Yale Writers' Conference: Day 4

-
So many good quotes and pieces of advice at the conference which I will not share with you because you are not here and did not pay for it. I keep asking all of these successful writers the basic question of how they do it. How do they have lives and get the writing done? The editor from Ploughshares, this lovely woman with square black glasses, a gentle, teacherly voice and a sensible bob, said that she gives herself an hour a day. Every day, whenever that might be. And sometimes, longer on the weekends. Why don't I use do this? Here is my goal. I have to write a book by next year's conference. That's 50,000 words or about 220 pages. If I could do math, I would figure out right at this moment how many words that is per day, plus revision.

This guy is here to talk about how he broke out of his drug addiction and construction job by writing about being shipwrecked for Amazon's Kindle. He wears a black Dead Volts t-shirt with a skull surrounded by angels wings, has two sleeves of tattoos (hopefully not cartoon characters, hopefully nautically-themed like his story), a scruffy face with sideburns and matching scruffy voice (read: smoker?). I wonder if he will write about coming out of addiction and I hope he will stay sober (I automatically flash forward to him being invited out to dinner tonight and being pressured to have a glass of chardonnay and taking it and then spiraling down into addiction and never publishing again. All because of the Yale Writer's Conference). His name is Mishka Shubaly. You should look him up and buy his work (so that he's indebted to me and introduces me to his publisher and I make $27,000 for a long piece and can buy my mom a house like he did).

His sensible advice, "If you don't send any of your work in to Amazon, you most certainly will not be published by Amazon. If you do send your work in, your chances are dramatically increased." He got $9,000 for his first Kindle story and three times that for the next piece (I can do that math). Just imagine. And not all of it has to be genre work. And his Kindle publication has led to a print publication. He's good. He's funny and gives real direction and emphasizes the importance of reading stuff that you don't gravitate towards, just to discover some new things and so that you're committing to a particular project (like, I'm going to go ahead and read the modern library's top 100 list. I am going to do this, even though it contains Ulysses). I am in love with this guy, maybe because he said he got sober without AA or treatment. And also because he looks like the rock star version of Don Draper. And because he recommends taking pictures of cats.



Just FYI, there are some look a-likes here. There's a guy sitting in front of me who looks like an older Bill Murray, a guy who looks like the cranky guy from a cartoon strip, and, like, two David Cross doubles.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Candyman: Race, Class, Sexuality, Gender, and Disability

-
Candyman hits on almost all of the sections we discussed over the last six weeks. Let's start from the most obvious and move from there.   Race: A large part of Candyman confronts the anger and rage of the Black community after years and years and years and years of systemic racism. Candyman is an embodiment of all of the men who have suffered at the hands of whites (white police man, the white community, white systems that have set them up to fail such as the housing projects of Cabrini-Green). The monster of Candyman is a tornado of retribution, a hive of bees swirling angrily and containing the men who have been lynched or tortured by whites, starting with the original death of a Black male painter who dared to fall in love with a white woman whose portrait he painted. This monster, like the original, can be summoned by anyone who dares to say his name out loud in front of a mirror five times. Until the very end, the only people who do this are white--and every one of them is
Read more

Short story by Lauren Groff, "At the Round Earth's Imagined Corners"

-
Image
You have to maintain a much more focused attention when reading a good short story versus a novel, because if you skim, you might miss something.  For this reason, I find it a little more difficult on my brain to read short stories.  But if you're going to write in the form, you should read in the form (and others--I have yet to memorize a poem as was suggested in my workshop last week), so I've been trying. Lauren Groff has a story called "At the Round Earth's Imagined Corners" in Best American Short Stories, 2014. You might have read her novel The Monsters of Templeton, or her other short story from a previous Best of collection, "Delicate Edible Birds" (also the name of her book of short stories), I have a vague recollection that that story was about World War II or possibly World War I and a dinner party where the people invited are living it up . I seem to also remember a line about the crunching of tiny bird bones. The Monsters of Templeton
Read more

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

-
Image
It’s all about the recaps. It’s a show made of recaps from previous shows. I purposefully skipped the first 40 minutes. These guys are all a bunch of idiots. They are turning on one another. Wes has not shown up, because he will probably come in at the very end for some kind of surprise. They are all trying to humiliate Jake because he is too perfect and too sweet (however, he just referred to himself in the third person; kind of irritating). I don’t remember any of these guys, to be honest. Who are these women in the audience? Oh, okay time for a short break because the show has been on now for three minutes. You know what, I’m going to go ahead and time the difference between the commercials and the actual airtime of the show. >Show returns at: 8:47 p.m. Don’t forget the 20 minutes of clapping in between the scenes. I can’t tell you how much hair mousse has been used in the making of this show. Dave is the crazy dude who has decided to grow a beard for the recap Juan is being atta
Read more