festival—was that it openly embraced in both name and sensibility the way we are both of this place and not at the same time. Having said that, the crowd that was there was an exciting mix of people all the same—and there was a lot of support in the audience by way of young African American filmmakers and students, and people of mixed Asian and African heritage.

Meanwhile, the main event: Red’s film, Manila Skies, was a wrenching portrait of one man’s despair but also of a system within the Philipines that privileges 20% of the population at the expense of 80% of the population. It was hard not to see modern-day Manila as the future of America, as the parallels were constant, especially at a time when the gap between the richest and poorest here has become even worse than it was under Bush. The film begins with a young boy and his mom making baskets to sell for money for groceries, and the boy keeps asking her about when can he go to school? We then cut to the father, walking up a long road, who finds a briefcase full of money and jewelry, and stained in fresh blood. We cut back to the father joining his family, and with a haunted expression, watch as he promises to send the boy to school in Manila, but to promise in return that he won’t come back here. And we cut to the city, where a much older man, presumably the boy, is sad to learn that his father is ill, and unable to leave his job to return without being fired. He decides to apply for a job “overseas”, but we learn quickly this is a scam operation, run by local gangs who promise this help, take fees for it and then do nothing.

The film was inspired by the story of a Manila man who hijacked a plane to try to “go home” and lept to his death, having used a parachute he’d made himself. I won’t ruin the beauty of the ending for you, but it’s a bravura take on income inequality’s persistence in Manila, and I hope it will serve as a kind of warning to audiences everywhere as to the future, if governments continue to give in to corporations and policies that privilege the economy over human dignity and the environment continue unchecked.

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Filed under film, political art

July 5, 2010

The Double Rainbows of Found Lake

Hello from Wisconsin, where I am spending the week with my boyfriend and his family. Tonight after dinner as the sunset started we saw this out over the lake, and it perfectly banded the sky. I hope this all finds you well, and that you are with the people you love. Happy Fourth of July.

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June 29, 2010

You’re Not From Around Here, Part 5

The conclusion to the Koreanish summer fiction serial. For those just arriving, for the rest of the story, here are parts 1, 2, 3 and 4.

“And what was I going to do, marry the town gay? No.”

I laughed at that against my will. I was trying to be mad at her, for not telling me about my son. But I was too happy to see her. Katie still held her cigarette the same way. She looked at me with a smile. “No. It was never going to be like that.” She flicked her ash. “You’re high if you think otherwise.”

“You could have said something,” I said.

“You were never going to stay here,” she said. “And I wasn’t going to make you.”

*   *   *   *

Punching out her brother hadn’t been the best way to find out where she lived now, but after he understood he’d insulted me, he was surprisingly okay about it. “You got a mean swing for a faggot,” he said, and grinned.

You have no idea, I thought.

He understood, though. “He’s your son? Sure about that one?”

“I’m sure,” I said. “Sure enough to ask her to her face.” Keep reading →

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June 23, 2010

You’re Not From Around Here, Part 4

It is June summer fiction serial month at Koreanish. Here are parts 1, 2 and 3, for those just arriving. And yes, I’m writing this as the month goes along. Next week, the finale.

Katie’s boyfriend was soon sending his best friend to pick her up most of the time. At work the next day she was quiet and when I asked her about how her night was, she just shrugged. She never said much more about it than she did that first night, instead taking to it not only without complaint, but soon seeming to like it. Geoff didn’t drink much, while Derrick drank more and more. And the more Derrick drank, the more Geoff seemed to like being Derrick’s go-to guy. Katie, I think, felt special, like Derrick had sent a car for her. Even if it was Geoff’s pick-up. Soon it was nothing special to see Geoff’s truck in front of the CVS at closing time, waiting for her.

Later, when people thought it was maybe Geoff’s baby, she rolled her eyes when she heard. From me–we were at work. “They would,” Katie said. “They fucking would.” And then she looked at me for a minute. “Just because he let Geoff do the driving doesn’t mean he let him do the driving.” We laughed about that one pretty hard, until we hid behind the counter, as if that meant our laughter couldn’t be heard down the aisles.

I’d overheard this at school and decided to tell her. By then we were like old friends. I was four months into the job. My checks were tiny but I knew my mother felt better every time she watched me come in from work and put my blue and white CVS vest on the barstool in the kitchen, and I, I felt a different kind of pride for being on the inside of the biggest scandal at school, which was no longer me. Katie’s pregnancy was interesting to me, a scandal partly because she not only announced it, she had no apparent shame about it: “What,” she said, of her decision to share the news. “Like you weren’t gonna know?” And then she said, “I’m keeping it, too.” In her senior photo for yearbook, she fought for the right to show how far along she was. Derrick offered to marry her but she turned him down.

I thought it was wrong, I also thought it was beautiful.  This confused me but also made it seem important. I was young, and it was my first time having that experience.

* * * *

Her brother that day didn’t seem to know much about this at all. At the bar we found near Whole Foods, we sat and talked amid several awkward silences. I worried that his sister was dead at one point, that I would find out in some way I couldn’t bear. But instead he pulled out his wallet, and he showed me the picture she’d sent recently of her and her son. Who was the spitting image of my dad when he was that age. Something he wasn’t likely to know.

I smiled as I felt my heart burn. It was me, then. All this time it had been me.

“He’s cute,” I said.

“Yeah. He is. He looks like he’s got some Indian blood, right?”

“Cherokee maybe,” I said.

“That’s what I was thinking! But she won’t say and honestly, my sister is like the Olympics.”

I said nothing, because out of something like scientific curiosity, I wanted to hear what he would say next.

“Open to countries from around the world,” he said, and then laughed like a maniac, until I punched him and sent him flying down off his stool.  He shook is head, whipping blood from his nose around him, blinking in surprise.  He had thought he was talking about Bob, her ex from before Derrick. He hadn’t thought it was me. But then no one, including me, had ever thought it was me. Except maybe Katie. And she had said nothing.

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