First: I have got to get out of that office. We are now running on a ten-business-day streak of "not home before 7 PM". Fortunately, Place Where I Work apparently has other vacancies in its other tech nodes, and fortunately more fortunately, they give priority to us folks who are already tethered there. I really really don't want to just crap on four years' seniority and some kickass dental benefits (thanks to dope and Pepsi, I've got a filling, a crown, or a cavity in every tooth in my mouth, so you know I'm all about the dental benefits.) I just can't work with Those Motherfucking Idiots anymore. (Who spends an hour getting trained on a new operating system and doesn't take notes? And what manager communicates--even implicitly--to her employees that they "don't have to bother" learning anything about their computers because "that's not their job"?)
Second: Is anyone else experiencing this weird sort of restless, pissed-off, ambitious angry exhausted fed-up creative-explosion-with-nowhere-to-go feeling?
Or is that just me?
Fuck Me: Did anyone else know that you could do this? (Okay. I would appreciate it greatly if all of you would momentarily ignore the difference between this plan and its current state of completion. Just for now. You can call me on it later--honest. Like, after this weekend, if I don't get any further.) Is CafePress the coolest thing in the world or WHAT???
I have such amazing plans and I don't know where to go with them. I need money and more importantly I need TIME.
you don't want to go that route, Gladys. it's called vanity publishing and is not at all respected in the literary world.
ReplyDeleteOh, I know--god knows I've read enough _Writers Digest_s to know about that scam--but I just find it cool that--if you wanted to do it at all--you can now actually do it without the cheesy middleman.
ReplyDeleteAs for the literary world, I'm starting to wonder if it's a thing on its way out...There will always be books, of course, and there will always be an industry for ________(insert cliched, hackneyed author name here, to your liking) to churn out threadbare potboilers, and there will always be adoring toadies to give them frothing, orgasmic reviews. But I increasingly wonder at the relevance of that little cadre of mutual adorers.
(Wow, that wasn't bad sentence construction for only having been out of bed ten minutes...)
Is it a scam or is it just a cultural faux pas in the literary community? I've a couple of plays and such I'd love to have bound just for my own archives, but trust me to go marching into a scam.
ReplyDeleteI think the most important thing here, Gladys, is how excited the mere idea of publishing made you, even if it was on your nickel. You need to do this. Screw Those Motherfucking Idiots.
as long as there are colleges/universities, there will be a literati. sad but true. and you're absolutely right--they stroke each other's egos and write positive reviews for one another's work.
ReplyDeletein real life, this doesn't mean that they have the definitive answers as to what is or isn't good literature, but the academy is so established it would take centuries to knock them out of their ivory towers.
if i ever decide to get serious about my writing, i'm not sure i'd be willing to accept a tenure-track position because then i'd be one of them. wallace stevens was a vice president at an insurance company. more recently dana gioia (goia?) was a VP at General Electric. he wrote an excellent article called "can poetry matter?" or something like that. you might find it interesting.
now, if what you're looking for is a way to present your work in a professional format, you don't need Cafe Press to do that. any printer can do that for you and at a much cheaper rate. i'm guessing you can even do it yourself at Kinko's and won't have to order a minimum number of copies.
just my $1. ^_^