A case of the Emperor's New Clothes?

Right now I'm mulling over a serious problem. What do I tell my two new online students, or any writing students, who work with me at perfecting their novels ready for a publisher? Do I stick with the traditional advice or do I give in to my now serious doubts and discuss them, giving the students that publishing information?

There is no doubt, I repeat this, no doubt, that the basic information handed out in books, on websites, and in writers' magazines or online writers' groups on how to get published with traditional publishers is correct. And this information is a must for new writers to follow. I have no problems with presenting it to my students at all. I know that often a first novel is not publishable even if many of the new writers don't yet accept that. All writers need to believe in themselves, to be arrogant enough to keep writing in the face of rejections. As they struggle with editing, query letters, synopsis and researching agents they are learning and you hope that one day, if they have sufficient of a writers' 3Ds or 3Ps, they will get there, write a publishable novel. Probably with their fourth or fifth attempt.

But what happens when you have more experienced writers, writers who have been publishing short stories, plays, articles, poems for a few years, and who have now written several novels? These writers really have the skills to follow the How to Get Published instructions. They have an original, well written, perfectly edited and presented manuscript. They have an attention grabbing but fully detailed synopsis, and their query letters are a work of art. They have researched their agents and publishers carefully. They have done everything necessary and yet cannot rouse the interest of an agent or publisher.

Current traditional thinking is that their novel simply isn't good enough or it would be published. All writers learn this very quickly and accept it as gospel. But is it?

To make way in traditional publishing a writer needs an agent. Agents are the guardians of the gateway to the traditional publishers. Some very helpful U.K. agents told me they take on one or two people a year and receive, according to the size of their agencies, 4,000 to 8,000 queries a year. Allowing for the slush pile rule that only 10% of the queries are worth reading that still means 400 to 800 query packages to be read. If each agent selects two that leaves anything from 398 to 798 manuscripts unpublished.

Are they unpublishable? How much does luck play a part in choices? How much does fashion play a part? How much does the agent's own preferences play a part? How much does 'we want more of the same', commercial candy floss play a part? How much do business considerations like the writer's age, where they live or how contract savvy they are play a part?

I'm beginning to think that this idea that these novels are not good enough is in fact a case of the Emperor's New Clothes and that giving the traditional advice to these more experienced writers, is keeping them locked into the traditional publishing world and its systems at a time when there are other opportunities. Of course the traditional publishing world is happy to keep these writers dangling, hoping that one day they too can have a Penguin or Oak tree, on their novel, because publishing is a business and the publishers want new writers. So if it's not this year, it might be next year or the year after that. Keep 'em hoping with the idea that their novel isn't publishable yet but the next one might be.

Cynical? Possibly, but I think I will be recommending that the experienced writers I know, with manuscripts which we have read, worked on and enjoyed, can try the traditional route of course, but that they will be better off with the Small Presses, those e-book and POD publishers who are open to submissions without an agent. And for those writers with energy and excellent PR ideas, who don't give a fig for the snooty put downs which self published fiction so often receives, I would even recommend that they can go that route and see how much they can earn!

Obsessions.

My neighbour from hell is obsessed. He, (and now his wife,) whose 12 acres border mine, is frantic that I should not plant trees. Their house is roughly 25 metres from our mutual boundary fence. They claim that my hazel, almond and fruit trees will damage their house. They claim that my windbreak of coppicing bushes and shrubs will damage their house, and prevent it being sold. Daily I endure abuse, am spied on, cannot walk down my drive without being stalked, yet when I complain they say they must protect their property and they are not doing anything wrong. Attempts to get a mediator in failed. They don't need one! A solicitor's letter warning them of the inevitable consequences of their actions is ignored and laughed at. They drag the local Council officials into their campaign of harassment and I have to waste more time reminding the Council that they have a large file about my neighbour and they should read it before threatening me. I am writing this with my neighbour's binoculars trained on me as I sit on my verandah about one kilometre away from his house and land. He is dangerously obsessed.

And as I wonder how high a fence I can build along that boundary to block out my neighbour I have to chuckle. One of the poets I studied for my O levels was Robert Frost. I can still quote 'Mending Wall' - 'Good fences make good neighbours' He will not go behind his father's saying and he likes to have thought of it so well.' Exactly!

Agents and Publishers' editors are obsessed too. With marketability and money. But I wonder if they really know what readers want. I have included a few mentions of book titles and quotes from poetry in my latest novel. There are school room scenes and the schoolmaster is an important character so I have not foisted these quotes and titles in isolation. However the expert advice I have received from agents and publishers' editors is to remove these as modern readers won't know what they are and don't like quotations. The readers and writers I work with, to test my writing by reading and critiquing, snort in indignation. They like quotes and titles. 'Tells me more about the character.' most of them have said. A quick check round the library, talking to the readers there, came up with the same answer. One person said they had found some interesting poems to read that way.

So who is right? Does an obsession with earning lots of money by getting a 'popular' marketable novel make these experts right? Or do the wide range of ebooks being downloaded by the new techy readers say something quite different. Something about reasonable prices allowing readers to try different types of books? Something about the fact that people cannot all be boxed into the same square?

The mind boggles.

What is it about some people that they cannot bear trees planted near them?

For the last three years I have been busy trying to turn 12 acres into a fairly self sufficient, small amount of income-earning horticultural block and the house into a Language School for Japanese homestay holidays, and a writers' retreat. I live in a glorious part of N.Z. with wonderful beaches, mountains and high country all in easy reach. It seems a sensible way to add to my pension when I reach pensionable age.

I have been working hard to plant windbreaks to shelter my tree crops. The tree crops I plan to grow are hazel nuts, a small pick your own orchard of apples, pears, cherries, apricots etc and Douglas fir and Scots Pine which have their roots inoculated with gourmet fungi, either saffron milkcaps or a member of the porcini family.

I do consider neighbours and before planting on my 12 acres I worked out what I could plant without shading, blocking or otherwise being a nuisance to neighbours. All my windbreaks are designed to be coppiced for firewood and thus aren't allowed to grow beyond 6 or 7 metres.

With all this planning then it becomes rather infuriating when one neighbour of my four neighbouring properties spends his whole time trying to get rid of me and my trees. I have had this man harassing me daily for the three years I have lived here. His threats and foul mouthing have been duly written down,reported to the police, taped, witnessed, and statements written as the police requested, yet nothing has been done.

This week, after having carefully checked with my friendly solicitor, I have been removing the nasty neighbour's electric fence reels hooked onto my boundary fence. The law is that both owners of a boundary fence must agree to anything done to the fence. I was not consulted and the three heavy reels have already stretched the wire. My nasty neighbour whined to the police.

Guess what? Oh yes The police came running to speak to me. Interesting isn't it? My neighbour has threatened me, stalked me along our mutual boundary fences, verbally abused me in sexual terms, and done this daily for three years, but the police have done nothing. My foul mouthed neighbour whines about my perfectly legal action and they jump.

It's still a man's world as far as the police go. I wonder if I'd been blond, glamourous and twenty years younger whether I'd have had more police attention!

Lordy, how time flies.

August done and gone and I didn't do my weekly blogging. Tut!

I've been teaching in one form or another most of my working life. Beginners are usually fun to teach, but beginning writers are definitely the worst people to teach.

One in ten new writers ranges from diabolically difficult to merely bloody awkward. Everyone learns to write at school so everyone thinks they can write a novel. Ah me!
Baby Beginners who are serious about using writing as an art form, a way of painting marvellous tales with carefully selected words will eventually become real writers but those people are rarely the one in ten.

I do feel sorry for the flagrant exhibitionists who want to be noticed and admired and see their names in the local newspaper. Why they think being a writer will do this for them I don't know. Perhaps they were ignored as children or believe that when they read about J.K. Rowling in the newspaper that they too can be like her. How little they know.

I'm grumbling because I've discovered that LinkedIn is a TakeIn. I'd been persuaded to join because it's a professional networking group. Oh yeah! Try the Authors and Writers group any of you experienced writers. It's full of the writing tutor's nightmare students. I've got my students tuning in to a particularly hilarious and sad couple of threads by a would-be writer who suffers from every newbie 'disease' possible. Sadly she is also rude to people who disagree with her and the lack of any moderator to remind her to respect her fellow writers is noticeable. I hope the other LinkedIn writers' group I've joined is better.

I can see the frustration, understand the rage.

The riots in the UK were a shock, it's the sort of behaviour one expects in American inner city ghettos or anywhere with people used to express their passions full bore, not like the stolid British. And, yes, of course there are opportunist baddies, thieves and thugs who know they can murder or pull of a tricky robbery and probably get away with it in the chaos.

But frustration with a life which seems hopeless, jobless, and which sets you in a society where you will receive no respect, and therefore you end up with little self respect, that can become anger-making. And anger and frustration, with nowhere to go, end up exploding.

When our Western societies have turned Capitalism into a religion, turned money into a god, and urge us all to consume more products with built in obsolescence, and buy, buy, buy, but ignore the other side, creating jobs, something will give eventually.

When films, TV and advertising all glorify possessions and obtaining them, and when films are made with heroes and heroines who are mass murderers, thieves or people who take what they want, we aren't exactly sending out 'good' messages.

What a waste!

I rarely watch TV. Can't stand all the American crap, this stupid vampire rubbish which seems quite dangerously unbalanced, let alone the violence which is so much a part of American films and TV programmes. There are so few interesting and intelligent programmes. I don't own a TV, didn't buy another when mine packed up. I am a slow writer and long quiet evenings are a great time for writing.

However last night a friend invited me to watch a programme following the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra on its first grand European tour. The tour had been reported as a great success and I looked forward to seeing the orchestra in some of the concert halls I'd visited when I was travelling around Europe. New Zealand on Air had funded the film which was fronted by someone called Jeremy Wells. I should get to hear some great music.

My fury knew no bounds when it turns out that Master Wells thinks himself a comedian. So it was a programme about Jeremy Wells, focusing on him and not the orchestra. Some comedian, he sounded like a brat of five asking kindergarten joke questions. So the poor members of the orchestra faced infantile questions about 'doing number one and number twos', 'playing in the nude', 'sex before a concert' and such like rubbish. The poor German doctor was asked if she had to pick up testicles if a member of the orchestra had them sawn off by a fellow musician's bow.

Funny it was not. Pathetic, infantile and a complete waste of NZ on Air money it was. If it was meant to be 'young person' humour and an attempt to gain a younger audience for the orchestra then I don't know of young people who are as infantile and stupid as Master Wells was.

I hope I don't ever meet the idiot. I'd like to saw his testicles off and stuff them down his too large, flapping gabby mouth. The NZSO truly had a successful tour, it was diminished by his crass stupidity.

twitter and tweet indeed.

I dared to comment on an online forum that I found it sad that a social networking forum like Twitter seemed to be part of a world that promotes money and business over all else. Shock and horror. How dare I say that? It wasn't true, Twitter was wonderful etc. Well, sorry, but my brief experience tells me so.

I've been learning how to 'use' Twitter for the past 18 days. From day two I had two or more suggestions to follow with a sickly pink button beside them saying Promoted. All of these promoted things turned out to be businesses selling clothes and stuff I do not want.

I followed a suggestion to use the hash key and join the Friday reads book group. My first tweet to them was about the remarkable, well written, and thoroughly thought provoking, Inspector Shan series by Eliot Pattison, set in Tibet. I then received a tweet from a travel company which makes tours to Tibet. Tweet is the wrong word it was just a business message.

Since I have complained to Twitter support all the suggestions to follow businesses with Promoted buttons beside them have vanished. I've discovered how to block any businesses which bother me. However now I am receiving tweets from people I am not following, nor are they following me. It's difficult enough reading and understanding the Tweets from the people I follow as it is without tweets from some twit raving about baseball which I hate.

I am picky, I only follow writers I know or want to know, a few small press publishers I know and like their books, and reader/book groups like the Guardian one.
So how does Twitter dare post on my Twitter site so much promoted business when I am clearly not interested in anything other than writing, reading, and publishing? All it does is convince me that Twitter is only after making money from compiling information about the people using the system and flogging it off to business interests.