Novelist. Editor. Journalist. Business Writer.
Everyone in Louisiana is preparing for a weekend of riding horses, chasing chickens, exchanging boobs for beads, and drinking too much in front of the kids. Oh, and it’s Mardi Gras weekend, too!
Here are some tunes to put you in the mood:
Continue reading “Some Mardi Gras Tunes”
Let’s face it. Some people can write. Some people can’t. Some can write fiction. Some can’t. There are areas in between, but for those in the can’t camp, sitting in an infinite hours of writing workshops just aren’t going to help. Sorry. But that’s reality. End of story. Go home.
Me. I can’t handle numbers. And all the patient teaching I’ve had in my life couldn’t remedy that.
But there are plenty of people who can sort of write. There are plenty people who are decent writers and can get better. Hell, there are plenty of good to great writers who can stand to get better.
My new agent asked me the other day if I had a first reader, wife or a girlfriend or someone I trust. I didn’t think twice before saying, “My friend Jackie Cangro.” That The First Annual Grand Prairie Rabbit Festival ever reached a state that it could be considered by an agent and sent to an editor and published? That was Jackie. She took a look at an early draft of the work, called “In Vain” at the time, and basically said, “Well, the writing is good, but this is basically a book about a simpering 30-year-old man who just lets life happen around him and doesn’t act on anything. He’s got no foil. No conflict here.” In other words, “This is basically you dressed as a priest and sitting in a room and who wants to read that?” (I might be paraphrasing.)
Before her, there was no clash between Father Steve and B.P. There was no B.P. Just Father Steve moping about the place. Jackie, a hardcore student of the fundamentals of fiction and storytelling, immediately recognized the gaping hole with the book. No conflict. And with no conflict you just have a bunch of words on the page trying to pass themselves off as literature.
You may not have ever heard of Jackie. She’s edited The Subway Chronicles and has had some things published here and there. And you will be hearing from her in the not-too-distant future, I’m pretty sure of that. But plenty of people think only regularly published folks can teach them or correct them. Actually, plenty of writers make for the worst teachers. Yours truly, included. (I can take your manuscript and rewrite it myself, but teaching you how to write? I’m not so hot at that.)
But Jackie’s not just a writer or editor. She’s a reader. And the sort of reader who reminds a writer that his duty is to the reader first and to his own hangups and sacred moo-cows second. She knows that stories have starts and ends and the good ones have peaks and valleys and buckets of conflict. She also gives it to you straight–without making you feel like a complete idiot.
Every writer should be lucky enough to have someone like her around. And now you can! Sort of. She’s started something she’s calling The Writers’ Salon. She’s billing it as a writers’ community, but the nitty-gritty is this: “Targeted one-hour sessions on writing techniques and getting published.”
As much as anything, writing is a craft and, for those who actually want to get published, a business. (Getting published is a craft as well!) Sessions include: Beginnings/Endings, Point of View/Narration, Dialogue, Revision and more. If it sounds workmanlike, guess what, writing is work.
And, yeah, she’s charging. As she should. $25 bucks a session. Live in New York and want to pick up some fiction skills? This is a good place to start. Take one. Take a couple. A la carte is a beautiful thing.
This isn’t a paid ad. This is my endorsement. She’ll probably beat me for doing this. Consider it a ringing one.
Hey, don’t “humanely” slaughter me and eat my entrails. I’m just relaying the message. And that message comes from the delightfully bitchy “Fed Up” by B.R. Myers in the March issue of The Atlantic. (Online it’s called “The Moral Crusade Against Foodies,” which gets more to the point, but isn’t nearly as much fun as my headline.)
Before I continue, let me say this much. In the past, I’ve found B.R. Myers to range from sanctimonious in his own right to flat out wrong. I’m sure if he ever bothered to read my book, he’d vomit on its pages and then set the thing on fire. But I’d still get a kick out of it. If you asked me to describe his style, I’d tell you to imagine taking my “Get Off My Lawn” persona, raising it in a cage in a room with no natural light, depriving it of love and human kindness, then feeding it a mix of steroids and estrogen. The result can be over the top, but it sure as hell is entertaining. (I say all this even with the sneaking suspicion he’s a vegetarian.)
Continue reading “Foodies: Amoral, Sanctimonious Jerks Who Can’t Write”
So an old Staten Island ferry is up for sale on eBay. Starting bid is $500,000. The sellers helpfully suggest: “Use as a Ferry, Floating Attraction, Casino or Private Club.”
If someone does not buy this and turn it into a gay club called The Staten Island Fairy, I will be sorely disappointed.
“In 2009, Louisiana punished oil companies for fewer than one in 100 spills, the data show,” according to this Bloomberg story. “Fines are measured in thousands of dollars, not millions. They take years to collect and are seldom levied against even repeat spillers. A small gas station operator was penalized for faulty paperwork while the state’s biggest oil producer paid no fines in more than a dozen spills since 2002, according to state records.”
There are complexities, to be sure. Overlapping state and federal agencies will always created more confusing than clarity. And the matter of intention–oil companies don’t PURPOSELY spill their precious gold–comes into play. But the quote says it all: “Lax enforcement leads to lax behavior.” Read the whole thing.
The story was written by Aaron Kuriloff, Charles R. Babcock and Ken Wells, all-around nice guy and author of the Meely LaBauve series, The Good Pirates of the Forgotten Bayous, and Travels With Barley (yes, a book about beer).
If you’re the sort who comes to Word O’ repeatedly to see what kind of wisdom I’m dropping, I’m sorry. You obviously should find something more enriching to do with your life.
Ha! See what I did there? I made fun of the few people who read this blog. Which is a dickish thing to do.
Continue reading “Sorry for the Lack of Posting”
As the cast of Jersey Shore heads to Italy, some people are complaining about their representation of Italians and Italian-Americans. One New York TV critic said that while there they’ll just be seen as boorish Americans rather than representatives of anything.
One thing these people all seem to be ignoring: Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. This guy INVENTED the smush room — and he’s the leader of the country.
“Inception” got nominated for best picture? Boy, some people are lucky they expanded the category to 10. I’d say no way that would have been nominated in another year, but you never know with these clowns.
But hey, maybe “Best Picture” means good acting, cool fight scenes, lots of noise … and a movie that doesn’t make a fucking bit of sense — except to people who like to claim superiority by saying it made perfect sense. “Inception” is like faith. You either have it or you don’t — and the “logic” used by the faithful is equivalent to the logic used by those trying to square the Book Genesis with evolutionary science. So save your breath, “Inception” defenders. Talk till you’re blue in the face, wave your pamphlets around, try to drag me back into the temple to blow another two, three, four hours (how long was that movie anyway?) of my life.
To which I say: “Go sell crazy someplace else, we’re all stocked up here.”
What should win? I don’t know. The only other movie I saw was “Toy Story 3.” Loved it, but don’t think it has a shot. I say “The King’s English” or “The Fighter.”
Friend, former coworker and soon-to-be on your cookbook shelves Lisa Fain has a new recipe up on her blog The Homesick Texan. It’s a Cajun recipe. You all know how I feel about non-Cajuns trying their hand at these things, but Lisa is has proven herself worthy. I trust her.
But she’s just blown my mind. What did she just make in her New York City apartment? No, not gumbo or jambalaya or any such thing. You know what? I’m not even going to tell you. Go to her blog right now and just look. I mean, seriously. That’s not even something I would try to do.
Mississippi Winn, whose parents were likely born slaves, died in Louisiana yesterday.
When she turned 113, Mississippi Winn could still stand up on her own and never thought her age was a detriment to her life.
The upbeat former domestic worker from Shreveport, known in the city as “Sweetie,” died Friday afternoon at Magnolia Manor Nursing Home, said Milton Carroll, an investigator with the Caddo Parish Coroner’s Office. He said he could not release her cause of death.
Winn was believed to be the oldest living African-American in the U.S. and the seventh-oldest living person in the world, said Robert Young of the Gerontology Research Group, which verifies information for Guinness World Records.
Anyone who’s read The First Annual Grand Prairie Rabbit Festival will obviously be put in mind of Miss Rita. But I had no idea Mississippi Winn was actually alive. Weird. In other such weirdness, there was apparently a priest with the last name of Sibille in the town of Ville Platte who left the church to get married.
KEN WHEATON 