Rise and shine: Meg Wolitzer'sThe Ten Year Nap is an eye-opener

Chapter One of Meg Wolitzer's novel, The Ten Year Nap, begins with this eloquent wake-up call:

"All around the country, the women were waking up. Their alarm clocks bleated one by one, making soothing sounds or grating sounds or the stirrings of a favorite song. There were hums and beeps and a random burst of radio. There were wind chimes and roaring surf, and the electronic approximation of birdsong and other gentle animal noises. All of it accompanied the passage of time, sliding forward in liquid crystal. Almost everything in these women's homes required a plug. Voltage stuttered through the curls of wire, and if you put your ear to one of the complicated clocks in any of the bedrooms, you could hear the burble of industry deep inside its cavity. Something was quietly happening."

In The Ten Year Nap, Meg Wolitzer offers us an extended play date with four women who set aside their careers in order to stay home and care for their kids. Ten years later, they open their eyes to find that—well, they’re ten years older, so are their kids, and so is the world around them. Contrasting vignettes place the story of their reawakening alongside the troubles and triumphs of their foremoms. We’re hanging out with sisters but haunted by ghosts of feminism past.

Quoting Sheri Holman from the Washington Post:

If Wolitzer were content to people her book solely with women happily married and wealthy enough to afford the luxury of ambivalence, it would be a too-familiar read. But she weaves in vignettes of marginal South Dakotans and various iconoclastic mothers and muses, subtly showing how women's individual choices (or lack thereof) are inextricable from the history and future of feminism…Wolitzer perfectly captures her women's resolve in the face of a dizzying array of conflicting loyalties.

When The Ten Year Nap came out in hardcover last year, the Chicago Tribune described Wolitzer as being “as precise and rigorous an observer of social status as Tom Wolfe…as incisive and pitiless and clear-eyed a chronicler of female-male tandems as Philip Roth or John Updike.” (Wow.) And the New York Times said, “The tartly funny Wolitzer is a miniaturist who can nail a contemporary type, scene, or artifact with deadeye accuracy.”

High praise, but great reviews are nothing new for Meg. Her debut novel, Sleepwalking, was published to critical acclaim a year after she graduated college in 1981. Her steadily growing body of work—novels, short stories, and screenplays—has earned a steadily growing audience. She won a National Endowment for the Arts grant in 1994 and a Pushcart Prize in 1998. And as far as I can tell, none of this has gone to her head.

“I am a fiction writer who, like most writers, is happiest when I'm working,” Meg says. “I have somewhat erratic work habits, and can go for weeks without producing much, then suddenly find myself in a whirlwind of productivity that lasts a long time and occupies most of my waking hours. Between those productive bouts I tend to read a lot, mostly contemporary novels, an activity that serves as a kind of re-fueling that I seem to need. I love being excited and keyed up by other people's novels; the best of them remind me of how powerful fiction can be.”

More from Meg tomorrow when she drops by Boxing the Octopus to chat about her career and offer some insight into the state of the industry. Meanwhile, click here to read the rest of Chapter One, and look for The Ten Year Nap in trade paperback everywhere this week.

The end...until further notice (Picoult novel rewritten for film)

When Jodi Picoult's 12-year-old son Kyle picked up his mom's novel My Sister's Keeper, he was immediately engrossed in it.

"The day he finished the book, I found him weeping on the couch," Picoult said in an interview. "He pushed me away and went up to his room and told me that he really didn't want to see me or talk to me for a while - he was THAT upset."

The shocker ending of the novel evoked a lot of response, ranging from throw-the-book-across-the-room outrage to quiet Kleenex-plucking reflection. But you won't know it from the film starring Cameron Diaz as the mom who has a baby to create a bone marrow match for a daughter with leukemia, and Abigail Breslin as the baby who grows into a teenager and doesn't want to donate a kidney to her big sister. According to an article in USA Today, :

Picoult hasn't seen the movie but has read the script: "Having the ending changed would certainly not have been my choice. I wrote the ending very intentionally because I wanted to leave the reader with a certain message. And changing that ending changes that message. However, I am excited to see the movie and to judge it on its strengths."

One hardcore Picoult fan, 16-year-old Lauren Kobren of Jericho, N.Y., started a "Save My Sister's Keeper!!" group on Facebook.

"For anyone who has finished the book," says Kobren, "I think most of us can agree that the ending is most of the reason that we literally throw the book at our friends and demand that they read it!" So far 1,655 readers agree.

When asked why she chose the ending she did, Picoult tells book clubbers (who probably come to blows over the complex issues of MSK): "This isn't an easy book, and you know from the first page, that there are no easy answers."

We'll have to wait until June to see how this ends...but I'm pretty sure I already know.

Thoughts?

The Supreme Court will hear Authors Guild class action suit

Update on the federal class action suit being pursued by Authors Guild:

March 2, 2009. This morning, we learned that the Supreme Court has agreed to hear the appeal regarding our freelance class-action settlement with electronic datase companies and decide whether federal courts have jurisdiction over lawsuits involving unregistered works. (Unregistered works are copyright protected, under U.S. law, but have a lesser status than registered works.) This is good news.

The Supreme Court decides to hear only a handful of the many cases it is asked to consider each year, so we're encouraged by this decision. It keeps alive the possibility that the settlement agreement originally reached in 2005 will be upheld.

Click here to read the article in full.

Over the Moon (and Over a Barrel)

I hate to break this to those of you on the cusp of publication, but your first book contract's terms are probably going to reek like a truckload of unrefrigerated mackerel. If you have a decent agent, smart literary attorney, and/or some preparation on the topic of literary contracts, it'll probably be somewhat less stinko, but the truth is, most first-time authors have been beating their heads against the brick wall of rejection for so long, they've killed off every brain cell devoted to foresight and prudence.

The truth is, we don't really care what we sign. We just want to sign it FAAAASTTT (before the editor changes her mind, the publisher goes under, or the world as we know it comes to an end and robs us of the chance to become a published novelist). And even if we do care (and/or have an agent with a vested interest in caring on our behalf) newbie authors only rarely have the leverage to demand a lot of changes.

So we often agree to dumb things. Overly-broad option clauses on the next book. "World rights" and out-of-print definitions that will never in a month of Sundays allow the rights to revert to the author. Substandard advances, paltry royalty percentages with all kinds of crazy caveats.

Once we know better, we'll be sorry. Or we probably should be, but looking back, we still grin big, silly grins as we remember that first, blessed moment when an actual editor (and editors were something supernatural, back in those days) wanted to buy a story we'd spun out of dreams, thin air, and more hard work than we ever imagined we had in us.

We were in the game, and we we certain the next contract, and all those that followed, would be better. Nothing whatsoever could possibly stop us now.

So, does anyone reading this care to share a first sale story, or perhaps a tale of some onerous contract clause new authors should do all they can to avoid? (What's that old saying? If you can't serve as an example, you can at least serve as a terrible warning! Feel free to comment anonymously if you prefer the cover of darkness.)

Corsets and caste systems (the real history of women writers)

Interesting review in the slim-but-still-there book section of yesterday's Houston Chronicle. Susan Salter Reynolds writes about A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers From Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx by Elaine Showalter. There's some enlightening stuff that sets the literature of women in historical context, and then we get to the beef.

Quoting the review:

Now and then, Showalter is called upon to untangle the waves of criticism and revival that works by writers including Dickinson, Sarah Orne Jewett, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Eudora Welty have endured. Her approach in this thorny landscape (feminist criticism can be fierce) is unifying and magnanimous.

She brings a perspective to changing literary culture that makes criticism seem not only understandable but also healthy and invigorating, making the work timeless in its ability to weather readers’ changing priorities.

Dickinson, for example, has been much criticized for her narrow window on life; Jewett and Welty for bourgeois views; and Millay for her self-styled insistence on domesticity.

The early 1900s saw the end of the Victorian Age and the birth of Modernism — many women in this next generation did not want to be defined as “women writers”; some, such as Willa Cather and Edith Wharton, openly criticized female writers. “I have not much faith in women in fiction,” Cather wrote. “They have a sort of sex consciousness that is abominable. They are so limited to one string and they lie so about that.”

Showalter hardly needs to point out that this open criticism among female writers is far preferable to the silence or condescension previously offered by male critics.

I thought about that statement for a long while. Women bashing each other is better than being bashed by men? (Erica Jong used to say: "You can't find a better slave than the one who beats herself.") But is it any better to "stick together" and support women writers just because they're women? That's patronizing and an insult in itself. I honestly can't decide which approach breeds the bigger migraine.

And we haven't even gotten to the part that really sucks my brain inside out, which is the market statistics indicating that "women dominated the book market, buying between 70 and 90 percent of all fiction." But there is no mention made in this review (so I'm assuming none is made in the book) of women writing genre fiction--romance, romantic suspense, mysteries, thrillers, and fantasy--which outsell literary fiction by far. It continually amazes me that literary critics consistently use that women-dominated market statistic while ignoring the fact that the vast majority of those sales are genre fiction, for which publishers give out sweat shop advances and to which critics give zero respect.

I recently read a novel that reminded me very much (style-wise) of Colleen's forthcoming Beneath Bone Lake, but Colleen's book is marketed as "romantic suspense" while this in-kind novel written by a man will be called "a thriller with a surprising love story" and marketed as mainstream fiction at thrice the price. The publishing caste system keeps the economic corset tightly laced on the majority of women writers by classifying books as women's fiction, chick lit, hen lit. Are we really going to pretend that Nicholas Sparks is not writing romance novels? Are Jodi Picoult's issue-driven novels less mainstream than John Grisham's? Surely somebody must have noticed that the high-minded stuffed shirts of the publishing industry got a ten-year piggyback ride on the shoulders of two intensely smart women: J.K. Rowling and Oprah Winfrey. Love or hate Sandra Brown, she's pulling the hay wagon that carts the elbow patch crowd to their awards ceremonies. And the only thing separating Meg Cabot from Jane Austen is a blow dryer and six feet of God's green earth.

Reynolds' article concludes:

A Jury of Her Peers does an enormous service, houses a drop-dead reading list and gives the reader a fluid framework for the great (much of it still undiscovered) wealth of writing by women in this country.

It was an excellent review. I'll definitely look for the book. And I'll keep hoping that someday the "undiscovered" women writers who are being read by millions will move from the back of the literary bus into the history books.

Sunday Quote:Flaubert on Precision

I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within.
-Gustave Flaubert

Most days, I can truly relate to this quote. The only purity (or illusion of purity) an idea ever attains is in the writer's mind. Once she begins committing it to paper, the possibility of perfection becomes nonexistent.

When we write, we're trying to bring down the moon with mere arrows. We may never reach our quarry, but the attempt's a noble effort.

Besides, no one else can read the illusions of perfection we keep locked up in our heads. If we don't at least try to get them down on paper, we're doomed to end up like this poor fellow from my favorite (rude) e-card site, someecards.com (if you click through, prepare to be offended. And amused, most likely).

Saturday Morning Cartoon: Oktapodi (an Oscar nominated lesson in fighting for what you love)

Authors Guild v. Google (kinda dry for Friday, but possibly worth looking into)

Somewhat in keeping with Colleen's post about intellectual property theft yesterday, I thought I'd pass along this notice from the Authors Guild regarding the $125 million settlement with Google:

"The settlement strengthens authors' rights and will, if approved by the court, result in millions of dollars of payments to authors. At least $45 million will be paid to authors and publishers to release claims for books that are scanned by Google by May 5th of this year. But that's not the most significant part of the settlement, in our view. We expect the licensing that this settlement would enable, particularly of out-of-print books, will result in far more revenues for authors over the coming years.

The settlement covers essentially all in-copyright books that were published by January 5, 2009. (Some authors have told us that they think of the settlement as covering only books for adults or nonfiction books. This is incorrect. Books of all types are covered by the settlement.)

We think it's in the strong interest of authors of all books, whether in print or out of print, to go to www.googlebooksettlement.com and claim their books. Here are some of the benefits of doing so:

1. If you file your claim by January 5, 2010, and a book in which you have a copyright interest is scanned by Google before May 5, 2009, you will be entitled to a small share (at least $60 per book, but up to $300, depending on the number of claims) in a pool of at least $45 million that Google is paying to release claims for works that were scanned without rightsholder permission.

2. By registering, you'll be able to share in potential revenues for uses of your works under several new licensing programs that the settlement enables. Here are examples of licensing revenues you may be entitled to share in:

A. Revenues from printing out pages from your works at terminals in public libraries.

B. Revenues from ads that may appear near "previews" of your works at books.google.com.

C. Revenues from sales of special online editions of your works.

D. Revenues from institutional subscriptions that may include your works.

Important note: Only out-of-print books will be included in these programs by default. In-print books will be included only where rightsholders affirmatively elect to do so.

3. By registering, you'll automatically enroll in the new Book Rights Registry, which will give you a considerable amount of control over the rights to your works, including your right to withdraw your work from the licensing programs described above.

The important thing is to assert your rights. It's easiest to do so by setting up an account at www.googlebooksettlement.com, the official settlement website. Once you're logged in, it's generally most efficient to claim your works by searching the database of titles by your name.

There are many more details, which the attached document spells out. For those who would like more information, we'll soon be announcing a new series of phone-in seminars. You will receive that e-mail later this week.

Please feel free to forward and post this message: non-Guild members are entitled to the same advantages of the settlement as Guild members."

The Cost of Free: How File-Sharing Hurts Us

This morning on the Today Show, I watched a story about identity theft through file-sharing sites such as Limewire. While users (an alarming number of them children) use such sites to steal copyrighted material, such as music, movies, and more and more frequently, novels, identity thieves are reaching into their computers (as often as not their parents' computers) and downloading personal information. Then, before you can say Chapter 11, the victims' tax returns, college financial aid applications, and banking information are out there in cyberspace, where anyone can steal them... and wreak absolute havoc in your life. Apparently, this problem is nothing new and extends to plenty of other file-sharing sites as well.

I heard a couple of stunned parents find out their tax return had been fraudulently filed before they had the chance to do it, with their $2000 refund wired into some thief's bank account. They seemed stunned because they had no clue that their daughters' file-sharing habits were hurting anybody. Until thieve reached out and hurt the family, taking "everything we've worked for."

Though I feel compassion for the victims of ID theft, this is sort of the way I feel when I see my work coming up as available for "free download" on Internet searches. I even see sites (many of them off-shore, with no contact info offered) claiming to have material that hasn't yet been properly edited or published. I work for nine months to a year on each book, with little guarantee of numeration, only to see it stolen, and its sharing passed off as innocuous "fun" and a "great way to save money." As if downloaders have a god-given right to take whatever can be stolen.

Not long ago, author Stephanie Meyer of the popular Twilight series had the partial rough draft of her work in progress, Midnight Sun, stolen and widely, illegally disseminated over the 'Net. Meyer was mortified, angry, hurt -- as any author would be. In fact, she was so upset, she abandoned the project for a time, unable to handle the pain of having the material out in the world before it was ready. By following the link to her response, you can get an glimpse of the quality of pain this illegal distribution caused her.

The trouble is, many people think of all artists, whether they be authors, musicians, or those in the movie industry as something other than "real people." They believe (with a painful degree of wrongness) that we're all so rich this won't affect us. They also think of the publishers, distributors, and other purveyors of art as faceless corporations, too large to be seriously damaged by the loss of "a few" sales. But the fact is, when theft puts publishers or record labels out of business, they can't go out and find new artists, or pay them for their labors. And less-established, rising stars (the struggling majority) will never get their chance. Nor will the public have the chance to experience their talent, since they'll be forced to go work in fast food jobs.

But if simple decency and fairness aren't enough to stop people from downloading or teach their kids that they won't tolerate it, perhaps the specter of identity theft will do it. Because there's no honor among pirates, nor on the file-sharing websites where they so often weigh anchor.

Fat Nude Writers rock (with congrats to Patty, our Fat Nude winner!)

A thoroughly enjoyable flurry came in response to our Fat Nude Writing challenge. Sarah talked about an Indigo Girls song that asks “How long till my soul gets it right?” provoking questions about the possible consequences of expressing herself as an artist:

…Truly, I have never felt right. Something feels out of place, and I have never been able to put my finger on it. Maybe it is the mistakes of the long lost past haunting me. Is it strange that the lines of a song could affect me so? Maybe the voices of the Indigo Girls is speaking to my soul, reminding me that there is more to what I see in me…

Colleen’s fat, nude moment came when she graduated college and accepted a teaching job 2,500 miles away from her close-knit family in New Jersey:

Without knowing a soul or much of anything about the southwest corner of Arizona (except that it didn't snow, which was a big plus at the moment) I packed my belongings in a car that wasn't long for the world and did the whole "Go West, Young Woman" thing. Because I wanted to claim an adventure for myself while I had that opportunity.

Dorothy’s “Delusions of Grandeur” may pay off yet:

Age 34. Remarried. Pregnant. Really feeling like it’s time to write that novel. Terrified to start because…Fame and Fortune. A virtual certainty my name will become the household word I’ve always known it would be. With certainty. Because I survived a crazy childhood. Because I had my 19th birthday in Alexandria, Egypt where I sailed as a merchant marine. Because I was destined to be remembered throughout the ages.

…Fourteen years and four novels later, Katie changed jobs and hasn’t called. Son of a bitch.

Stepping up and speaking out, Vicky surprised everyone including herself at a writing conference:

I signed up to pitch my fledgling manuscript. Unfortunately I didn't know how to pitch...

The editor asked me, "Is this the one where the guy is really hung over?" I said, "Yes, but I promise he's gettting reformed." Everybody cracked up...

Then she asked me if I'd entered it in another contest. I knew there was only one left. So I meekly asked, "The Orange Rose?" She nodded. "I gave you first place. I guess you won it."

Lark talked about summoning the courage to reconnect with an old flame:

...In the long run, things didn’t work out for us, but over the next five years we gave it a hell of a good shot. Best of all, we’re still friends and I’ve never had to wonder what might have been.

Jo Anne inspired me by embracing her bignitude:

...I’m not a head-down, eyes-averted, knees-together person. I’m a throw-my-arms-wide-open, open-my-mind, open-my-life-to-people soul. I’ve got a big smile. I’ve got big energy. I have a big personality and a big heart filled with the capacity for big love.

So I come to you today. A big woman of sixty-two, with a big, booming voice. I’m out of shape, and I have bad knees. I’ve got gray hair and arthritis. But by God, I’m fearless.

And our winner, Patty Henderson, spoke of keeping a “Fat Nude Eye to the Sky”:

Not one to learn the easy way, having a male nurse mere inches from my face as my left eye continued to blossom to a royal blue with a tint of purple and shades of pink etched in a bloody crust I found the words "you need to file charges," a rude and abrupt reality.

The chill of the examination room was warm in comparison to the sadness that ran through my veins. However, as I turned for the photographs the deputy needed, the stark reality was I was on the way back. My spirit had risen and it would no longer be beaten down. The limit of defeat of my soul had been touched upon and no longer would the man who'd driven me to this exhaustive, stark awakening ever take me here again.

To say the departure was immediate would be misleading. I stood steadfast, determined to give it my all. The last call, if you will. But that proverbial straw came and the door didn't hit me. There was little drama left. The woman I'd always been capable of being was fully present, not to be engaged, bent or torn.

With God, my guides and the angels who watch over me, I moved gently, but steadily, making constant headway, never looking back. It was and will always be about looking forward. It is not where I was nor what happened, but how blessed I am and how far I have come.

The journey is tender, earthy and reverent. I realized my soul is precious and I have gifts to nurture, share and treasure. My children and I have found what we lost and the peace I'd thought forever missing, is found.

It took a man to point to another man and say this is wrong for me to believe.

Now I am a woman, whole, powerful, enlightened, strengthened by pain, done with thinking I was less instead of more, now looking at goals and life plans when there were, at one time, no dreams or prayers I could hear in my heart.

I will not look back. My eyes will be to the sky and my soul will do a tantric dance.

It took the spastic journey to the bottom to propel me to bliss.

Huge thanks to all our contributors, and congrats to Patty. (Flip me an email, girlfriend, and let me know which book you want.) Click here to read all the entries in their entirety.

(Above: Pieter Paul Rubens' "Union of Earth and Water")

What's Keeping You Tethered?

"A ship in port is safe, but that's not what ships are built for."
--Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper

We allow all sorts of things to keep us "safely" in port. Fear of failure. Fear of success. The pain of some childhood rejection still telling us we don't deserve better.

What's keeping you tethered? And what's your plan for casting off and doing what you must to hoist the sails? For without a plan, the the courage to act on it, the one certainly in this life is that you're staying where you are.

Fat, Nude Writing Contest

Just a quick note to let out fabulous entrants know we're delaying the post on the winners for a few days, as Joni was called out of town on business. (See her post below!)

Stay tuned for a winner early this coming week!

Today's image is Rubens' The Three Graces. Lovely!

Joni says:
Thanks, Colleen. And sorry about that, gals. One too many subdivisions in the mental real estate combined with chock-full-o-nuts schedule and iffy internet at the hotel. Back in my office tomorrow with the winning results!

Feel free to dive in there with a last minute entry!

The view from here

Hope everyone's had a wonderfully productive week. I'm in New York working on a bombastically fun project. Rue McClanahan's book is being adapted for Broadway, and as her memoir guru, I've been brought in to collaborate on the script. Suddenly, everything I've learned in my script/screenwriting studies over the last year is coming into play (ba-dum-bum CHHH!). I had no idea where, when, how, or if I was ever going to use any of that, but now here I am.

The last few times I've been in the city, I've stayed at the pleasant Park Central Hotel on 7th Ave betwixt 56th & 57th. Close to the publishing and theater neighborhoods, an easy hop to anywhere on the subway. This week, I'm on the 11th floor. From up here, the people on the street look busy but not as intimidating as they seemed to me the first few times I came to New York. What looks like a tangle of traffic from street level -- dodging taxis, rumbling buses, daring pedestrians -- from up here, it all makes perfect sense. It's like looking down on the June Taylor Dancers and seeing their ridiculously fabulous legs forming stars and asterisks.

Looking up, there's a lot going on between here and the skyline. And a whole lot more between skyline and sky. Last night, I opened the window and listened to someone practicing violin somewhere overhead. This morning, someone a few floors above me leaned out her open window to air a slinky red dress. As I scan the windows straight across the way, I see no less than a dozen people tapping away on laptops.

The 11th floor is about where I see myself as a writer, professionally and artistically. My father always told me, "Luck is preparedness meeting opportunity." By that definition, I've definitely been lucky in my career. This job is a prime example. Writers lay the foundation for their work starting with "Pat the Bunny"; I don't know any writer who wasn't a voracious reader from tiny childhood. By being insatiably interested in people, places, and things, we live in a constant state of research, never knowing how one tidbit or another will come in handy, but knowing that sooner or later it will -- as long as we keep working at our craft. There are always apocryphal tales of those who find an express elevator, but most of us climb, word by word. Don't be afraid to look down once in a while and see how far you've come.

Meanwhile, one glance upward reminds us how far we have to go. We look up and see other writers who (from our perspective) have "made it", and we think their careers are a breeze now. We think, wow, if only I could catch a break, maybe someday I'll get to where they are, but my dears, they're all looking up and thinking the same thing. (Except Stephen King. He looks up and sees...Pluto.) There's no such thing as "arrived" in this business. No such thing as "done" or "enough" or "over." That's part of the thrill. Look up at the skyscrapers once in a while and feel dizzy with your own potential. Look up at the sky and know that there are no boundaries between you and your future.

Then crack out the laptop and get back to work.