Yeah, I know I’m a little late here, seeing this prop already passed on November 4, but I still feel the need to express my outrage that such a thing could even become part of California’s state constitution.

For those of you who are non-Californians, Prop 8 goes as follows, short and (not so) sweet:

“Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.”

It basically eliminates the right for homosexuals to get married.

This to me is just ridiculous for several reasons. I’m not sure what good could be accomplished by enacting this law. All it does is discriminate, and what does that show about the people of California? That we are homophobic and prejudiced against people outside the norm? I definitely would not like to be seen that way. Think about it: the United States used to have laws preventing interracial marriage, between whites and blacks, and between whites and Asians. Those laws were repealed because they aren’t constitutional. Those laws eliminated marriage rights; so does Prop 8. Why is it okay now to prevent certain people from getting married when you can’t do so to others?

I know some religious groups, particularly the Catholic Church I attend and especially the Church of Latter Day Saints (the Mormons), were in support of Prop 8. I believe they refer to the Bible to declare that homosexuality is a sin. Being a more scientific person, I believe that sexual orientation is something you’re born with as a result of chemicals in your brain. I didn’t know until a little while ago that some religious people view homosexuality as a choice. To me, that is just ridiculous. I mean, I did a quick search on Google and found loads of sites confirming my theory. I mean, I just don’t understand, if everyone is “created in God’s image,” then aren’t the gays also? But then again, religion and science don’t mix too well, do they?

I’ve also heard some people say, well, so what if the gays can’t marry? They can get a civil union. Unfortunately, they are not the same thing. If a couple is married, then they are married in every state and have the same rights as every married couple. If a couple is in a civil union, then their rights aren’t uniformly defined across the US. So if perhaps someone in a civil union had a health care plan that included his/her partner in one state, they might not get the same benefits in the next state.

Some people want to protect the “sanctity of marriage.” Well, I hate to let this come to light, but people can get married in Las Vegas one night and then divorced the next. If that doesn’t violate marriage’s sanctity, then I don’t know what does. Some people think marriage is solely defined as the “union between a man and a woman.” Well, words change over time, as do their definitions. People will change language as it suits them. Why doesn’t that seem to apply to the word “marriage?”

Also, don’t even get me started on the ridiculousness of some of the propaganda supporting Prop 8. I’ve seen so many commercials and so many signs that my eyes have nearly bled (seriously). One of my favorites goes as follows: a young girl (maybe in second grade?) comes home from school and tells her mom something along the lines of “Today I learned that princes can marry princes and that if I want to, I can marry a princess!” And then her mom looks all shocked and probably proceeds to instruct her daughter in the “correct way of marriage” or something like that. Seriously, that commercial is so wrong it’s funny. Firstly, public schools aren’t required to teach anything about marriage, which is why I highly doubt a second grader would ever come home from school to talk about “princes marrying princes.” Besides, if there was a school program about marriage, parents can request to have their child excused from it, and the schools are then required to follow this request. On top of that, if parents don’t like the way public schools are teaching their children, they always have the option to home school their child or put them in a private school. And I don’t want to hear anything about well, maybe they don’t have time to home school their kids or maybe they can’t afford private school. Well, if they cared enough, they would find a way to make it happen.

I’ve also seen some of the most ridiculous handmade signs in support of Prop 8. One of them, I believe, said something like “protect religious freedom.” Uh, hello?!? Americans already have religious freedom. However, what we do not have is a mixture of government and religion. I don’t think eliminating rights for homosexuals to get married has anything to do with religion. It has to do with discrimination.

Oh, and my oh my, should you have seen all the signs in support of Prop 8 around where I live (I live in a rather conservative part of SoCal). One time when I walked home from school, I counted at least twenty something “Yes on 8” signs. The day before the election, I saw one house with at least 10 signs. I’m pretty sure I saw a man who lived in that house jaywalk across the street to plant some “Yes on 8” signs on public property. I’m glad they were gone the next day.

This weekend, I turned on the news and saw that there were anti-Prop 8 protests occurring in LA and one other southern California locale I forget. There were a lot of people holding signs that said “H8” because, well, that’s what Prop 8 is. I really hope Prop 8 will be tried in court and found unconstitutional (against the United States’ Constitution, not the California constitution considering it is now a part of it) because I believe in tolerance for people who aren’t like me. I am an open-minded thinker, and I hate it when people tell me what to think. I especially hate it when people lie to me. And this is why I am so against Prop 8. It serves no purpose other than to eliminate rights and promote intolerance and discrimination.

Of course, this is not solely a Californian issue. It was put up to vote in several other states, I believe Arizona and Florida (I may not be right, and there may be others as well). I hope in those states, their new prevention of same-sex marriage will be overthrown.

Muses?  Um, I think they’re on aisle 13.

Non-writers like the word “inspiration.”  My guess is that most writers don’t so much.  I know I don’t.  ”What’s your inspiration?”  ”What inspired you?”  ”Ooooh, you live in Italy, that must really be great for inspiration.”

Well, actually Katherine (Applegate) and I are leaving Italy.  We are dragging the two kids, the two dogs and the cat away from stunningly beautiful Tuscany to stunningly dull Orange County, California.  Why?  Are we expecting to find a muse to inspire us in Southern California?  No.  (The last muse in Southern California was killed during the wildfire season of 1997.  Her siblings had died earlier from mudslides, smog and earthquakes.)  What we’re expecting to find is high-speed internet, book stores, an Apple store and a Target.  Each of those mundane things is more important to me as a writer than my lovely view out over the rolling vineyards.

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I know, I know:  I’m not keeping up with this blog.  I’m behaving very badly.  Useless.  But I promise I’ll do better, starting in, oh let’s say three days.

I’ve been preoccupied.  I am ashamed to admit that I am a hopeless political junkie.  Politics is my sport.  I’m checking polls literally hundreds of times a day.  Yes, I know the meaning of “literally.  I literally mean “literally.”  Again and again and again, starting with the DailyKos poll first thing in the morning and proceeding around and around like a crazy person until I pass out at night with my laptop open to FiveThirtyEight.com.

I could draw you a color-coded map right now, showing every state as red, pink, yellow (toss-up) light blue or dark blue.  It’s really kind of sad.  But it explains why I’m not pushing people for posts or writing my own.  I’ll be better in a couple of days.  And since this is a YA lit blog and not a political blog I’m not even going to tell you who I support.

Unless you click on the “More” button.

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I love anagrams. And I love Rosemary’s Baby, both the brilliant and underrated Ira Levin novel and the unbelievable Polanski film adaptation. So I am killing two birds with one stone—make that three—to convince you to buy Rosemary’s Baby and read it soon (Levin started as a screenwriter and he’s a master at both understatement and making totally implausible situations seems real), rand ent the DVD of the film, even if you’ve seen it before. There’s so much to love, from Ruth Gordon’s nutty Satanist, Mia Farrow’s gorgeous Sassoon haircut, and John Cassavetes generally oozy ickiness, which, if you’ve ever dated an actor you will recognize immediately.

But really I just want to throw in an anagram I came up with while playing with paper and scissors—I’ve recently given up the act of cutting but still like to play with sharp objects.

So, here’s a nice use of “anagram” from Rosemary’s Baby, just to get us started.

“With no false moves she made [the scrabble pieces] into Roman Castavet.

And again into Adrian Marcato.

And then again into Roman Castavet.

. . .

“’He’s Adrian Marcato’s son,’ she said. ‘The man who said he conjured up Satan and was attacked downstairs by a mob. Roman is his son Steven. Roman Castevet is Steven Marcato rearranged—an anagram.’

Guy said ‘Who told you?’

‘Hutch,’ Rosemary Said. She told Guy about All of them Witches and Hutch’s message.

. . .

Rosemary looked at Guy uncormfortably and said, ‘You don’t think he’s –the same as his father?’

And here’s my anagram of the day:

SARAH PALIN = A PLAIN RASH

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

Now, you may be thinking, why would a lowly teenager like me (who isn’t even old enough to vote) be interested in the presidential election? Well, even if I cannot cast a ballot, I do care where this country is headed, because, frankly, it’s the adults who are deciding my future.

I consider myself lucky to be relatively politically aware and to have my friends the same. I think it’s a pity that most kids and teens aren’t interested in politics because they don’t think it affects them. WRONG. The leaders of this country are creating the world of the future. And we all belong to the future, especially the younger generation. If people don’t care about electing future leaders, then they shouldn’t lament how horrible their situation has become in the future, because they didn’t try to change that outcome when they had the chance.

Now, I’m going to remain neutral in this post, because my point is not to persuade people to vote a certain way but to try show the benefits of being more politically aware. I don’t know, if the knowledge that electing certain people could mess with the future you want doesn’t make you want to be politically active or at least aware, then I don’t know what will.

Part of the problem with politics is the stickiness, evasiveness, lying, and just general politician qualities that make it so difficult for people, especially young people who are trying to figure out their political philosophy, to understand what each candidate stands for. And this only discourages people from trying to become politically aware, because, trust me, it is a LOT of hard work to find out who’s right and who’s wrong and what’s really going on. And then there’s the whole internal debate of if you agree with this or that issue. Just ignoring this whole mess would be the easy way out. Unfortunately, making a country run smoothly has never been easy, and in order to make it do so, people have to work hard from the bottom up.

So, I encourage everyone, especially young people, to watch the debates online, if you haven’t already. Visit Obama’s and McCain’s websites. Some other great sites to check out are Ya for Obama, YA for McCain, and MyDebates.org.

Don’t let your future be decided for you.

Greetings readers of Stupid Blog Name! While on my latest book tour (England, Sweden, South Africa, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Thailand) something truly exciting occurred. I came up with the idea for the official Crack and Stack Challenge.

Editors, publicists, and booksellers who are reading this, please let your authors know:

It’s on.

The Crack and Stack Challenge has been informal up until now, but that’s over. I want official numbers. I want to know—who is the fastest stock signer on earth. That’s right. ON THE PLANET.

Because, I’ll be frank—I think it’s me. (Robert B Parker, who only signs using his initials, doesn’t count. To participate in the Crack and Stack Challenge, you must sign with at least one full name. Do you hear me? One. Full. Name).

In case you’ve never heard of the Crack and Stack Challenge, allow me explain: I made it up. I made it up on my past book tour due to my being sick of authors who take forever at their stock signings (for those of you who don’t know, a stock signing is when authors are sent to a warehouse or book outlet and asked to sign thousands of copies of their book, which are then sent on to random customers or shops to be sold as “autographed copies”).

Authors are asked literally to sit there and sign their name over and over several thousand times, and some will take forever to get through their books.

This is, of course, excusable for elderly or infirm authors. For those authors, it is reasonable to expect their books to have to be handed to them individually for signing.

But that is not okay for perfectly healthy young authors. Perfectly healthy young authors should, in my opinion, be required to participate in the Crack and Stack Challenge.

Why is Crack and Stack so important?

Because due to perfectly healthy young authors who take forever to sign their books, my publicist insisted I get up at six in the morning to make the two hour drive to the book outlet where the thousands of copies of my books were waiting for me, so that she could hand feed me each book one at a time.

I did not WANT to get up at six in the morning to do in four hours what should take one. There was no reason for it.

But do you know how hard I had to argue with my publicist that it would not take me four hours to sign a thousand books just because it took some other perfectly healthy young author four hours to sign a thousand books? I had to prove that I could do it!

Which is why I came up with the Crack and Stack Challenge.
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It’s not really surprising that I love Halloween.  Like all fiction writers, I spend my days making up stories of people who don’t exist.  (Which, for some reason, society lets us get away with.) But it’s more than that.  My books turn out, again and again and in many different contexts, to be about people pretending to be other people.  I don’t know why identity fascinates me so much, and, frankly, I don’t really care.  But on Halloween, I don’t have to limit my weird identity fixation to paper. 

My husband and I throw a big Halloween party every year.  And it’s funny: when it comes to dressing up, no one is neutral.  Year after year, some people find excuses not to come because they hate the whole costume thing.  (Surely it’s not because they don’t like me?)  Far more start talking about the party in January and haunting eBay for the perfect costume by June.  Maybe writers don’t have a monopoly on identity issues?

Enough text.  Heeeeeere’s Britney ….

It was a revelation when my girlfriend patiently and kindly explained to me that I was a geek.

I was obviously surprised: my love of sci-fi, spending time in libraries, getting excited about physics, weren’t these things cool? I wanted clarification because I’m a bit self obsessed, “Okay, fine.” I allowed, “But I’m King of the geeks right?!”

We live in Hackney, which is in East London. We have this regular walk we do from our house, through London Fields park, down Borough Market, through a flower market and into Spitalfields (another market).

It’s a nice walk. Give me a shout if you’re in the neighbourhood and we’ll do it together.

For those of you who don’t know or haven’t been to London this area is a vibrant, young and fashionable place to be (or at least, it is since we moved there).

I call the route we walk the ‘Catwalk Mile’. Everybody attempts to outdo each other in clothing craziness. Jeans pulled up around their chests, odd shoes (or no shoes), hats of all shapes and sizes, pins and badges - anything goes.

Interestingly more and more of these charity shop fashionista’s are dressing as bookish librarian types. The increase in people wearing cord trousers with a high waistline, thick rimmed plastic glasses and cardigans means that the Catwalk Mile is starting to feel like a trip to the local library. (Apologies if I’ve just offended every librarian on the planet).

The good news from all of this is that being a Geek really is cool again - look at Napoleon Dynamite. If you’ve been sitting in a dark room reading by a dim light, open the curtains and go outside! Times have changed! As you sit proudly with a well-thumbed copy of your favourite paperback, you’ll be recognised for the style icon and trend setter you really are.

I was talking a while back about doing school visits to promote the paperback of GONE and the launch of HUNGER (GONE 2) and the editor I was talking to made a good point.  She said, “Look, the question is how you’re going to present yourself.  You have to put some thought into that.”

The gold standard is someone like Lemony Snicket (Daniel Handler.)  He would play the accordion and tell jokes and basically put on everything just short of a Broadway show.  I only met Mr. Snicket while getting a book signed for my kids.  So I didn’t have a chance to talk to him and say what I would like to say.  Which would be, “Thanks a lot, jerk, you’ve really raised the bar for the rest of us.”

I don’t play a musical instrument.  I don’t tell jokes.  I’m a big, fat, baldheaded, cranky old man.  The things I care deeply about are politics and food.  If I had to sit down and talk to a group of YA readers the topics of conversation that would come naturally to me would be, 1) My preference for the Powell doctrine of overwhelming force, 2) Why food ideologies are ridiculous and beside the point.  I can do a good extemporaneous half hour on either.  Or on any number of other topics that would cause a 14 year-old (and most other sensible people,) to fall into a coma.

It’s not that I don’t enjoy talking.  It’s hard to shut me up unless you have a baseball bat handy and are prepared to use it.  But, man, what do I talk to “the kids” about?  The things I’m interested in are things that will either cause students to consider jumping out of the window, or, things that will make their teachers want to throw me out of that same window.

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(Yes, there is a reason I’m writing on this topic, but that will come up later.)

Personally, I dislike game shows. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with a little bit of Jeopardy every now and then (the nerdy side of my shows through), but every day? Most definitely not!

I’ve never understood why certain people (*cough*cough*my mom*cough*) are obsessed with these game shows. It’s not like the watchers are winning thousands of dollars and extravagant prizes. I don’t see why people get excited over other people who they most likely do not know winning large sums of cash. I don’t understand it (being the kind of selfish person I am). I would rather not waste my precious time watching other people win money.

But on the other side of the coin, what if I got on a game show and won a bunch of money? Wouldn’t I then want a whole bunch of people to watch me on TV, my friends, my family, and even people I do not know?

Not being a huge fan of game shows, you probably wouldn’t think I’d ever consider even trying out to be a contestant on a game show. Yet, one Thursday a couple months ago, that’s exactly what I was doing. And what d’ya know, I got on. Whoop de freakin’ do.

Actually, it is kind of a big deal for me. I am a rather selfish person (see above), and I like money. Can you blame me? I like books and new clothes. To get those, I have to have money. To get money…I have to win a bunch on a game show. (Okay, I could get a job, but this is much simpler). So, even if I don’t particularly like a certain game show, I wouldn’t say no to winning a bunch of money on that show.

…Which brings me to the purpose of my post. I’d like to invite/ask/beg all of you to watch me and my BFF on Wheel of Fortune this coming Wednesday, October 22 at 7:30 p.m. PST. Pretty please? It would make my day! You might even discover my real name (if you do not know it already) if you pay extra special attention.

I cannot imagine that young adult readers will turn in droves to this blog to explain the current state of the world.  That’s what parents, teachers and South Park are for.  Nevertheless kid readers who may be watching their parents weep uncontrollably as they watch CNBC, or who overhear them wondering whether there’s an iPhone app for translating hobo signs, may be wondering if the world really is coming apart.

Short answer:  nah.  

I’d be the last person to want to go “age and experience” on you, but I’ve lived through ten of the last zero apocalypses.  The end has been nigh since I was born.  Always nigh.  Nigher.  Nighest.  But no, the end will not come soon enough to keep you from having to write that history paper.  I had to pay my taxes today, so once again the end is running late.

There’s a really great song called Eve of Destruction.  I was playing it today as I went fishtailing around the gravel road that leads to my home.  The tune is portentous, the lyrics grim.  The chorus goes like this:

But you tell me
Over and over and over again, my friend
Ah, you don’t believe
We’re on the eve
of destruction.

Yeah, well, it’s true, I do tell you over and over and over again, my friend.  You know why?  Because that song was written in 1965.   The big thing the songwriter was worried about?  Red China.  Kind of thought they were going to blow up the world.  Turned out they were just going to send us toys decorated with lead-based paint.  

I was 11 in 1965.  In 1970 I was in 10th grade.  I was one of two kids to put together my school’s first ever Earth Day assembly.  Our big concern at that point?  Overpopulation that would lead to wordwide famine within a couple of years.

Yeah, that kind of didn’t happen.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t do your best to figure out what’s happening in the world and decide how you can help things work out for the best.  Not saying there aren’t very real problems and threats.  I’m just saying stay cool, don’t lose too much sleep over things and keep a clear head.   People who panic end up looking like idiots down the road.

One of the great things about being a famous author is that you receive piles & piles of adoring fan mail.  At least, that’s what I’ve heard.  (Meg, care to comment?) 

Me, I have to settle for stuff like this:

Subject:  My book report

Dear Carol Snow,

I have recently read your book “Getting Warmer.” It was a very good book, and I am looking foward to more books by you. I have a book report that is due very soon, and needed some help on it. The teacher wants to know the setting, and is expecting a description that paints a picture for the audiance. In your book, i couldn’t find the setting that well. if you could help me it would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

(A book set in Scottsdale, Arizona)

Imagine writing a middle grade book about Eva Braun. In 1938. Or editing a picture book about James Buchanan, by his son—except his doughy face and apparent homosexuality, always a rough combination, even more so today when cheekbones are everything, kept him from marrying and having children—right about the time he made a few very bad decisions that led to the Civil War. (By the way, his boyfriend was a slave-owner.) How would you feel? 

Would the money you earned feel dirty? Would you spend it frivolously? Would you donate it to a charitable organization? Would you double your efforts at doing good things in your personal life? Or would you just assume it’s all part of the game of publishing (writing AND editing) and do it as well as possible, as objectively as possible—giving the kids the facts without left- or right-wing editorializing and letting them make their own decisions? Isn’t that what we want them to do when they grow up anyway? Read what’s out there, as much of it as possible, and make their own decisions? 

All of these questions are weighing on my mind because I have been hired to write a book—for money, needless to say—about a public figure who represents many thing that I think are wrong with our society: a seeming low regard for the importance of words and putting them into meaningful sentences, for one thing; a distaste for answering questions that might put the responder in a bad light; and it must be said, the revival of a hairdo that only looked good once, and that was on Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Oh yeah, and there’s that shooting animals with high-powered rifles from helicopters thing she does. (I myself prefer to kill things with my bare hands while I look them straight in the eye, and that’s only if they have an IQ high enough to have crossed me in some way, which bars out wolves, rabid hamsters, and scheming bunny rabbits, all standard shoot-‘em-up fare for the subject of my book. Ugh, I wrote those words. My book.)

Since I work freelance in this industry for at least one part of my career, I rarely turn down a project, including this one. But unlike many projects, this one has been really hard to get off the ground. I was only given two weeks to write 25,000 words, and although we all know editors don’t ever give you the drop dead due date, I’ve now let four days go by having done nothing but research. 

And it’s because I feel dirty doing it. I tell myself its better that I’m writing this book than some junior Anne Coulter who would get it all wrong and make this person sound like a saint in stilettos. But still, I feel uneasy. Is this dirty money? I have bills to pay, and I only make money in legal ways—call me foolish, but it’s a rule with me—so a lot of the easy ways to make dough are out. 

So this weekend, I’ll do what I usually do when on a deadline crunch—get up around 4 AM Saturday morning, research already organized, chapter outlines ready, and drink Red Bull and write until I have to take a nap for an hour or two. I’ll repeat this six or seven times until I need to actually go to sleep for the night in order to wake up Monday morning for work. I find it helps not to eat much, since digesting food makes you tired, but a fig newton every hour or so will keep me going. (The upside to this is that the new male ideal is VERY lean and trim, even the staid New York Times noticed, and I’ll lose a few pounds over the weekend.) 

And my honor? Will I have lost any of that? I don’t know yet. I’m going to try to be objective and remember that there are hundreds of reporters out there right now covering this person, filing piece after piece in which they state as much of the facts as they have access to and they presumably aren’t losing sleep. (Or losing weight. One of my neighbors has been covering the campaign for a national publication and he’s gotten downright tubby. Hotel food will do it every time.)

I realize it sounds like I’m weighing the loss of my soul against gaining some money and those little muscle lines that travel south on either side of your belly button, and that’s all true. But well-paying writing jobs don’t come along every day, do they? And perhaps I will be able to inform without editorializing for the left (which would surely be cut by the publisher) or butt-kissing to the right (which might just be left in, simply because the only people who will buy this book are fans of this person who want to give it to their kid.) There’s no easy answer to the questions in my head, but since I gave my word to my editor that I would write it, I’m going to. And I’ll make my deadline. I’ll be hallucinating on Red Bull and lack of sleep, I’ll smell bad, and probably have organized at least one closet in my apartment before I’m done, but I can only assume there’s a lesson to be learned from this, and not just the details of this person’s life. 

One thing I’ve learned already. It’s a lot harder to write about something—or someone– you don’t believe in and respect than in something or someone you do.  And that one’s own self-respect can be a slippery thing to hold on to

There are salt people and sugar people.  You know which one you are.  Me, I always fell solidly on the sugar side.  Cakes, cookies, a half-eaten bag of chocolate chips hidden in the back of the pantry:  bring it on!

And then I started writing.  I began my first novel years ago, but I just couldn’t seem to finish it.  A hundred and twenty-five pages in, I thought I’d identified the problem:  I had quirky characters, snappy dialogue, vivid description … but no plot.  Oops.  I stopped writing fiction – forever, I thought — because I had a problem even bigger than the plot challenge:   I found it really difficult to focus for the long stretches of time that novel writing requires.

And then I discovered the importance of salty snacks to the creative process.  Plain tortilla chips, stale Doritos, multigrain Wheat Thins:  none of these would have the slightest appeal under normal circumstances.  But plant me in front of a laptop and saddle me with a deadline, and wham!  Some part of my brain – which I envision as an obese man watching TV in his underwear, cradling a bag of Lays — starts craving sodium and trans-fats and all of those other things that are really, really bad for you.

But the funny thing is?  After a handful of tortilla chips (which I don’t even like), I can do the work!  There’s only one downside.  Now need something else in order to work effectively:  elastic-waist pants.

(In case anyone cares:  This blog entry was previously posted on HarperTeen’s MySpace page.)

Forbes is reporting that the iPhone has become the country’s top eBook reader.

Toldja so.  Well, not you, exactly.  But other people I know and work with.

How did I know?  Because the first fan to read the first draft of HUNGER: a Gone Novel, all 700 manuscript pages of it, was my son Jake.  On his iPhone.  And this was before there were any book-reading apps for the phone.

Kids are early adapters.  They are devoid of loyalty to the past.  No loyalty to paper.  So all that effort by Amazon and others to create book readers that duplicate the paper experience are beside the point when it comes to kids.  And not just beside the point, but actually impediments.  Kids like the new.  Old people like old.   Kids like to experiment and investigate.  They like to take possession and redefine.  

Also, they aren’t all that excited by spending hundreds of dollars on a book reader, they’d much rather have an iPhone.  Seriously, do a survey of the kids you know:  Sony book reader or iPhone?

Real books — you know, with pages and all — will continue to be important, even in kidlit, but publishers who ignore e-books are making a big mistake.  This is doubly, trebly true for YA lit where we should already be deep into this new paradigm.  

But how to monetize the free, paperless book?  Advertising.  Specifically product placement.

Excuse me?  Was that a howl of outrage?  

Sorry, I didn’t invent the internet.  (That was Al Gore.)  But the internets exist, and the internet has defeated DRM and other protective measures for music, and it will continue to defeat similar efforts to control the flow of data.  We are going to be giving books away free online.  It’s already happening, it’s going to keep happening, and now the only question is:  how do we all go on making a living as writers and editors and agents?  

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(10/3 Update: An email to Ron Hogan at galleycat discussing my experiences speaking to this subject in Turkey has resulted in a posting there.)

As most have read elsewhere (galleycat’s coverage has been pretty entertaining), Horace Engdahl, the permanent secretary for the Nobel prizes for literature, has slammed American literature as too insular, whining that we “don’t translate enough” and “don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature.”

This complaint that the American market doesn’t translate enough world literature is an old one, but the numbers that are usually cited by Europeans aren’t quite as clear-cut as they might at first seem. Thing is, the lion’s share of books translated into other languages are translated from English—American and British authors—and are big bestsellers. John Grisham. Stephen King. Sue Grafton. Maeve Binchy. Frank McCourt. J.K. Rowling. Lemony Snicket. Etc.

These books aren’t translated because the publishers in France and Turkey and Poland are keen to engage in an international dialogue with American literature. These books are translated because there is a market for these books, and because these books sell, and sell well.

The real test is to ignore translations from English, and for someone to examine how many books each market translates from a more obscure source. South Korea, say. Or, heck, let’s say Japan. Big country, big body of literature. I’d wager that the numbers will be awfully similar.

I got my pages done today, so it was a good day. That’s the question that defines my day: did I get my pages done?

The number of pages I have to get done in order to feel that I “got my pages done,” changes. It’s not a fixed number.  Today I decided 7 1/2 was enough. Yesterday I was in a lousy mood because I crapped out after 3 1/2. Two previous days were 9 pages each, so I was feeling pretty good about that. When I lose a day of work I am impossible to be around.

My name is Michael, and I am a workaholic.
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I did something kind of cool with my Dutch publisher Unieboek a couple weeks go.  We did a Skype interview.

For those who don’t know what Skype is, (Don’t pretend, okay: I can see that Sarah Palin look in your eyes,) it is a service or software . . . okay a service and a software . . . that allow you to communicate by picture phone.

Fine, clearly I don’t really know what it is, either, but I know this: I can use it to hook up by two-way video link with anyone similarly equipped. (Yes, that last is really an unfortunate sentence, isn’t it? Editors? A little help.?) Through my computer.

I get the account name of another Skype person. (Or, Skypester.) I click on their name. A window opens on my computer. They answer, and lo! Their picture appears to me, as mine does to them. And we see each other. In real time. Plus or minus three seconds.

This is almost always a better deal for me than it is for them.

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