Author: Patricia J. Parsons

Reading, writing & publishing. Doing things differently.
Posted in Backstory

My writing ‘girlfriends’: Now Nora’s gone

Posted on by Patricia J. Parsons

I am a woman who would rather poke her eyes out with a red-hot poker than spend an evening with a bunch of women.  The ubiquity of magazine articles extolling the virtues of our ‘girlfriends’ have never resonated with me.  My girlfriend preference is for the arms-length, mentor type.  And one of those women whose work has inspired (and I daresay influenced me) died last week.  I’m talking of course about Nora Ephron.

I don’t think that her influence on me was in my conscious mind until I read about her death and thought, “We’ve lost a good one.”  Then I started thinking.

In all of my writing (of the non-academic type), my protagonists (whether fictional or real) are strong women, feminist types, ahead of their times or just plain wise.  Although she may have been best known to the masses as a screenwriter, it wasn’t her movies that inspired me – it was her journalistic career and her books.

I first read Heartburn in 1983 or ’84, soon after it was published.  Relating a seriously funny take on the break-up of a perfect marriage, the book resonated with me partly because I had escaped a (less-than-perfect) marriage myself only a few years earlier, and I found her witticisms so spot-on that she captivated me for the long-term.  When I think about some of her most valuable pieces of advice over the years, I’m almost alarmed how much I agree with her.

When she said, “I am continually fascinated at the difficulty intelligent people have in distinguishing what is controversial from what is merely offensive,” I found myself nodding in agreement.

And then there was advice for living: “Oh, how I regret not having worn a bikini for the entire year I was twenty-six. If anyone young is reading this, go, right this minute, put on a bikini, and don’t take it off until you’re thirty-four.”  Yes, I should have done that.

But of course, she also said, “Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.”

Amen.  And I don’t feel bad about my neck.  Yet.  Sigh.

Posted in Book publishers, Publishing, Self-Publishing

Are writers back in control? The electronic rights challenge

Posted on by Patricia J. Parsons

About two years ago I received an email from a former student who had stumbled upon one of my books – online.  The book was not published as an e-book.  Far from it.  In fact, when it was published in 2003, no one was even considering anything but the hold-in-your-hands, paper-between-covers kind of book.  However, it was a professional reference handbook that had continued to sell in dribs and drabs so was evidently still useful.  My student posed this question: Was I aware that it was available electronically through Questia?  I most assuredly was not.

The book I sold to a ‘traditional’ publisher after publishing the first edition myself. Then the publisher made it available on Questia without my knowledge.

I contacted the publisher (a large American textbook publisher that had since been acquired by a yet larger American textbook publisher) to try to find out how it got there, and why I wasn’t being compensated for its online use.  I got exactly nowhere.  And this is the story that came to my mind this morning as I read Simon Houpt’s article in the Globe and Mail.  He tells the story of the new e-book about (God forbid that we should need to know any more about her) Karla Homolka, accessory to brutal rape and murder a few years back.

Houpt describes the 14,000-word book Finding Karla that author and journalist Paula Todd decided to release as an e-book last week for a variety of reasons – the primary one was that since she found Homolka alive and well and living in Guadaloupe, she feared the story might be scooped by others on her trail.  Add onto this the idea that 14,000 words is more than a magazine feature and less than a “real” book and you have a writer seeking a new publishing model.  And no editor standing in front of you saying that 14,000 words are not enough.  Evidently readers beg to differ with those editors.

What’s interesting about this story is not the content of Todd’s book; rather it’s the story of how publishing models are changing.  I’ve talked about this previously, trying to figure out where all of this is heading.  But Houpt make an interestingly provocative observation of what might be happening: “…for the first time in decades, some of the power in publishing is shifting back to writers, who are trying to grab the electronic rights that publishers have been taking for granted…”[1]

It’s these electronic rights and the on-going difficulty we have with publishers who seem to think they have the right to be the sole beneficiaries of the material that we slaved over.  Of course, these days a contract is likely to contain reference to electronic usage (I await my contract from the University of Toronto Press as we speak and I’ll be looking for a fair division of rights), but it still seems that unless we take matters into our own hands, we are the last ones to be paid – rather than the first.

I still haven’t figured out what to do with things I’m working on – apart from the final revisions on the UTP manuscript.  Will I dive back into the traditional publishing model; or will I go right to Kindle?  I’m thinking about it!

Posted in Reading, Writing craft

The beauty of a deadline… (OK, don’t shoot me!)

Posted on by Patricia J. Parsons

A few weeks ago I picked up a book that I didn’t realize was about deadlines.  Okay, I now recognize that Chris Baty’s entertaining little book No Plot? No Problem isn’t supposed to be about deadlines, but it is.  Baty, the creator of the National Novel Writing Month says this in the first chapter:

Deadlines are the dynamos of the modern age.  They’ve built every city, won every contest, and helped all of us to pay our taxes reasonably close to on time…a deadline is…optimism in its most ass-kicking form…a potent force… (p. 26)

…and it occurs to me that I’ve been sympathetic to this point of view for many years.  Just ask my students!

A deadline changes everything about any project that you plan to implement.  It moves you past the planning stage and drops you head first into the implementation phase, forcing you to consider milestones along the way.  And when the deadline is imposed by an external force (like your boss or your professor or your editor) those deadlines take on even greater importance.  Or do they?

I have about a dozen writing projects on the go right now.  Some of them are actually academic (low on the priority list at this point in my career), some of them are creative, and some of them are strictly personal.  The one project that gets done every week is my contribution to the travel blog I write with my husband.  Why?  Because I have a self-imposed deadline.  I made a personal commitment to a certain number of posts at certain intervals when we started on this project (which will become a book in due course) last fall, and I have neither looked back nor shirked my deadlines since.  The truth is that I have never missed an externally-imposed writing deadline, and now it occurs to me that when I have actually taken the time to create personal deadlines, my work has progressed faster and more efficiently than the more organic, artistic approach to work schedules that seem to be common among the ‘creatives’ of the world.

Case in point: I had almost forgotten, but a number of years ago I decided that I’d take a foray into screen-writing.  I think it’s because I see plot and dialogue as a kind of film running through my head when I write narrative, so I thought I might capitalize on that tendency.  I registered for a script-writing course, and set about learning the nuts and bolts of the process (not to mention learning about the paranoia that seems to run rampant through the film industry: no one wanted to share their ideas for fear of them being stolen – this never seems to happen in the world of books!).  After the course was finished, I had a notion of script framework, ideas and scraps of dialogue, but not much else.  So, I did what I always do, I bought a book on script-writing.

In fact, I bought several, but the one that really got me to a different level is not Robert McKee’s classic (and wonderful)  book titled Story; rather it is a small book called How to Write  Movie in 21 Days by Viki King.  I followed her framework for getting to a finished 90-minute script in 21 days and it worked.  I have the proof of it sitting in a drawer just waiting for a producer/director to snatch up Something I’m Supposed to Do.  But I had not noticed that her admonitions about deadlines really got inside my head.  In fact she says, “…your deadline…is your friend.  Focus to reach your deadline.  Make it your priority.  Sleep, food and phone are secondary to the deadline…” Okay, this was published in 1988.  These days she would have had to add a list of social networking sites to avoid – but I digress.

The bottom line is that if I impose a deadline on myself, I get it done.  It’s time I stopped flailing about trying to get the parts of my new novel (actually novels, and articles, and blog posts) perfect, and just get them finished.  There will always be time for editing later – with an editing deadline, of course!

Novelist Rita Mae Brown said: “A deadline is negative inspiration.  Still, it’s better than no inspiration at all.”