Writing: A Medium of Quiet

I write most mornings.  Today I'm in Connecticut on the shore at South Norwalk.  I'm waking up in my best friend's mom's house, like I did many mornings in junior high school and high school.  We lived in Greenwich then and their house was right on the water by Byram Shore Road. We could walk or swim before school in the early summer months on warm days like today.  Of course the water was freezing, but we were young and foolish.

I'm here for the Book Expo in NYC, a busy noisy place I also used to live in, but now, I crave this quiet sunrise and slightly dewy porch furniture waiting for a new day to start. No hustle and bustle need apply.

No noise here, just so much quiet and as I finish my book, I was thinking about the privacy and quiet neighborhood of a book. It's a place you go to find the thoughtful quiet, reflective musings of another person. I can share the delicate noise of one bird on the porch and the peaceful silence of this shore at sunrise with you in a book and it's hard to find that peace many places these days.

Despite the many ways you can write now (blogging, tweeting, facebooking), a book still has a solid weighty feel like no other.

No surprise there. For goodness' sake, a book is made of trees, like any good neighborhood. The medium has a luxurious quiet and whispers a story person to person, which we share, writer and reader, because as the writer I get up early and carve out the time to take you to the places I see and imagine.

Her house stood in Hurricane Sandy while many to the right and left of her house did not, because it was built in the 1960's by a contractor who already knew how rough Mother Nature could get.  He'd shored it up on a higher level with a rocky undercarriage to keep it out of harm's way, never knowing in 2012 his house would have the last laugh on this street, as his house stood up to the proverbial test of time. That's my idea of a good story with a happy ending.

Most Fun Ever / Working with Guy Kawasaki

One more APE fan!

Of course, I want to thank Guy and Shawn for mentioning me in the acknowledgements of their book APE, Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur. Before I get going on why it's so much fun working with him -- I must stop and ask you -- did you read his book yet!? Go get it!

We met when I worked on Enchantment since I was one of many other excellent contributors to the book and his social media push for the book. I really didn't know all that much about him. I knew he was an Apple Evangelist for the Mac. I knew he'd done 9 books before Enchantment. I knew he was smart, but I didn't know how funny he was, or how ANNOYING he can be.

Seriously, he is as annoying as some brainy younger brother who is always asking you questions about why something is done the way it's done and why not try something new.   I use the word "annoying" here as a high compliment, since he is relentlessly innovative. There's not one thing he takes for granted.

He's the original "push the envelope" guy and "think out of the box" guy and "why not" guy. I'd worked with him on his book Enchantment, met him online, met in person, connected with him on social media often, then worked with him on the What The Plus: Google+ for the rest of us and still, for some odd reason, had never heard him speak at any conference. He speaks at lots of events and conferences, and I was busy most times he was in town to speak, but then I finally heard him speak in Boston after knowing him for about two years.

Maybe I'm a little critical of speakers, because I was involved in putting on events and hearing many speakers at Harvard Business School Publishing and at TTI Vanguard. I figured he would be good. I did not expect him to be TERRIFIC. He's serious, smart, funny and hilarious at times. He also speaks the truth when it needs to be spoken, which most people don't do. So this makes him even more fun to listen to. Anyway, if you have been busy and have some good excuse for not having read his last few books, I forgive you, but go get them! Read them! Enjoy them! I know you will!

Andrew Sullivan on ebooks and publishing

Great piece via 52novels by Andrew Sullivan on ebooks and publishing.

ebook secrets ... shhhhh!

Leo Tolstoy, Age 20, 1848

Don't tell anyone I told you, but here are some of the secrets ebook lovers have discovered and do not want to share.  This is why they can't go back to books.

Secret No. 1:  No Glasses Required!

Know what this is?    Aa

You probably don't if you don't read ebooks.

"Aa" is the key on the Kindle that lets you set the font size so no matter where you are you can read WITHOUT putting your glasses on.  (That is, if you are myopic.)  And, let me tell you, once you get used to being able to read without having to go HUNT FOR YOUR GLASSES, it's very hard to get used to reading a real book again, where you can't change the font size instantly.  Like that baby on Youtube who thinks a magazine is an iPad, you'll find yourself whacking the paper book expecting the font to get bigger.

Secret No. 2:  No Lights Required!

If you have a dumb old paper book and you read from daylight into darkness, you have to either get up and turn on the light or go find a little clippy light.  With an ebook, you likely have a built-in light with the cute old Kindle cover, or you have the Kindle Fire or iPad which means the book is "lit" without doing anything.  Sounds like no big deal, but there are many times and places you want to read where turning on a big old light overhead is either very inconvenient or disruptive of others.  Ebook readers love not having to mess with lighting.

Secret No. 3:  Effing Count Alexei Kirillovich Vronsky 

If you read novels, and most ebook readers do, there is something so WONDERFUL about a quick search to find out who the hell a certain character is, with an unpronounceable  name like this one.  I mean, if you read Tolstoy and don't speak Russian, you are lost in a snowstorm of complicated character names.  Who can remember who the hell Count Alexei Kirillovich Vronsky is anyway?!  And you BETTER remember who Vronsky is, because he's Anna Karenina's lover and she throws herself under the train for the bastard. Not only does the plain old Kindle let you search the name, finding the first time it appears and other important data, but with the super cool upgrades on the Kindle Fire, it practically gives you all the Spark Notes info on the guy.  You start to feel less like a reader and more like a private eye.  What paper book can do that for you in 5 seconds?!

Secret No. 4:  Have I Got A Deal For You!

If you have a Kindle, you get so many terrific deals on books EVERY DAY, it's almost impossible to imagine going into a bookstore anymore.  I mean, maybe you could go into a bookstore, use one of their big comfy armchairs, open your Kindle and see what great books are on sale today at Amazon, download one in a split second and sit there and read, but that would be very rude behavior.  Can you honestly use a bookstore's chair, with no intention to buy their wares as you sit next to a hardcover book, priced at $19.95 or more and read the SAME BOOK in the e-version which you just bought for $1.00?! Please, be fair.  As the Ebook Wars rage, be polite enough to avert your eyes from the hopeless victims.

These are just a few of the secrets, I refuse to tell the others.

A Room (and a Printing Press) of One's Own

I've been reading about Virginia Woolf's life and how she and her husband decided they needed to self-publish. In 1917, that meant buying a printing press. (Too bad she missed the e-book revolution by a hundred years or so.)

Check out this great site at Yale University called The Modernism Lab and this fascinating piece by Jessica Svedsen about Virginia and Leonard Woolf starting Hogarth Press. Their reasons for starting the press will sound all too familiar to ebook writers.

Leonard recalled that one of the major reasons for beginning the Hogarth Press was to publish small books that would otherwise have little chance of being printed by established publishing companies—small volumes that “the commercial publisher would not look at” (Woolf, Leonard 234).  The majority of Hogarth authors were a part of the Woolf’s Bloomsbury circle—Clive Bell, T.S. Eliot, E.M. Forster, Roger Fry, Katherine Mansfield, Vita Sackville-West—and they were allowed to escape from the unpleasant pressures of editors and publishers.

Of course the notion now that “the commercial publisher would not look at” writers like T.S. Eliot, E.M. Forster, Katherine Mansfield, or Virginia Woolf sounds completely crazy. But escaping the pressures of the editors and publishers in 1917 sounds more than reasonable, even to the present day.

Virginia Woolf being 1) a woman writer and 2) a highly experimental writer, meant she had two strikes against her from the start in terms of getting a publisher and her husband Leonard understood this. Thank goodness they decided to start Hogarth Press. It meant we know Virginia Woolf's work, just the way she wanted to present it.

Photo Credit: The painting is "Portrait of Virginia Woolf" by George Charles Beresford via Wikipedia