On Other Blogs

Nerve Magazine is asking readers to vote on the best literary sex scene of the month, culled from novelists like Sam Lipsyte, Meg Wolitzer, AL Kennedy, and Darcy Steinke, among others. Here’s a sampling from AL Kennedy’s PARADISE:

I hold his head as he bows it and then
kisses, suckles the way a son would, then teases, bites, because he is
a man and, either way, draws out my heart from me like a thorn. I’m
hauled out beyond myself, beneath myself, outside myself, inside his
mouth.

   I love his tongue. No other word will do it. I love his tongue.

   And the sweet scalp underneath his hair and the drive of his breath,
the fierce push of his cheek and the howl, our howl, the one we make
out of our skin.

   Which is very well, but it isn’t filth.

   What I was after was filth.

Cornelia Reed, who is subbing on Sarah Weinman’s blog, has a new novel coming out soon from Mysterious Press and talks about it in a post:

So mostly I’m in that pre-published bliss state, where everything about
the book itself is still all potential I haven’t screwed up, and I
think of my editor Kristen Weber as this shining distant goddess, like
how Winston Churchill thought of his mother when he was little.

This is the first time in ages that I’ve seen the term "pre-published" used in a way that doesn’t make me cringe all over.  In my mind, this is an example of the proper, and only, acceptable use of  "pre-published" — i.e. your book has been bought by a publisher and is about to be imminently published. It is not a term that describes an aspiring novelist who dreams of selling his or her book some day.

Carly at the Daily Grind blog takes the writers of a recent NIP/TUCK  episode to task for perpetuating the “fluffer” fantasy and portraying it as an entry-level porn job.
First off, she says, fluffers simply don’t exist… guys tend to, uh, fluff themselves between scenes.

Furthermore, the notion of “having to work your way up” in the industry is absolutely hysterical. If a girl walks into an agency and says, “I’m ready to do a 900-guy anal gangbang with overweight Germans while juggling flaming chainsaws and playing ‘Bark At The Moon’ on the kazoo,” the agent isn’t going to tell her, “I’m sorry, but you have to start out as a fluffer first.” He’s going to get on the phone to JM Productions right away and negotiate a piece of the pie for him or herself….

…So no big deal, scriptwriters, but I had to get that off my chest. We must stop the fluffer madness for the good of the people, for accuracy, and for the sake of entertainment everywhere.

(Thanks to  "Markus1917  in Berlin" for pointing me to this blog)

My friend Gregg Hurwitz talks about what it takes to get him to conside giving a book a blurb.  Number two on his list is that author has actually read Gregg’s stuff.

Nothing says
arrogance like an unpublished writer asking me to read his manuscript
who hasn’t bothered to read one of my books.

Even that won’t guarantee Gregg will give you a kudo.

I don’t care if it’s a social novel or a book of lesbian haiku, the first few pages better sing.

Which explains why he wouldn’t blurb my book of Jewish lesbian haiku ("Mazel Love"). I thought it was because my publisher put Dick Van Dyke’s picture on the cover of that book, too.

My friend Paul Guyot pointed me to Doughy White Guys, where the blogger praises the second season of Martial Law, which Bill Rabkin & I wrote and exec-produced. 

I miss that show with Arsenio Hall and the doughy Asian guy. Doughy Asian guys
rock. People who thought that show was foolish – see the thematic tie-in? –
didn’t get that it was a comic book. The writers were good, they knew what the
show was and more importantly what it wasn’t. Well, not the writers from the
first season. That first year was weak, the show wasn’t sure what it was
supposed to be yet.

It’s nice to know that someone besides my wife and my agent got what we were trying to do…

I found a blog dedicated to reviewing vanity press novels. That’s right, all that PublishAmerica, iUniverse, POD stuff.  And no, some cruel Judge didn’t order him to do it as "community service" to work off an indecent exposure conviction. So how can he endure it?

I expect nothing. And, in fact, I get
nothing the far majority of the time. But every now and then I stumble
across a winner, a book so compelling and well-written that I feel the
need to immediately call my friends and share. And the fruit, my
friends, is that much sweeter.

That was the question posed on screenwriter John August’s lively blog today. He’s got a good answer, and so does his former assistant Rawson Thurber, who went on to write DODGEBALL.

It’ s a smart question to ask, since being a writer’s assistant is a good way to break into the business…which is probably why there is so much competition for the jobs (and why so many applicants are WAY over-qualified).  The pay is crap ($500-a-week), the hours are hell (9 am to as late as, well 9 am), and the work is menial (answering phones, running errands, typing scripts, printing revisions, organizing files, putting revision pages into scripts, etc.)… but the experience is priceless. You learn how a TV show works from the inside. You see how stories are broken. You read lots of scripts… not just the one that are written, and endlessly rewritten, for the show… but the specs that come in clamoring for the showrunner’s attention. You see how freelancers succeed… and how they fail. You see how the producers deal with writers, studio executives, network executives, managers, actors, and everybody else associated with making a show. You make lots of contacts…not just with the writer/producers on the show and the freelancers who come in but, if you are any good at what you do, with the network and studio executives who call the office 178 times a day. If you’re smart, you’ll also hang out with the editors, line producers, script supervisors, directors, assistant directors… hell, everyone… and learn whatever you can about production. A job as a writer’s assistant is a graduate school education in the television… and, in your down time (on the rare occasions when there is some), you can write.  And I know it works. Not only have a lot of showrunners I know started out as writers assistants, most of the our assistants have gone on to become professional screenwriters themselves… one even became a development executive (though I lost track of her years ago).