Monthly Archives: November 2012

Giving Trees

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One trend we’ve been discussing in Contemporary Publishing is the rise of the boutique publisher, who crafts books as beautiful objects in an age when everything is going digital. I was just reading an article on this subject, about books with hand-stitched binding, and while I agree that we shouldn’t be cutting down trees to print more paperbacks, I was confused as to why they would brag about making their books with recyclable paper. Recycled paper, I get. That would make sense, and would be noble enough to deserve some bragging. But if the book is a lovingly crafted object, then why would anyone care if the pages were recyclable?

It is one of life’s little cruelties that I feel this quiet affinity with trees… which are cut down to make books. I’ve been told in the past that recycled paper makes for terrible printing, but maybe someday we’ll come up with an alternative. Or we’ll buy ebooks of “disposable” titles, quit printing so much dross, and only kill trees for really special books. I dunno yet.

I was going through my photos from the Deireadh Seachtaine Gaeltachta (Gaeltacht Weekend) and I realized that all my favorites contain trees. So here you go, some scenes from the Ballynahinch Estate in Connemara:

I have been slacking on the writing – I will try to be better, but I can’t make any promises. Final exams and essays are looming. But I’ll try.

Apologies

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If I attempted to have a conversation with you today (and for some reason, I was very talkative), I need to apologize for making little to no sense. I stayed up ’til 5am watching election coverage, and caffeine only caused me to lose my breath when I spoke.

And to Kevin Barry, who kindly read short stories and spoke to the English Department about Doing Writing: I’m sorry I started crying during your reading of Across the Rooftops.

O Say Can You See?

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A few things I wish I had pictures of so I could post them here:

  • The Book of Kells, which I saw for the second time yesterday
  • The first three books printed in the Irish language (I have to make a special scholarly request so I can go back to Trinity’s library and see them myself)
  • The bookcase at Marsh’s Library in Dublin that was hit by machine gun fire in 1916. One bullet traveled through a book, ricocheted off the back of the bookcase, and passed through the book again. It was an incredible thing to see.
  • The two elderly gentlemen I saw on my walk home, sitting side by side in a book-lined study and working on their laptaps. I imagine it was some scholarly collaboration taking place in the house near campus, overlooking the canal.
  • My absentee ballot (it never showed; must have requested it too late)

Today in Irish for Beginners, we learned Amhrán na bhFiann, the Irish national anthem. It was taken up by the rebels in the GPO during the 1916 Easter Rising, and is always sung in Irish. The chorus includes lines like Tonight we man the gap of danger and ‘Mid cannons’ roar and rifles’ peal…

Sounds familiar, right? And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air… Funny how both our national anthems are about fighting the British.

Happy election night, y’all!

Decisions, decisions, decisions

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Welcome to November, when I start narrowing my focus and making choices about how I spend my time. For two months, I ran around trying everything offered and never refusing an opportunity to explore Ireland. I kind of had this policy that I would make myself follow through on every possibility, no matter how much it scared me. Someone even called me a culture vulture, and I was thrilled with that description. It all kind of culminated on October 31, when this 30-year-old woman went out on the town dressed in full fairy costume.

It’s catching up with me now. Time is tight, workload is increasing, and it’s freaking cold outside. On November 1, I skipped a volunteer wrap party (with free pizza) in favor of a frozen pizza and reading at home. On November 2, the rain and hail kept me from going out to use the free video rental coupons that arrived via email.

Today, November 3, was a tough one. I’m bound and determined to keep up with my pleasure reading while I work on my master’s. If I stop reading for pleasure, then there’s no point in pursuing a career in publishing. However, it’s not purely pleasure reading, because I have written a review of every book I have read since 2010 (first on Tumblr, then on Goodreads). Those reviews are kind of like mini-assignments I’ve given myself over the past 34 months.

I finished a book of short stories today, and wrote a review. I tried to be nice, given the whole criticism/Ruby Sparks issue I have been dealing with all week, but this book had a glaring error that I couldn’t ignore. I went to post the review on Goodreads, and I learned that the book has never been reviewed. It’s a new book, and it doesn’t even have an entry on Goodreads yet. My review, which focused entirely on some major flaws I found in the book, would be the first and likely only review – for a while anyway.

I decided not to post it. This is the first book in nearly three years that I won’t publish an opinion about… and I have posted some nasty reviews in my time. But I’m trying to be smart about this – it’s an Irish publisher, the proceeds of the book go to charity, and even though I’m in a publishing course and highly attuned to editorial misfires, I also know how easy it is to make a mistake. I just don’t want my negative (but fair!) review to be the only entry on Goodreads regarding this book.

There’s my tough choice of the day. Taking a hiatus from my three-year record of publicly stating what I think of the books I read so I can keep quiet about this one. I wonder if I’ll make a choice like this every day in November?

How many pages is that?

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http://www.wordcounttool.com has been very good to me.

Our speaker today was Jonathan Williams, a literary agent in Dublin who also used to teach a course in the Literature and Publishing programme here at NUIG.

He mentioned that “books are always dealt with in thousands of words.” In the book business, no one talks about pages – at least, not in the commission/submission stage of the process.

If a publisher wants to commission a book and approaches the agent in the search for a writer, they will talk about the project in terms of words. When hopeful authors submit their manuscripts to Mr. Williams, he prefers that the cover letter includes a note about the word count. Pages come much, much later in the process.

I have always thought in terms of word count, ever since college and up through my time as a freelance journalist and then a newspaper editor. The average news article is 300-400 words. Magazine articles run about 2,000 words. Novels are about 80,000 (although NaNoWriMo asks for 50,000).

Several of my loved ones, when hearing about my thesis, have asked “How many pages is that?” I have no idea. So based on my first essay and this words-to-pages calculator website, here is a quick break down of my assignments:

2,500 words = 10 pages double-spaced
5,000 words = 20 pages double-spaced
And my 18,000-word thesis? That’s about 75 pages.

NaNoWriMo

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Do not be critics, you people, I beg you. I was a critic and I wish I could take it all back because it came from a smelly and ignorant place in me, and spoke with a voice that was all rage and envy. Do not dismiss a book until you have written one, and do not dismiss a movie until you have made one, and do not dismiss a person until you have met them.

That’s Dave Eggers, and he’s right. Tearing down someone else’s work is not helpful or progressive or creative. It’s certainly nothing to be proud of… which is maybe why I’ve been so remorseful about my mean Ruby Sparks post.

Today, I was supposed to recalibrate my goals. In doing so, I was reminded that the start of November is also the start of National Novel Writing Month, during which participants write 50,000 words in 30 days. I may not be able to vote in the national election (my absentee ballot still has not arrived), but I can join my fellow Americans for NaNoWriMo.

I wrote 1700 words today, and I hope I can keep this up for the rest of the month. Quality is not the issue – it’s all about getting words on the page. Still, maybe by the time December rolls around, I’ll have a lot more empathy for writers of fiction (and screenplays).

More Self-Doubt

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I went out for Halloween last night, and spent some time with the other postgrad students from my course and the related Writing MA. We talked a little about where we saw our career paths heading, and before I knew it, I was expressing all this concern about how I might not have what it takes.

I’ve been feeling bad for posting that rant about Ruby Sparks, partly because it seems to imply that I didn’t “get” the movie. I understood what was happening. I saw the skewering of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope; I just didn’t think it was done well.

Still, the possibility that I might have somehow missed the point of the film (a lot of reviewers loved Ruby Sparks) started this spiral of self-doubt and I ended up spending part of Halloween night worrying about my future ambitions.

I started this program because I want to edit fiction, but what if I haven’t read enough to know good fiction when I see it? I don’t even have a literature course this semester. It’s the same with the job hunt – I really wanted to work in Irish publishing during my time here, but it’s looking less and less likely that it’s going to happen.

I’m hoping to use the start of a new month to sort of refocus on my goals and maybe recalibrate exactly what it is I think I’m doing here.