Home sick for the third straight (wobbly?) day in a row, so I can't vouch for the coherence of this post. I sort of knew everything would catch up with me eventually, but I think the trip to Chicago (also known as the We Still Smoke in Bars City) and two solid days on my feet in the letterpress class, both of which were totally worth it, finally tipped my immune system into giving up. Go ahead, idiot! Drink like a fish in smoky bars for four days, do manual labor all weekend. See if I care! Get a cold, then. Just don't say I didn't warn you when it turns into bronchitis, dimwit. So it's been a regimen of Cold-Eeze, vitamin C, OJ, hot tea, and soup, though I did start it off right Monday night, when I felt myself getting sick, by going to Telephone (after delivering Eva from her Lasik surgery) and sucking down a couple of Irish coffees.
So what, you're wondering, is my little geek girl avatar doing up there in the corner? Why isn't it sick&tired!moi, or blogger!moi, for that matter, given the subject? Well, a coupla reasons. One is a call for submissions I got from one of my writers' lists yesterday, which I bring you here in PDF format. It's for an anthology called She's Such a Geek: An Anthology by and for Women Obsessed with Computers, Science, Comic Books, Gaming, Spaceships, and Revolution. How could I resist? The only thing on the list that I'm lukewarm about is gaming.
After passing this on to no fewer than four of my friends who also qualify (Jen, Livy, Em, Marcia) I started the draft of what I'd like to submit, yesterday, not really knowing where it was going, as I seldom do with first drafts (I've gotten to really like freewriting; thank you Natalie Goldberg!). One of the emerging themes was technology as a tool that's changed the processes of writing and publishing, which is one of the reasons I've always been interested in computers, and why I own so much publishing and graphic software. This dovetails with the second reason for my little geek avatar's appearance: a post by A.L. Kennedy on the Huffington Post a while back, that I'm just now catching up on. Like so many authors, she's bemoaning the state of publishing:
Fewer publishing houses concentrated in conglomerate hands trying to produce more books of less quality. No full time readers, no full time copy editors and therefore missed newcomers and pisspoor final presentation of texts on the shelves, silly covers, greedy and simple-minded bookshop chains, lunatic bidding wars designed to crush the spirit of unknown newcomers, celebrity “tighten your buns and nurture your inner pot plant” hard backs and much related insanity.
Which makes me want to run right to Soft Skull Press with my manuscript. It almost makes me glad that my novel is likely to get shoved into the spec-fic pigeonhole, since it's so hard to sell a literary novel. It may still be possible to sneak one in under the radar, as Ursula LeGuin, Doris Lessing, and Marge Piercy have been doing for years. And after taking the letterpress class this weekend, it's made me briefly reconsider self-publishing. I originally got interested in hand presses from reading Virginia Woolf's diaries. She and her husband Leonard had a small publishing house called Hogarth Press through which they published much of Virginia's work in the UK, as well as then-experimental work by writers like Katherine Mansfield, T.S. Eliot, C. Day Lewis (father of Daniel), Robert Graves, E.M. Forster, Christopher Isherwood, Gertrude Stein, and Robinson Jeffers. How lovely, I thought, to have control of the whole process: choosing the work, editing, designing, printing, binding, distribution, producing what ends up being a work of art in more ways than one. Hogarth Press was the major inspiration for my own attempt at publishing, Long Meg Press, which was stillborn. In many ways, Woolf was a bit of a geek herself, using the technology available to subvert and change the shape of fiction.
This leads me to the book I'm reading now, if not another reason for the Geek Girl's presence. The only good part about being sick is that one legitimately gets to lie in bed and catch up on one's reading without guilt (not that I ever have very much guilt about lying around reading, but you know what I mean). The book of choice at the moment is a new one: Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life by Julia Briggs, which puts Woolf's creative process and product at the center of her life, rather than writing about her life as though the books were incidental. As always, I find her thinking inspiring and fascinating. As I'm reading about how she constructed her books, I'm thinking about how I constructed mine, and how much that has to change now, with the distance of time, and I suddenly saw where I could lost most of the ending without doing any harm at all. And how easy it will be, thanks to the wonders of computers, to change the text, and yet preserve its original form, just in case.
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