I loved Star Blazers as a kid. I remember watching it in the afternoons. So when I saw it on Netflix, I borrowed the first disc to share with my kids.
We just watched the first part. I’m still trying to decide whether to cry with nostalgia, laugh at the horrible hokey-ness, or wander away bored.
I don’t get to go to writing group next week because Kiki has a band concert. This makes me sad. It is part of a larger disapointment, not with the writing group, but with myself. The group meets every week. A couple of the writers submit writing for every meeting. I don’t. I wish I could. I would love to submit and get feedback each week. I simply don’t write fast enough for that. I am capable of writing that fast, but I have other priorities. The things I am putting before writing really are more important to me, but I still grieve that I can’t get more writing done. I want to submit and rewrite and then send things off to editors. I want to write a book that other people really believe in, and are dying to see published.
Hmm. I’ve kind of done that. I wrote a picture book and found an amazing illustrator. The project is almost ready to go to press, but we decided to give it a shot at traditional publication before self publishing. The agent said no, and I havent’ heard back from the editor. It is about time to move this project forward. Because it resides in limbo, I keep forgetting that I can count the project as an accomplishment. It doesn’t feel real until I can hold it in my hands. The same can be said of my one short story sale which won’t see print for more than a year from now. I want something I can hold in my hand and be amazed that I actually wrote it and it exists. I think I’ll have a little of that with Tub of Happiness because I made many of the layout decisions. I’ll almost certainly feel that way about The Terraport Wars because I’ll be doing all of the layout work. Why is it so easy for me to mentally discount my own triumphs?
Anyway, I’ll miss writer’s group this week. I’ve already got plans for what to submit for next week. And I need to get to work writing stuff to submit for the weeks after that.
There is a trend in the publishing industry to get fiction authors to keep blogs. The publishers have seen how blogs allow authors to connect with audiences in a way that was previously impossible. That connection is an incredible marketing tool. It can be used to create enormous loyalty in readers and to fuel buzz about a particular author’s work. There’s just one problem. While all bloggers are writers, not all writers are bloggers.
Blogging is much closer to newspaper column writing than it is to novel writing. For a blog you have to come up with subject after subject and spin it into something that will interest people all within a few short paragraphs. A novel is the slow development of characters and plot over hundreds of a pages. A blog is like improvisational dancing in public. A novel is like practicing for painful hours in private for a large public performance. It puzzles me that publishers, and the world at large, should assume that a person who is good at novels would therefore be good at keeping a blog.
Of course publishers have always asked authors to do uncomfortable things in the name of marketing. Many writers have learned with dismay that being an author means public appearances and speeches and self promotion as well as writing books. The imposition of blog writing is just another manifestation of this same practice.
I both love and dislike the fact that more authors are being pressured into keeping blogs. I love the chance I get to interact with the authors, to get glimpses into their lives. I dislike sensing the discomfort some of these same authors as they have to learn a new medium with a live audience. As a blogger I hope that some of the writers grow into these imposed blogs and begin to love maintaining them as much as I have loved maintaining mine.