Sharon Bakar has posted up a fascinating piece she wrote for Chrome magazine in January 2006, which struck me not because of its truth (the publishing industry is well aware of the stigma surrounding female authors) but the quotes from some of her readers.

For the uninitiated, her article is about how men prefer to read male authors, opting out of reading prose written by the fairer sex. Listen to this:

… (a) blogger, Amir, felt that “prose written by a lot of female authors tends to be, how do you say it? Delicate? Detailed? Ditzy?”.

“I don’t think women can write like Marquez, Nabokov or Gunther Grass,” wrote one blogger known as Greenbottle, “to me these guys write as though with p*nis instead of pen, full of masculine animal energy.” He felt that many women writers, on the other hand, tended to produce “saccharine, wimpy or effeminate writing”.

If that was the case I would’ve never read The Age Of Innocence - one of my absolute favourites. Nothing like heart rending, heart stopping dialogue as a warmup.

[Read more →]

That’s right. Hands in the air. Anything you say can and will be used against you in court.

I’m finding that my computer doesn’t really help the writing process. And that doesn’t make sense - what is so different about writing with a pen and writing with a keyboard?

Everything, as it turns out.

I write best with pencil and paper. Pens won’t do, since I can’t stand crossing out phrases that could be improved upon. Pencils give me the freedom to doodle along the margins and to mind-map all my plot ideas, themes and characters … in cute little bubbles. It’s aesthetically pleasing.

Composing my thoughts on the computer, like in Wordpress or in Word is an entirely different thing. I don’t see the empty document window or text box as a canvas on which my art can be crafted and molded on. I see obstacles to my creativity (and my lovely email inbox).

Writing this post has taken me 2 hours. During that time roughly 30 minutes had been spent on actual typing and forming sentences, while the other 1 hour 30 minutes spent on surfing Amazon, checking email, catching up with friends on Skype as well as reading up on the latest reviews over at the NYT.

In contrast, it takes me roughly 4 hours to write a 3000 word chapter on paper. That means 750 words an hour - a hefty pace, considering I spend a lot of time on rewriting entire pages.

You know what? I should spend more time writing my posts offline. I believe the quality would improve, as well as give me the time to doodle and drink coffee (no fear of a short circuit!) and to smell the flowers and run from the bees.

Take a day away from the computer. It helps.

[Read more →]

A quick trip over to the bookstore yesterday found me updating my ‘must-buy-book’ list. Let’s see:

1. We Need To Talk About Kevin caught my eye, nevermind the fact that it was on a bottom shelf at a tucked away corner of the bookstore. You’d expect the winner of the 2005 Orange Broadband prize for fiction to be prominently displayed - but no - the Da Vinci code and Jeffrey Archer’s newest novels occupied the top rows. Bestsellers vs Award Winners right in your face - and this was a small bookstore, mind you.

I like the premise of Kevin: shortly before his 16th birthday, Kevin Katchadourian kills seven of his fellow high-school students, a cafeteria worker and a teacher. The main narrative of the novel is then contained within a series of letters by his mother, Eva, to his estranged father, telling him the story of Kevin’s upbringing. Is she at fault for her son’s actions? Or is the evil he shows inherent in Kevin’s very being? The novel asks some very disturbing questions and I can’t wait to read it.

2. Lord Of The Flies is my favourite book - something I’ve read twice over - but my copy went missing about a year ago. I’m on the lookout for a better, nicer looking edition (let’s say my old one had encountered a few insect problems) and this cover caught my eye:

It looks kind of innocent, especially for a novel with such dark, overarching themes. But I still love it - and if it tricks my family members into reading it, then why ever not?

3. The Book Of Air And Shadows. I know it sounds very much like the Da Vinci code (A distinguished Shakespearean scholar found tortured to death … A lost manuscript and its secrets buried for centuries … An encrypted map that leads to incalculable wealth …) - but we all need a regular dose of roller coaster fiction, don’t we? Something you can enjoy and … that’s about it. No need to rethink your set of values, no need to consider a theme or point of view that the author presented and which you’ve never thought of before. Just pure, orgasmic reading.

This is going to be bliss. I’ll be expecting to buy these books within the next two months, if I can find copies at the (mostly small) bookstores I frequent. And when that happens I’ll probably disappear from the web, immersed in a world quite unlike our own.

[Read more →]

After my counter argument to Ed Infinitum’s Bugger Blooker article, I took the liberty to ask Paul Jones, head of the 2007 Blooker Prize judging panel to give his opinion on the discussion. To which he replied:

So I’m wondering what’s wrong with amateur writers. Julie Powell’s book got the kind of New York Times Book Review space that any writer would be delighted with. Cherie Priest’s book isn’t in the dominant genre — Zombie Gothic has its own set of fans. I can’t say much about this year’s Short List since I just got my first shipment on Monday, but I think that we can say that the Blooker celebrates a breaking of genres and of concepts of what good literature is and will become.

I think I shall sum it all up, before this debate carries on for far too long:

The Blooker prize is new, just as blogging and blooking is new. Paul Jones has had his say, so has Ed and I.

And in the end I look back at Paul’s reply: “Julie Powell’s book got the kind of New York Times Book Review space that any writer would be delighted with” and think to myself: is it not good enough that previously unknown writers get their big break through the Blooker?

That’s food for thought for you. To the rest of the authors shortlisted in the 2007 Blooker Prize: God Bless and Good Luck. Us online writers will be watching, with or without the hype.

[Read more →]

I came across a post two days ago in the blogosphere (specifically, posted in Vox and found here), and it started me thinking as well drafting a response in this blog.

Ed-infinitum’s post is an answer to the question: Do you think that ‘blooker’ prize winners would have won the ‘Booker’ prize? If not, why?

His post is a remarkably well thought out affair, with references to the articles that may or may not have sparked off his reasoning. It took me two days before I started writing this reply, because, well, it requires some thinking.

Ed-infinitum’s post is in essence saying: no, Blooker prize winners cannot win the Booker prize, simply because blooks are part of the Blogosphere - an ‘amateur medium‘. So what the Blooker prize does is to award the best of the amateurs, and creates a category of what he calls ‘professional amateurs’ who do not aspire to be ‘intellectuals’.

“Blooks are the new books, a hybrid literary form at the cutting edge of both literature and technology,” said Bob Young, founder of self-publishing site Lulu which organised and sponsored the prize.

What Bob Young actually means is that ‘blooks’ are ‘a hybrid literary form at the cutting edge of’ non-upper (intellectual) class literature. How, pray tell, can the ‘intimate diary of a prostitute’, or a ‘guide to ’s best greasy spoon cafes’, or ‘misadventures in the kitchen’ be considered to be located on the ‘cutting-edge of literature’? How do they compare with, for instance, Evelyn Waugh, Virginia Woolf, Ngugi wa thiong’o, Rousseau, Marx, J.S. Mill, Marcuse, and so on?

He sums up by saying that the best kind of awards spurs nominees along a ‘vertical development path’, to make them be the best they can possibly be, and to break past the barrier that separates amateurs and professionals.

Now, what he proposes may be elitist in its stance, but I can’t discount the fact that he is right, and he’s not the only one who has made such an observation. In a ZDnet article entitiled Reflections On The First Decade Of Blogging Dan Farber quotes Andrew Keen’s new book The Cult of the Amateur:

…instead of creating masterpieces, these millions and millions of exuberant monkeys [Internet users]–many with no more talent in the creative arts than our primate cousins–are creating an endless digital forest of mediocrity.

Yes, it may sound offending, especially to you and me, mere mortals on the internet.

But there lies my counter argument against Ed-Infinitum’s post. The blogosphere is new, it is raw, and it can be described as The Madding Crowd. Using it as a medium to publish books (blooks) is still very much experimental.

But who is to say that the next Hemingway or the next Faulkner would not have online origins? The internet is ’social’ and is getting more and more ingrained into our daily lives. I’ll be willing to bet that in a few years most of us will feel like we’ve had a lobotomy the instant we go offline, and that means the most of the next wave of ‘professionals’, no matter how elitist that sounds, will have an online presence of some kind.

[Read more →]