Professional Milestone

Today marks a professional milestone for me; Publishers Weekly published my very first—and bylined—feature article. Here's how it happened.

One of my PW editors, Rose Fox, emailed me a few weeks ago and asked if I'd be interested in working on a feature article for the upcoming romance issue of the magazine. The topic? Author online self-promotion. With a two-week turnaround time and a brief to include authors from a variety of imprints/lines/publishers, and a list of publicists for the major publishers, I jumped in.

Emails back and forth to the publicists, my suggestions and theirs, and I put together a list of more than 20 authors. They represented all romance subgenres, included debuting and long-published authors, those who kept it strictly professional online and those who treated readers to personal or off-the-cuff commentary, those who started blogging for fun and those who began to blog as part of a plan to become published. Some intrigued me for other reasons; one because she found a unique way to promote herself by not actively promoting herself, another because she'd sold a quarter of a million ebooks before being picked up by a mainstream publisher, and a third because of her pop culture connections. I did not know most of the authors, but some I knew from my years at AAR.

Twenty interviews later, with 36 pages worth of Q&A and follow ups, I sat down to actually write the article. It took me two eight-hour days to complete it, and another couple of hours to come up with the sidebar of do's and don'ts Rose asked me to pull out of the article itself and use to create a sidebar, along with quotes from the interviews to match.

My draft was due to Rose on Monday, November 14th; because I'd exceeded the 2,100 word count by 500 words (what else is new?), and didn't have a clue if it was any good whatsoever, I emailed it to her the Friday before so she would have plenty of time to edit (and I could rewrite if necessary). And then spent a sleepless night wondering if she'd hate it or approve.

I woke up at 5:30 that Saturday morning from the pain of a dreadful, full-frontal headache, presumably a tension-release headache like those that plagued me after finals all throughout college and graduate school. I checked my email and discovered a couple from Rose. First, and I'm totally channeling my one-time baby-sitter Sally Field here...she liked it, she really liked it! Next, she asked me to secure print-ready cover art for the article. I took a migraine pill and went back to sleep, secure in the knowledge that I hadn't fucked up my chance to prove I could write a magazine-quality feature article.

Over the next few days I gathered up all the print-ready cover art, and went through Rose's edits to clarify certain points. As always, her edits transformed my lowly draft into something terrific. Today the print version of the magazine went on sale, and those with subscriptions to PW can access it online.

The payday for the article is roughly the amount I receive for a year's worth of reviewing, and while the money itself isn't what's important, that my writing is worth it means a lot to me. It only took me fourteen years to get a gig like this; hopefully it won't be another fourteen years to get another.

Professional Milestone

Snarked on Net Neutrality

I've written before about Net Neutrality, and probably a quarter of my tweets relate to the issue. The FCC's Net Neutrality rules just went into effect, and Free Press is one of several entities to file suit against the FCC. The rules, you see, don't provide for true Net Neutrality; while they address the issue where land-based computers are concerned, they don't for wireless.

It's hard to get a handle on how much profit Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint make per cellular customer, but enough is never really enough, is it? AT&T recently eliminated the ability to buy a limited number of texts in favor of a $20.00 option for unlimited texts. I believe wireless companies make approximately a 10,000% texting profit. Another example: When I tried to change our existing plan to less than 700 minutes, I learned the 400 minute option—which would have worked for us as our daughter does most of her talking at night and on weekends— had disappeared. Like restaurants charging more for ever-larger plates, cellular providers are closing out less expensive options in favor of larger profits. And as there's so little competition, who's to stop them?

Free Press, a national, nonpartisan group working to reform media, sends out daily emails about media-related news. Many of those news items these days relate to the activities surrounding the proposed AT&T/T-Mobile merger (different filings made by AT&T as various items have leaked surrounding costs and jobs, lobbying money spent on Congress, unions, and corporations to win their support, and the recent Justice Department's Anti-Trust filing) to the fight for and against Net Neutrality.

I spend a lot of time reading articles linked to by Free Press in newspapers, magazines, online journals, The Huffington Post, etc., because the issue of Net Neutrality is important to me as a writer and former web publisher. You can imagine, then, that I was more than a little perturbed when I read the following headline yesterday on the Techland blog for @Time by @MattPeckham: Net Neutrality Proponents Sued by Net Neutrality Proponents? Though Peckham eventually cuts to the chase, it's not until four paragraphs in that he addresses the issue; until then the suit is made to sound frivolous and nonsensical. Here's the lead-in that follows the headline:

The folks who just officiated over net neutrality Internet regulations, the Federal Communications Commission, are being sued by—yep, the folks who fought to make net neutrality happen. Net neutrality's advocates suing net neutrality's enforcers?

True story.

Again, Peckham eventually makes Free Press' case, along with the FCC's response, but to me the article's headline, that snarky lead-in, and the lack of context related to the issue frustrated me. What's ultimately at stake is what the creators of the Internet envisioned, not a two-tiered system that cellular providers have already begun to force on customers.

It's clear that corporate interests already have a disproportionate impact on legislation, but articles like Peckham's do nothing to dispel the idea that corporate interests now infect journalism. The media bias I fear comes from corporate America, and that's what I worry filtered through into this particular article. "He said, he said" doesn't provide readers with the information they need to understand what's going on, any more than allowing politicians and their spin-meisters from making lies without being called on their bullshit because we've so perverted the concept of equal time that lies and reality now share the stage.

Yesterday I tweeted my displeasure and early today Matt Peckham answered me in a tweet. And then he snarked me by posting about a #Superficial #Reader" and linking back to his article on the Techland Blog. Ouch!

Snarked on Net Neutrality

Busy Girl

This morning I turned in my latest PW review, saw that three of my previously written PW reviews made it into this week's PW (a new record), and learned that I have [at least] two pieces going online this week at Heroes and Heartbreakers. I've got assignments out the wazoo, and could not be any happier. These aren't lengthy articles, but the creativity seems to be flowing out of me.

My H&H piece for tomorrow was a blast to write, but achieving just the right tone for it proved a challenge. I worked and worked and worked on it, and because it was a spec piece was patient as it found a slot on the H&H schedule. Once you read it you'll understand that I feel proud of it yet while also feeling, in a non-ironic sense, exposed. That's as much of a teaser as you're getting from me.

Busy Girl

Voices in My Head

Evan Fallenberg's When We Danced on Water, my favorite book so far in 2011—and my first Desert Isle Keeper in more than half a year, will be published later this month. It's terrific for a lot of reasons, chief among them its elegant prose.

Those of you who've known me online for long know that I often point out bad prose—hence a decade of the Purple Prose Parody Contest. It's less often that I talk about prose in a positive sense. When I do, it's generally to compliment spare prose, as I've done with other DIKs, such as Paulo Coelho's The Fifth Mountain, or overall spareness, both in prose and plot, as with Mary Balogh. Fallenberg's writing isn't so much spare as it is precise. Coelho's writing packs an emotional punch because the prose itself is so spare. Balogh's emotional success comes from the all-round spareness. It is Fallenberg's precision that works so well in this book because it allows him a tremendous fluidity, like Baryshnikov flying across a stage.

The book features an 85-year-old choreographer, so indulge my using that as a metaphor for Fallenberg's writing. Just as a choreographer can capture the fluidity and emotionality of a piece of music and dance, so does this author. Just as a dance features moments of different tempos and varies in boldness and strength, so does Fallenberg write with a pin-point focus, creating a similar fluidity and elegance.

In a couple of scenes his lead character explains how he sees and feels music in his head. While a beautiful concept, it did not fit my experience of music. I wanted needed to understand it better because it was conveyed with such beauty. As music is so integral to his being, I read those passages aloud to my husband, who seemed surprised when I asked if he understood what Fallenberg's character was trying to explain. "Of course," he said matter-of-factly, as though everybody experienced music in that way.

It's been quite awhile since we had that conversation, but it wasn't until recently that I realized he sees music...and when I'm reading, I hear dialog. I hear dialect, voice inflection, even timbre. I don't listen to audiobooks because hearing someone else voice characters interferes with my experience of hearing them in my head.

Among the reasons I so love Eve Dallas' Roarke is that his voice is so clear in my head, particularly when he jokes with Eve or croons sweet nothing to her in that yummy Irish brogue. And when he speaks Gaelic in moments of pure passion, I'm a goner. When a poster to yesterday's piece for H&H objected to a similar speech cadence in Roberts/Robb's writing, I had to sit back and think about whether I'd ever noticed that. I haven't, but I'll start paying attention. That said, though, some of her most vibrant characters are those with accents, so perhaps there's something to her criticism.

What about you? Do you experience music, art, or books in an unusual way?

Voices in My Head