Because that’s what you get this summer, apparently. I’ve been working on Killingly and course prep and an eighteenth-century abstract this week, and I’m wiped.

The Hairpin has a great interview with Kate Beaton, who talks smartly about many things, including dramatizing history in comic form and why people reacted so weirdly to her calling-out of sexism in comics. And for your enjoyment, a recent Hark! A Vagrant strip sure to delight c18 nerds: Fop Gun.

Thriller writer Will Lavender describes his path from writing literary fiction he wasn’t satisfied with to writing what he loves.

A long piece in the Atlantic about the development of the current YA market.

And a lovely review in PW for my friend Merrie Haskell’s forthcoming middle-grade book, The Princess Curse.

The problem with having two computers you use regularly is that you end up with loads of tabs open in one browser, things you mean to post links to — and then you (or at least I) switch to the other computer for a week and forget about them. I have an Ubuntu desktop machine and a Macbook Pro; I do most of my dissertation work on the desktop because the screen is bigger, and most of my fiction writing these days on the Macbook, because I’ve been using Scrivener for Killingly. (I love Scrivener, by the way. I usually write in order, but Killingly is challenging that habit a bit, since I keep realizing I need to go back and add a scene, etc. The corkboard/notecard system is perfect for keeping track of what I’m doing.)

Anyway, there were a few things I’d intended to include in my link roundup post this weekend that were lurking on my laptop. The first is this response by David Simon to criticism from the current Baltimore police commissioner about the effect of The Wire on the city. Makes an interesting comparison with this article about Portugal’s decriminalization of drug possession. (As the person who posted the Portugal link on Twitter said, “Portugal is Hamsterdam.”) I don’t buy the argument that the commissioner is making, either — the notion that a fictionalized portrayal of real problems in a city somehow harms the city more than the actual problems do. Or that fictionalizing real life makes the fictionalized version untrustworthy, as if the only thing art were good for was creating documentation.

And speaking of complicated things, I’ve been meaning to link to this post about ebook piracy, by a writer who grew up in Malaysia and has been living in the UK recently. But I’m glad I hadn’t yet, because Karen Healey, who was involved in the original Twitter discussion (? maybe not quite the right word) about pirating ebooks, has also made a sensible and apologetic post owning up to the fact that she hadn’t really considered the points brought up in Zen’s post, or in colorblue’s post, which focuses on (in colorblue’s words) “the underlying hierarchies & inequalities in the both the current concept of IPR and the ways that it is used and enforced.” Seriously, read all of these. For a number of reasons, including the fact that I taught Lessig’s Free Culture a few years ago, I’m not ever likely to go off on Twitter about how kids on BitTorrent are ruining my career — though it’s entirely possible that that would change if I were trying to make a living solely off my writing, or if I were in striking distance of a bestseller list, which I am totally not. But I can’t say I had considered the points made in these posts as fully as I should have either. The conversation authors often have on the internet about intellectual property rights and piracy is lamentably American-centric, but it doesn’t have to be.

The Blanton Museum Book Club meeting was really lovely — we met in one of the galleries while the museum was open for Third Thursday, next to some very fitting art. It’s been a little while since I’ve talked to a group about Alcestis, and I’ve been thinking so much about Killingly lately that it was fun for me to compare the two projects and consider, as I talked with the group about the book, what I’m doing differently this time.

Have to get back to dissertation revisions now, but here, a whole bushel of links:

• A rejection letter in kind, to Gertrude Stein.
• A border collie that knows more than 1000 names of objects (and is now working on grammar).
• Jubal Early doing his bit for the mode of self-defensive autobiography. (No, not that Jubal Early, the real Jubal Anderson Early [ouch at that web design]. Who is apparently one of Nathan Fillion’s ancestors. What.)
• Via Jessa Crispin, an Edith Wharton short story in which she snarks about book clubs… published, in PDF, by the Library of America. As they introduce it: “During Story of the Week’s first year, we have been gratified to learn (via e-mail messages, blog posts, and phone calls) that an increasing number of readers are using selections for reading groups, the classroom, and library events. And so it is with a bit of trepidation that we offer, in commemoration of Edith Wharton’s birthday on January 24, a story that makes fun of such gatherings by describing one of the more dysfunctional reading discussions in the history of literature.” Heh.
• Maud Newton “on creating the feeling you want the reader to feel“, which opens with the question “Do you think writers have to feel what they want the reader to feel when they’re writing?” What’s interesting here is that this isn’t a “write what you know” question — it’s not about whether or not writers need to feel what their characters feel, but about whether they need to be able to evoke the same state in themselves that they will evoke in their readers. I’m not sure that’s possible, exactly. I think the fact of being the writer of the work always tempers, even if just slightly, the feeling that will be fully accessible to readers — if you’ve done your job right.

It’s been quite a year — one of the strangest and nicest in a while. Alcestis was released in February, an experience that really began for me when I returned from MLA a day or two before the new year and found my box of author’s copies awaiting me. They were so beautiful. I still can’t get over how lucky I’ve been with the design of this book and what a tremendous job Soho’s done; I’m very much looking forward to seeing the trade paperback, too.

And then I had a book launch party in February. I went to Wiscon for the first time in May, and taught a fiction workshop this summer. I’ve been on fellowship all year and I still have six more months of fellowship funding to go.

I wrote a draft of my dissertation, and I started writing Killingly, just a little bit. I revised “The Former Hero,” which I started in 2000, during my sophomore year of college — I can even remember the unfortunate college futon I was sitting on while I typed up notes from my copy of Much Ado. I think it still needs more work, but sometime I’ll get it right. Maybe in another ten years. (This interview with Michael Chabon is a good reminder that even the stubbornest projects can yield something excellent in the end, even if it’s a completely different something from what you intend.)

Tonight I’ll be outside Austin, at a house where you can actually see stars. (The house with the Nubian dairy goats, for those of you who have heard me rhapsodize about them before.) I won’t be tipsy, because I’m driving, but I expect that I will be happy. There’s a lot I want to get done in 2011, starting with finishing the final draft of my dissertation, and it may be something of a rough year. But I hope it will be a good one, too.

Happy new year to all of you.

Bliss: not having a headache after days of lingering migraine. Of course, I made up for it by taking a fierce tumble while I was out running on an especially rocky trail this morning and whacking the hell out of my knee. I don’t even know what I tripped on. Sigh.

While I’m sitting on the sofa with an ice pack, here are some links:

A lengthy and fascinating interview with Cynthia Ozick at the Paris Review, in which Ozick typed her responses to the interviewer’s spoken questions. And here’s the Times review of Ozick’s new novel Foreign Bodies, a reworking of The Ambassadors. I really want to read this!

Maud Newton’s grandmother’s recipe to make you “the skinniest, shittiest, sexiest, drunkest, bastard in town.” In 30 days. In case you’re on a deadline or something.

Rachel Manija Brown on “what freeze/fight/flight” has felt like for her, as a resource for writers.

A forthcoming collection of essays about alternative academic careers in the humanities, to be published online and freely available. (Can anyone tell me why people use “#alt-ac” as the alternate academic tag even though Twitter doesn’t recognize hyphenated hashtags? Is there something wrong with “#altac,” or even “#alt_ac”?)

Alcestis will be going back to print soon — the trade paperback edition will be published in February 2011. I’ve been asked to submit any necessary changes for the reprint. So: if you’ve read Alcestis in hardback or e-book form and noticed any typos or other weird artifacts, would you be so kind as to comment here or email me at katharinebeutner at gmail dot com?

In return, I’ll give you. Uh. A link to a very good article at the Huffington Post about why we need to teach programming in schools? Not that there’s any relation between the two; it’s just one of the more interesting things I’ve read in the last week, and I’m pretty short on content yet again. (I know I’m on fellowship this year and am supposed to be a lady of leisure, but I don’t think my workload has gotten the memo.)

Lisa Brackmann, the author of the fabulous debut thriller Rock Paper Tiger, is a fellow Soho debut novelist. We’ve gotten to know each other a bit this year as our books have been released, and we decided to interview each other about the debut publication process.

How long did the process of getting published take, from starting to work on the novel
through its publication date?

LB: Hah. Hahah. HAHAHAHAH.

Ahem. Well, writing the novel took a while. I’m not particularly fast. I started working
with my agent, Nathan Bransford, in July 2007. The novel sold in May 2009. The
publication date was June 2010.

So writing and revising the novel took the longest. The actual production schedule with
Soho, from sale to release, was pretty fast in terms of Publishing Time.

KB: That is pretty fast! Soho bought Alcestis in October 2008 and it only came out four
months before Rock Paper Tiger did (February 2010), so your production schedule was
speedier than mine. I did one small revision with Katie Herman’s advice after Soho acquired the book, but the rest of that time mostly involved doing proofs, brainstorming copy, or waiting while Soho worked their magic.

I started writing Alcestis in June 2004 and finished it, including one round of revision, in April 2006. My agent (the lovely Diana Fox) took a little while to send it out because she was just launching her own agency, but I’d say it was truly on the market for at least a year before Soho made the offer in 2008.

What surprised you about the publication process?

LB: I think that everyone I worked with was so nice and accessible. There was a lot to
do, and it had to get done according to a schedule, and I always felt like the people on the
other side kept lines of communication open and did their best to help me do the work.

Also, it’s a lot of work. I sort of knew this, intellectually, but actually going through
the process brought home to me how much of a job being a published author is. I didn’t
have that much to do in the way of creative revisions, but the line edits, the galley proofs
and all the other stuff you don’t necessarily think about: setting up a website, getting a
professional photo shot, and all of the PR efforts—it really is a job.

Finally, how wonderfully supportive book people are in general—from agents to
publishers to bookstore owners to other authors. I’ve never met a group of people who
were so gracious and willing to welcome you to the “club.”

KB: PR is incredibly time-consuming (thankfully, a lot of it is also fun!). In the month or
two surrounding the book’s publication, I probably spent at least two or three hours a day responding to book-related email. I was really fortunate because I was on fellowship that term and I could spend that time when I needed to, but I have no idea how people with full-time day jobs manage book releases.

I was also surprised by how touched I was when friends and family were excited about
the book. Which makes me sound like a jerk, but what I mean is that I had kind of gotten used to the idea of the book coming out, simply because the publication process does take such a long time and involves so many small steps along the way (like proofs). So when I got up to read a bit at my launch party and found myself teary, I was a little surprised. I thought I was all cool and blasé! But in fact I was not, and that was a good thing.

What do you wish you had known in advance?

LB: How much of a rollercoaster the whole thing would be, though I think that’s another one of those, “you can know it intellectually but it doesn’t really prepare you for the
experience” kind of deals. I’ve been extremely fortunate in the kinds of reviews I’ve
gotten and the overall positive response to the book. What I didn’t exactly get is that, for
me anyway, even positive attention has its stressful aspects. The experience at times left
me feeling exposed and vulnerable. Hey, there’s a reason that we’re writers—most of us
are introverts!

KB: I must be needier, because I have no problem with positive attention! Then again,
as we were discussing recently, I will probably feel differently about that when I’m
stuck in the middle of the draft of my next project and feeling totally incompetent. And I
absolutely agree that waiting to hear what people think of your book is stressful, even if
the results are positive. I’ve also been really lucky in the majority of the reviews Alcestis
has received, but I was extremely nervous about what PW and Booklist and etc. would
think.

I wish I had known how much time the PR stuff would take, as I mentioned above.
Beyond that, I actually think I was pretty well-prepared, but only because I was working
with people who knew what they were doing.

What’s your favorite thing about working with Soho Press?

LB: Did I mention “nice, accessible and supportive”? And fun to hang out with?
And how much I’m looking forward to the Soho party at this year’s Bouchercon?

Also, I really like the whole Soho philosophy: they’re big enough to put some muscle
behind their products and small enough to care about everything they publish. I think
the Soho slogan might be “No Book Left Behind!” I honestly think that in the rapidly
shifting publishing landscape, the future belongs to nimble independents who really
support their writers and know how to “brand” their press as a whole.

KB: I’m really jealous that you’ve been able to hang out with the Soho staff—I haven’t
met any of them yet. But my experience has also been that everyone at Soho is nice,
accessible, and supportive. Justin Hargett has been especially patient with my newbie
questions about promotion.

And I agree that their supportiveness doesn’t just mean having a friendly phone and email manner. It also means developing a publication plan that suits the individual book and author. I think I would feel far more anxious about the process of debut publication if I were one of hundreds of debut authors at a huge publishing conglomerate. The Soho staff know what kind of book I wrote and were willing to take a chance on it; they weren’t
expecting it to be something it isn’t. My favorite thing about working with Soho is that
they’re practical and considerate at the same time.

At least one reason why debut novelists should have feline companions:

LB: Cats are instant stress relief. They purr, they sit on your lap, they play, they crack
me up with all the little things they do. They make the isolation of writing less lonely
without distracting me with conversation or temptations.

KB: They also sit on your manuscripts (or at least mine do). I think pets in general
are a good reminder not to take things too seriously. How serious can those page
proofs be, after all, if my cat’s just creased them all up with a drive-by snuggling?

(Thanks to Lisa for doing this interview with me!)

(I don’t discuss much plot stuff at all, but if you want to remain totally unspoiled about The Passage, do not read this post or the linked reviews.)

It will surprise no one who’s read Alcestis that I’ve thought about death often in the last few years. Partly this is an occupational hazard of writing about the underworld; partly it’s related to my own life, as my father was diagnosed with lymphoma in 2003 and died in late 2008, while I was working on the last revisions of the book.

If you read this blog regularly, you also know that I talk frequently about genre fiction and literary fiction, and that I’ve been on a tear of reading YA novels.

I think a lot, and care a lot, about what it means to try to write something emotional and immediate and accessible and fun and still beautiful, still “literary.” Still artistically worthwhile, in the way that something like Twilight, satisfying as it is for teen readers and the employee of the blood donation center (!) near my apartment who has a “Forks or Bust!” sticker on her (his?) Ford Explorer window, isn’t.

I read Justin Cronin’s The Passage because about five people on Twitter recently posted about how it “lived up to all the hype!” I remember first learning about it because of the hype, since the world seems to be tremendously amused by the idea of a writer of literary fiction — Ron Charles calls Cronin’s first two books, one of which won the PEN/Hemingway award, “a couple of small literary novels” — producing a big sprawling genre book and then, gasp, selling it for a load of money. I remember reading about Cronin’s book deal a while back and being totally tickled that a fiction writer with an academic job had hit it big with a post-apocalyptic vampire novel. As always, I’m a little wistful about the suggestion that it takes a literary writer to make genre tropes shine. (Read Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker. Read Maureen McHugh’s China Mountain Zhang and Necropolis and “The Naturalist.” Read Alice Sola Kim’s “Beautiful White Bodies,” which I just discovered thanks to Wiscon and the Tiptree shortlist.) But Cronin himself is hearteningly sensitive to false distinctions of this sort, too:

I think literary is shorthand for appreciated, and commercial is shorthand for sells. I did not undertake the writing of this book thinking that it was one thing or the other, or even that books in general have to be one thing or the other. Those are descriptions of what happens to a book after it’s written.

I read the book in a day and a half, and now T.’s racing through it — he started reading it while I was working and has been agitating for me to finish. Verdict: The Passage does live up to the hype. It’s not perfect; the ending is a little weird because it is the first in a (giant) trilogy; some bits are a little slow even for me. (Also, there are a surprising number of typos and misspellings, which my resident editing/typography nerd cannot forgive.) But you know what? It’s better than The Road. It’s as grabby as Tana French’s The Likeness or as The Secret History. It has a sense of humor, one that penetrates the very structure of the book — a few times, when reading, I could picture Cronin (and his daughter, with whom he apparently plotted much of the book) thinking something along the lines of: “You know what would be even more awesome? Nuns!” or “And then, they watch Dracula!” This is fabulous; this is what Kelly Link was talking about in the post I linked a few days ago. You put what you like in your book, and that makes it appealing.

What makes it appealing to me is its mixture of joy and melancholy. Many people die in this book. (Some others don’t, and that’s just as bad.) Here’s what Cronin said about that in the Times interview I linked above:

“The vampire narrative deals with the fundamental question, the basic human question, and that is, what part of being human is defined by the fact that we’re mortal?” Mr. Cronin said. “If you got to be immortal, would you be trading away your humanity? It’s the fundamental question of what is death to being alive. The vampire story gets at the heart of that. It reassures us that we’d rather be human.”

I wasn’t entirely sold on some of the more mystical aspects of the book, but nonetheless it made me think. What I’ve been thinking about most is the Colony, the group of survivors’ descendants who live in a walled town defended largely by banks of lights run by aging batteries. These lights aren’t just a “peculiar plot point,” as Janet Maslin calls them. For me, at least, they seemed far more central than that. Some of the inhabitants of the town are able to forget that the lights will go out eventually, and some aren’t. How they handle that knowledge, how it controls them — this is at the heart of what happens to the townspeople and the rest of the world.

Maslin’s review mentions the creepiness of reading Cronin’s projection that the future Gulf of Mexico would be an oil slick. I’ve spent way too much time in the last month reading and retweeting appropriately outraged articles about the spill and BP and our terrifying reliance on oil. I signed petitions and made some donations, and I tried to plan ways for us to cut our household energy consumption further. But once I’d done those things, I can’t say my reading those articles, or any of the other links I find on Twitter to the horrifying things we do to each other and our planet, really did much good for anyone, including me. I’ve been thinking about this a lot since reading Alexander Chee’s fine blog post — some good things do come from reading links on Twitter! — about the urgency that online news sources often make him feel, and the anger their content inspires. I feel conflicted about my own relationship to Twitter and to online news in general. I think the act of being outraged about something that you are not forced to experience personally can be absolutely necessary for change, and I fully realize that the choice to step away from something horrible is the epitome of privilege.  But sometimes that moment of outrage before retweeting, etc., isn’t leading to any real change at all. Sometimes it’s performative of identity, consciously or unconsciously: I will retweet this thing because I am the kind of person who is outraged by this thing! Which is not to say that the outrage itself is any less vital or valid. But sometimes it’s also a reminder, a little wearing reminder, that the lights will go out someday. There are some things none of us can step away from, and among them are death and grief. I loved The Passage because it acknowledges that — honors it, even — and also acknowledges that the world is beautiful, even when you’re in the dark woods, unsure of what’s waiting for you in the trees.

This morning, after I’d finished reading at 1:30 last night, I found this post via Shauna James Ahern and Elizabeth McCracken on Twitter, another post that, like this one, starts with the death of a parent but means to talk about love and joy more than about death:

The best thing you can possibly do with your life is to tackle the motherfucking shit out of it. And, Johnny, on this front, I think you have some work to do.

…

Don’t be strategic or coy. Strategic and coy are for jackasses. Be brave. Be authentic. Practice saying the word love to the people you love so when it matters the most to say it, you will.

We’re all going to die, Johnny. Hit the iron bell like it’s dinnertime.

Let’s.

I cannot believe it’s the middle of May. My friends: what happened to this spring? I mean, I know what happened — my book came out, I traveled around a bit, I wrote another giant dissertation chapter, I started the next novel (just a wee bit), I started yet another dissertation chapter. But despite all those very good reasons for busy-ness I still feel like this semester has just gone FWOOSH.

Here are some things I learned this spring, in no particular order:

Thing 1: Sarah Waters is brilliant. I knew this; I love her faux-Victorian novels, though I was slightly less enthused about The Night Watch. But The Little Stranger impressed the hell out of me. It’s so cleverly managed and yet reads in so natural a way that the trappings of the haunted house plot seem realistic and psychologically appropriate. This interview with Waters, from last May, is worth watching, and she’s also got a short piece on Angela Carter, here. Every time I read an interview with her or one of her essays about writing I get even more fangirly. I totally want to buy her coffee and talk about pacing.

The Little Stranger was one of the books on my new year’s resolution list — so far, I’ve also read Emma Donoghue’s The Sealed Letter and The Woman in White. You can see brief responses to those books on my Goodreads account, if you’re curious. The Little Stranger was definitely my favorite of these, though I was startled by how much I loved the first two-thirds of The Woman in White (the last third is bit draggy, in my opinion). The Sealed Letter I found readable and interesting but oddly unenchanting; I felt compelled to finish it, but when I was done, my reaction was mostly: “Huh.” Even though it suits my genre interests and contains a lot of things I like. Not sure why that was.

Thing 2: Job interviews for a job you really want to do can be fun. I had a couple, and I actually enjoyed them (even the one that got extended by a day by a snowstorm). The academic job market isn’t at its best right now, and the process of waiting to hear about interviews and offers and all that is always going to be frustrating, but the conversations themselves were entertaining and even MLA wasn’t too stressful.

Thing 3: Doing promo for a book is shockingly time-consuming, especially when you’ve never done it before. It offers far too many ways to procrastinate on other work, too. And, like job interviews, promo can actually be pretty fun, especially when you have the chance to talk to individual readers about your book. (Or even to spy on individual readers, via, for example, Goodreads.)

Thing 4: Apparently my fondness for watching L&O reruns at the gym places me in a recognizable demographic. Note the mention of UT.

Thing 5: It can be a pain to apply for fellowships, jobs, grants, etc., but it’s worth it. (More on this soon.)

Did you learn anything useful or entertaining this spring?

I just heard from Soho that they’ve sold the Turkish rights for Alcestis to Epsilon Publishing! This is my first foreign rights sale and I’m thrilled. My editor Katie Herman tells me that Epsilon publishes Ha Jin, Barbara Kingsolver, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Charles Frazier, among others.

I have to get back to dissertation-writing now — though it’s difficult to do when fun news of this sort keeps arriving in my inbox — but before I go, have one more interesting link to liven up your Friday afternoon: Gwynne Garfinkle (also repped by my agent Diana Fox!) talks in a guest post on Victoria Janssen’s blog about the research she did for a book set in the 1970s.