Kirsten Mortensen's blog

The Hill Wife

by Robert Frost

V. The Impulse

It was too lonely for her there
And too wild,
And since there were but two of them
And no child,

And work was little in the house
She was free,
And followed where he furrowed field,
Or felled tree.

She rested on a log and tossed
The fresh chips,
With a song only to herself
On her lips.

And once she went to break a bough
Of black alder.
She strayed so far she scarcely heard
When he called her –

And didn’t answer — didn’t speak –
Or return.
She stood, and she ran and hid
In the fern.

He never found her, though he looked
Everywhere,
And he asked at her mother’s house
Was she there.

Sudden and swift and light as that
The ties gave,
And he learned of finalities
Besides the grave.

Okay, I’ve been golfing for about a month now (not counting when I played as a kid) and I came soooo close to a milestone tonight — on an easy course, of course — I played nine holes and shot a 51, and that was with a terrible last hole (9 strokes). Short game fell apart. Not that my short game was all that together before, lol. But I’m still ecstatic — to be this close to breaking that 50 for nine /100 for eighteen stroke mark . . .

I am so gone for this game . . . today marks five days in a row I’ve played. (Oh dear, I’m truly a mess, aren’t I!!!!)

Technorati Tags: golf

By definition the audience for literary fiction — for difficult, or as Ralph Nadir would prefer ;-) “challenging” books — is smaller than the audience for mainstream books.

It’s probably impossible to know for sure how small, but that doesn’t stop people from speculating. Via Publishers Marketplace, in Saturday’s Globe and Mail, James Adams writes that 15 years ago, it was estimated that about 3000 Canadians read “serious” books. Adams speculates that number has since fallen by as much as half.

The adjective “serious” was never precisely defined, but it was understood to describe those readers who could be counted on to go to a bookstore at least once a week and buy one or two titles on each occasion, mixing purchases of fiction with those of non-fiction. Since then . . . that estimate has dropped, I’m told, to between 1,600 and 2,000, the result, one imagines, of the competing distractions-attractions of the Internet and the rise of digital media.

In 1993 (about the same time the 3000 figure was being floated for Canada) Kurt Andersen wrote an essay for Time, “It’s a Small World After All,” in which he attempted to suss out the size of the market for “high end cultural artifacts,” including the market for literary fiction. He noted that

250,000 Americans bought Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera in hardcover. Every thoughtful reader in America did not, despite Knopf’s best efforts, buy the Garcia Marquez novel, meaning that the potential audience for any given book is larger. “It might even be a million,” says Knopf’s Ann Close, who edits Alice Munro and Norman Rush, among others. On the other hand, all the actual buyers of any typical serious novel would fit in Fenway Park, or even a Vegas showroom.

Presumably, a “typical serious novel” would be one written by someone without the sort of reputation Garcia Marquez enjoys. So how many actual buyers might this novelist count on?

If we extrapolate from Adams’ figures we can just multiply by ten (since Canada’s population is roughly 1/10 of the United States’). That would put the US lit fic market size at somewhere around 20,000 people today.

Think that’s low? I dunno, maybe it is. It’s a long way from that quarter of a million figure for Garcia Marquez’ book. What possessed all those people to buy Love in the Time of Cholera? Were they all shopping for I’m-quite-the-intellectual coffeetable tchotchkes? Why aren’t they buying other lit fiction? Hey, why aren’t they buying serious Canadian books?

By way of context, some 280 million copies of Nora Roberts’ novels have been sold to date. Granted, she’s prolific (this registration-required NY Times article mentions her next book as number 166) but that still averages to over 1.5 million copies per book.

OTOH, most commercial fiction doesn’t scale those heights. John Scalzi* cites the New York Times as his source for this fact: a mainstream novel is considered a bestseller if it sells 25,000 copies.

(Scalzi also says that anecdotally it seems publishers offer larger advances on lit fiction than on genre fiction — despite the fact that lit fiction may have poorer odds to earn out. Gambler’s fallacy perhaps?)

* AKA the guy who just won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer.

Technorati Tags: writing, literary fiction, commercial fiction

Okay, I’m doing my part to stop this meme from corrupting any more innocent bloggers. Read this before you believe the story about cows having accents. It’s a PR ploy. Make that, a PR cow pie. Hear that sound around the globe? It’s the sound of journalists munching. Munch munch munch.

Technorati Tags: cow accents

Blogs that cover the cultural and economic effects of the Internet on newspaper publishing are all linking a couple of articles in The Economist about the latter’s dire straits:

For most newspaper companies in the developed world, 2005 was miserable. They still earn almost all of their profits from print, which is in decline. As people look to the internet for news and young people turn away from papers, paid-for circulations are falling year after year. Papers are also losing their share of advertising spending. Classified advertising is quickly moving online. Jim Chisholm, of iMedia, a joint-venture consultancy with IFRA, a newspaper trade association, predicts that a quarter of print classified ads will be lost to digital media in the next ten years. Overall, says iMedia, newspapers claimed 36% of total global advertising in 1995 and 30% in 2005. It reckons they will lose another five percentage points by 2015.

So what are newspapers to do?

Gal Beckerman, at CJR Daily, ends a summary of the piece with this little zinger:

If the only way to make newspapers profitable is to turn “fine journalism” into junk, than maybe we should start thinking about whether or not news is too precious a commodity to be subjected to the same economic rules by which one sells widgets or hamburgers.

That would be “free market” rules, right? Bring on state-subsidized newspapers!

Meanwhile Jeff Jarvis excerpts from this companion piece in a post titled “Who Saved the Treees?” — and notes that it ends hopefully. This is about change, after all. And change is only a threat if you aren’t willing to change with it.

I was thinking last night about how Google has made a fortune organizing content for people without regard to its quality while newspapers husband their content jealously — in essence, they place a higher value on the content than on peoples’ access to it. “This is so good, you have to pay to see it.” “If you want to read this, you have to register and maintain an account with us.”

It’s a completely different mindset. No wonder the newspaper industry is in flames.

Technorati Tags: media, newspaper industry

Literary agent Rachel Vater, whose blog I only just discovered but which is an absolute treasure trove, has a post up now about “hooks and layers.”

You need both to write a marketable book.

She compares examples of queries she’s rejected to taglines from published books to show how adding layers can make a “been done before” (and what hasn’t been done before?) premise fresh and interesting.

Great stuff.

Technorati Tags: writing, fiction

Golfed with my parents this evening at a course they play often in Chenango County. There’s a doe with twin fawns that they see all the time around the second hole/third tee, and sure enough they were out tonight. I managed to get several pics of the fawns before they stepped into the underbrush. Not that they were in a particular hurry. They don’t let the golfers bother them much.

(Yeah, I know this doesn’t hold a candle to the photos a certain blogger‘s wife captures when they’re out on the course :-))

Technorati Tags: golf, fawns

Slime mold is one of those things you encounter when you wander around in the woods, like moss and lichens.

I always thought it was a fungus.

But now I read this article by Chet Raymo, and it turns out that slime mold isn’t a fungus, but . . . well, something else entirely.

For part of its life cycle it lives as “free-roaming amoebas, single-celled organisms, grazing on bacteria” — during this stage it’s invisible to the naked eye.

If the supply of bacteria runs out, however, some of the organisms “secrete a chemical called acrasin, after Acrasia, the cruel witch in Spenser’s Faerie Queen who attracted men and turned them into beasts. It is a call. A signal.” This caused the organisms to clump into the slime form — at which point the mass is able to move by sliding, say, down a log — and then, when it reaches a suitable spot, organisms within the mass organize to form fruiting bodies.

Raymo gives details of this process in a very readable way, so click through if you enjoy that sort of thing. Incredible stuff.

Raymo then writes that it’s “now widely agreed”

that slime molds are neither plant nor animal nor fungus but members of the kingdom Protoctista, which encompasses some of the most ancient single-celled organisms . . . in their curious life cycle slime molds recapitulate that episode in the history of life, which occurred about 700 million years ago, when single-celled microorganisms, having lived on their own for 3 billion years, came together to form multicellular organisms. Invisible life became gloriously visible, and wonderfully diverse. Creatures individually smaller than the point of a pin piled themselves together to become, in the fullness of time, brontosauruses and blue whales.

Something to muse upon the next time you see a splotch of “dog vomit fungus” in your perennial bed.

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POD-dy Mouth sheds a bit more insight into the agent rejection thing — specifically why an agent would love your novel but still decide he/she wouldn’t be able to sell it:

What you, aspiring writer, are forgetting, is that while an agent may sell (as an example) mysteries and yours is a stellar one, he/she may know that his/her editorial contacts will not go for your particular mystery for some offhand reason. Agents, to varying degrees, sell to the same editors over and over. Examples: Jenny Bent (Trident) sells regularly to Denise Roy (S&S), Dorian Karchmar (William Morris) sells regularly to Claire Wachtel (William Morrow), Elaine Koster sells regularly to Carrie Feron (William Morrow), and so forth. The point is these agents know what these editors want . . . specifically. So if your novel’s protagonist happens to be a coke addict and Agent A’s contacts aren’t much for characters with substance abuse issues, you’re out of luck, no matter how deftly written your novel may be.

Interesting. So to some degree, agents act as scouts for particular editors . . . you learn something new every day.

Technorati Tags: writing, literary agents

A screenwriter, that is.

Tess Geritsen tried it once and is glad she’s writing novels now, instead.

Technorati Tags: writing, novels, screenwriting