Authors, Pets, Inspiration!

So, not exactly news, but  the always interesting Brain Pickings has an interesting post about the important role pets play in the life of famous authors. As a struggling writer, I am personally enjoying my dog barking loudly and with fury at our neighbor coming in to the apartment across the hall for the fifth time this evening. Never mind that we have lived her for three years and my dog should know better. He’s cute and he’s he is always willing to watch whatever is on TV without argument.

So, some firsthand knowledge of this author-pet love: 1. When I visited Lord Byron’s home we saw a huge tomb, raised on a pedestal, near to the gigantic Byron mansion and I thought, “Oh, that must be his mother or father.” Closer inspection proved that no, it was for his dog.  And, 2. When I went to Key West, I saw a lot of roosters wandering around, but I am told that Hemingway’s cats (six-toed and eccentric as the Key itself) are also wandering around.

My personal theory is that authors and writers need pets not just for companionship when you spend your “writing time” staring out a window but also to allow for more procrastination (see: “I can’t start this chapter until I take the dog for a walk.”)

So, enjoy some light reading about authors and their pets. Who knew  Charles Dickens had a pet raven?

Paper Lives!

In the midst of big news that has to do with paper (like, oh, Amazon buying Goodreads) it’s always fun to inject some light into the argument.

While we are forever debating (and reading about) whether or not we are reading more less these days, leave it to the French to have a witty response to our constant digital vs. paper argument:

Marlin Barton Talks Novellas

Who better to discuss the form than an author who has just published his last novella excerpt? Read Part 3 of “Playing War” here

What’s in a Name? A Few Thoughts on the Novella / By Marlin Barton

Though Katherine Anne Porter wrote three of them, “Old Mortality,” “Noon Wine,” and “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” she hated the term. She preferred the phrase “long story” to “novella.” I’m not sure why. There’s a kind of beauty in the sound of the word itself, I think. Maybe that’s one reason I prefer it. Sometimes one hears the word “novelette,” which sounds downright silly to my ears, and as the writer Lou Mathews pointed out in remarks for Failbetter upon the publication of his novella “The Irish Sextet,” it sounds as if it could be the name of a girl-group from the early ’60s, The Novellettes.

So what do we call these things, and how do we define them? We can agree they’re longer than short stories and shorter than novels. But how much does that really tell us? If you look up novella contests on-line, you’ll find guidelines that vary from 40 to 150 pages and word lengths from 10,000 to 42,000 and more. There are simply no easy answers, and I’d suggest that is part of their appeal for writers. They have a kind of in-betweenness to them, an elasticity. They live in that gray area, and isn’t that where fiction writers live, too, and not in the black-and-white world of easy answers for life’s questions, moral, artistic, or otherwise?

Since their word length, and even what we want to call them, can be difficult to pin down, maybe there’s something about their content, or even intent, that can help us decide what they are. I’ll offer a few thoughts, my two cents, which may be about what these remarks are worth since all writers have to decide for themselves what they’re creating and how they want to define their creations. When I began to envision my novella (there, I’ve said the word), “Playing War,” which Failbetter has been kind enough to publish (and which is probably on the short side at 21,000 words and 68 manuscript pages), I knew it would be longer than my typical twenty-page story, and it seemed that it might have a more complex plot and maybe even a greater emotional, and moral, complexity than what I normally attempt in a short story—if I could achieve what I intended. Of course, I also hoped that I didn’t know already everything that would happen in the story I wanted to tell. I wanted to explore the characters and their situation and see what I might discover. I thought it might run 100 manuscript pages or so. Turned out a bit shorter, but I do think it has a more complex plot than any story I’ve written, perhaps more than most “typical” stories, and I hope maybe even a greater emotional and moral complexity than a typical story, or at least for one of my stories. Of course, many writers and readers will say now that even a short, short story (or sudden fiction, or flash fiction—what do we call these things?)  can have great moral and emotional complexity. Layers of complexity do not belong only to the novella. So here we are again, trying to define something that can’t be defined. I say we simply celebrate its in-betweenness, realize that when we can’t easily categorize a piece of fiction, we may just have a novella on, or in, our hands. And while novellas, due to their length, can be as difficult to place in print journals as they are to define, the good news is that with the now widespread availability of on-line literary journals likeFailbetter, print space is no longer an issue, which opens up all kinds of avenues for a literary form that encompasses writers from Conrad to Porter to contemporaries such as Michael Knight and Cary Holladay, and maybe to you too, if you might be so inclined to find your way into such a slippery form.

The Bell Jar or Chick Lit?

One of these images is just as hellacious as the other:

1. The Carnival Triumph “cruise from hell’ that left passengers drifting in the Gulf of Mexico with backed up plumbing and no AC, forced to erect tent villages on the deck:

2. The 50th anniversary cover of Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar.”

You may wonder how these things are connected.  Allow me to elaborate: When I was seventeen, I went on a Carnival Cruise, it was a nightmare—like a floating Denny’s sans good fried breakfast options. While on the cruise, I read “The Bell Jar.”

Yes, that was me, the pale looking girl sitting on a lounge chair curled up with one of the most devastating memoir/fictions of the 20^th century.  While I did think it a bit of a downer, it was not nearly as disturbing as the amount of vomit I encountered in public places on the Celebration on a daily basis. In the midst of my own teen angst and “cruise hell,”  I related to Esther’s character in a number of ways and remember thinking “If she were alive today, she would have been okay.” True? Who knows.  What I do know is that if she were alive today, she would be pretty P.O’d at the 50^th anniversary cover chosen for her book.

Galley Cat has done a nice job of compiling the best of the parody covers here

Quickie Q & A with failbetter Author Grant Ginder

We try to be a full service journal over here at failbetter, anticipating your wants and needs as readers before you are even wanting or needing. That’s what 2 or 3 Questions is all about–and now, it’s Grant Ginder’s turn in the hot seat.

1) Which has been better for your writing: Being a speechwriter, working for a literary agent, or teaching expository writing?

They’ve all been good for my writing in different ways, to be honest. I think speech writing was the first job that taught me the importance of narrative — how a story, or the sense of an arc, is necessary to draw in an audience. And also, obviously, the importance and ability to write in different voices that speech writing teaches is invaluable when it comes to creating new and distinct characters. Still, though, when we’re talking about what’s been better for my writing, I’ve got to say being a literary agent (as much as I’m loathe to). In many ways, it was a wholly depressing job; seeing how the sausage gets made, so to speak, can be devastating. That said, I read a ton, and a lot of that reading was from potential clients. I very quickly gained a sense of what I responded to as a reader, and as a writer — what got me excited, so to speak — and (more importantly) how to incorporate those elements into my own work without sacrificing my nature as a writer.

2) Where did the awesome image that the excerpt ends with come from?

I’m assuming you’re talking about the house built out of records, right? Really, I think it came from a few places. For starters, I’m sort of obsessed with memory (as this excerpt, and the rest of the book for that matter, shows), and the physical traces of memory. I’m also really interested in jazz. I don’t know anything about it — I mean, absolutely nothing — but I’ve always had this sort of visceral response to it, so the prospect of doing a little research on the topic was exciting (the fact that Wylie Avenue in Pittsburgh used to be such a hotbed for music made it that much more fun to research). So, right: the two threads sort of came together into the idea of records, of vinyl. And I got to thinking: Okay, what could Alistair, the grandfather, do with these records to preserve memory, or to use memory to protect it from itself, and the idea of a house built out of records struck me.

3) How does being from Orange County inform your writing and your existence?

Well, Tamra Barney and the rest of the cast of Bravo’s The Real Housewives of Orange County regularly read and edit my work. Also, whenever I go home to visit my parents (I’ve lived on the east coast since I was 18), I always get sand in my laptop (I write on the beach). I’m kidding about all that, of course. Orange County is a place with (probably rightfully so) a lot of negative stereotypes: plastic surgery, suburban sprawl, a fuckload of foreclosures, etc. It’s also, of course, a very beautiful place. And I guess it was interesting growing up with that tension — that idea that beneath such a beautiful place was all this hilarious (and sad, maybe) absurdity. But I think you can find absurdity anywhere, if you look hard enough. I mean, I suppose it says something that when I turned 18 and went off to college, I got the hell out of Dodge and haven’t moved back. Still, at the end of the day, I think I’d be lying if I said Orange County has had this drastic impact on my existence and my writing. If anything, I look at it with this sort of comfortable ambivalence.

Happy Ho Days!

We’re taking a few well-deserved weeks off at the end of the year, but already have a bunch ‘O new works set to be published in the New Year.   In the meantime, if you are still looking for possible gift ideas, might we suggest this…

They said what?

I attended one of my first literary award dinners this past weekend. I will not bore you with the details of which famous author’s hand I got to shake or details of the other guests at my table, aside from saying that the odd assemblage of said characters bluster was reminiscent of a zany Preston Sturges film. While a fine time was had by all, I walked away (albeit slowly in ill-chosen “black tie appropriate” stilettos) wishing that I had a better sense of what the nominated books were about. The one to two line critical praise and author bios did little to pique my interest beyond my silent vow to Google the authors later. Four days later and no Googling or book purchasing has taken place. Damn the middle(wo)man.

That said, I was very excited to see that our friends over at GalleyCat have done the heavy lifting for the lazy reader who lurks inside all of us by assembling links to free samples of the PEN 2012 Literary Award winners works.

Speaking of lazy readers and the kind souls that connect us to our books, feel like a superior reader after checking out the Christian Science Monitor’s chuckle-worthy list of strange bookstore customer comments. A personal favorite: “I’m looking for some books on my kid’s summer reading list. Do you have ‘Tequila Mockingbird’?”

An Introduction, and then some things that are funny. . .

So, it’s a little strange to introduce yourself–you know, the awkwardness and limitations of the first person POV. I’ll make it short and sweet:

My name is Shannon O’Neill and I’m the brand spanking new social media director here at Failbetter. I’m a Taurus, I remember a world before the Internet and I’m currently pursuing an MFA here in Richmond, VA. Before my stint here in RVA, I was a Metro Detroit native,and remain a Midwesterner at heart.

Here is what I look like when I’m smiling:

I like to think of my role here as social media director as your cruise director on the SS Failbetter. Via this blog, Facebook and Twitter, I will help manage your activities and expectations (Example: “Have you seen the great new [story] [interview][poem] by [insert fantastic author name]?”), share the news of the day (Example: “Literature is dead, again?”), and will generally be the first to know things and disseminate said information in a fashion that might save your life.

Now, on to the promised funniness. Leave it to The Paris Review to keep the modern classic:

You Likes Us…You Really Like Us!

Well gee golly gosh….We just got a nice little review on New Pages.  More importantly, they seem to like  what Ann Tashi Slater, Noha Al-Badry and Kara Candito have to say in our latest issue.  Of course,  we’re always happy to provide our readers with some damn good reads and have a bunch more in store.  But for now, we’ll bask in the limelight and say this.

We’re Back!

Get ready folks!  Fall is here and guess who is back?  That’s right failbetter fans, we’re back baby!  Our fall 2012 issue is unfolding as we speak.  Sure, some folks might not be so excited about the news.  And others still may mock the point of it all.  But we’re thrilled (just like this guy) and we hope you are too.  Sure, we could make this personal, but really, this is all we’ve got to say.  After all, if you are reading this , it is kinda self-evident. So….We’ll let the new issue speak for itself.  Go check out Girl X.  And feel free to listen to our snazzy non-official theme song for the issue as well.