Women Writers Around the World

I have been looking for an agent for a short children's book, and looking through the Children's Writer's & Illustrator's Market listings. Every one of them that I saw was a woman. Taking a look at the book publisher listings, I found that most of the editors and founders were also women. My Writer's Market came yesterday and I perused it briefly just because, well, I'm a geek, and many of those listings also listed female contact names.

That got me thinking about all of the lovely writers who have been kind enough to give me advice over the past couple of years, and all but one of those has been a woman. The ladies at the WAHM writers' board are of course women, but then so are most of the writers at Absolute Write. I used to think of a writer as some kind of Hemingway/Faulkner type, typing alone at a typewriter with a bottle of Scotch nearby. Now I think of a writer as a woman at home trying to write with kids underfoot.

Thinking that this must be some kind of new phenomenon that has made women dominant in the industry, I tried to find some stats. As far as I can tell, there aren't any. But, I found out a few startling things. The first is that the surge of women writers isn't limited to the West- women in Iran are writing books in higher numbers than ever before. The number of women writers in Zimbabwe are also rising. I thought this must be a new phenomenon, and in some countries it certainly is. But in the West, it's just business as usual.

Take a look at all of the British women writers from the Regency. From that era most people can name Austen and Mary Shelley, but there were multitudes of women novelists writing away in their corsets and empire-waist dresses. Perhaps I'll join them, though it'll likely be in sweat pants.

Freelance Roundup

I got accepted by Suite101 some time ago and just recently got the time to get an article up. A lot of freelance writers won't write for them because they don't offer any upfront payment- just small payments based on pageviews. It's certainly not ideal, but it's a neat site and the writers get creative control over topics and approaches. I don't know how often I'll do it, but it will be a lot more often if I end up getting any pageviews. So far, in two days, I have gotten one.

Elance announced today a major revamping of just about every aspect of the site. Bids, now called "connects," will cost .50 apiece, with some projects requiring several just to bid once. All quarterly and yearly discounts have been disposed of in favor of a monthly fee. The Select program, that I had paid about $350 for, is now gone. In its place is a merit-based system, which sounds great, except that they want to charge more than $200 extra for it. They also require two credentials to be verified to be eligible, and providers have to pay for those as well. The people in the Elance forum have reported that their fees will be going up anywhere from double to triple the amount they had been paying. And, we have been given less than a month's notice of the change. If I haven't said it enough before, I'll say it now- Elance sucks.

I signed up with Triond to see how well it works. I love the idea of residuals, and it pays writers a portion of the revenue for their articles every month. They accept pretty much anything not obscene or libelous- even poetry. I worked up four very quick articles on topics that I already knew a lot about and sent them in. All were approved, and all have gotten slow page views. Each has earned me less than a cent a day, so it may not be the best use of time ever devised. Of course, if the articles take only a few minutes to write and a person had hundreds of them, they could bring in a steady stream of extra money every month. The articles/poetry/stories don't have to be long- mine are 250-300 words apiece, but I don't think there is any specified length. You can also use a pen name, which I have done. I'll post further stats about it if they get better or worse.

Howtodothings.com was a site that paid pretty well at one time- though they paid in gift certificates. After awhile they revamped the site to pay writers only with their own AdSense revenue. At that point, they added a place for writers to see how many page views their total articles had gotten on the site. At the time, about a year ago, my 49 articles had about 800 page views, which I deemed pointless to pursue new page views for Adsense revenue. However, I looked at it again yesterday for the first time since, and the page views were more than 45,000. Somehow in the last year they have revved up their marketing, and HTDT might just be a little more worthwhile. Hey- residuals are residuals.

Norman Mailer- Dead

It's been a big month for literary figures, and the events continue. Norman Mailer has died, having lived a long life full of literary creations of all types. The part that I thought was interesting is how little I had read of his work, and how no one I asked about it had ever read anything of his. Ok, I've never read anything of his at all. With literary figures of his caliber, they actually become more famous than their works, much like actors. How many times have you seen a picture of a famous person, knew their name and had no idea what they've been in? The same principle seems to have been at work for Norman Mailer. This is unfortunate for him, as he sounds like a wretched person. A few of the highlights:

• He was married six times
• He stabbed one of his six wives, almost killing her
• He hated women's liberation and feminism, and once said that "all women should be locked in cages"
• He was physically abusive to his fourth wife
• He claimed that the women who didn't appreciate his misogynistic words were seeking publicity for themselves
• He fought to get a felon out of jail, who then killed someone in a restaurant
• He was married to his his fifth wife for only one day and got engaged the next day to someone else
  
• He invented the word "fug"

I read once that people spend more time reading about famous writers than they do reading the works of those writers. In the case of Norman Mailer, I've read all I need to. I think I'll pass on his works.

Wall Street Journal nod

I check my pitiful stats every day just to see how many people are wandering in here. I noticed this morning that a number of people were coming in from a link on the Wall Street Journal site. I couldn't access that link, not being a paid subscriber, but I poked around a little and found a page where I could access it. The site has a link to this blog at the very bottom of a story about Harper Lee and her Presidential Medal of Freedom. The link is near the bottom of the page under " Blog Posts About This Topic." I'm thrilled that they'd link to 'lil old me, but I have to wonder how they came across such a small, obscure blog. I don't yet have the best idea about how the whole blogosphere thing works, but it must work pretty well, since that post wasn't on any of the first 15 Google pages when I searched the title of the post. Thanks, WSJ!

Harper Lee and the Presidential Medal of Freedom

Harper Lee was just granted the Presidential Medal of Freedom for To Kill a Mockingbird. And what better a work to command such an honor? If you've ever read the book, and who hasn't, you know what an amazing work it is. It's so richly textured that you can read it again and again, further dissecting it and finding new aspects of it that contribute to the whole. The bird imagery, the use of light and dark to highlight the character of each of the players- they all add up to a masterpiece of observation and persuasion. There's just the one little thing...I really don't think she wrote it.

Rumors have dogged To Kill a Mockingbird for decades, but here's what tipped me off: she came up with such a richly-textured work as her first novel, and never wrote another book. Say what, now? Someone with that ability couldn't come up with anything else? Apparently not. She also never talks about the book and never gives interviews. Adding to the questions is that fact that she lived next door to Truman Capote, who wrote novels on similar subjects and with similar nature imagery. There's nothing that can be proven, of course, but I'll always have questions. Why nothing else from Harper Lee? Why never talk about a book that won her the Pulitzer Prize?

I live a few hours from Monroeville and poised the question to a native Monroevillian who had been in the town's annual production of the play based on the book, because I'm just that obnoxious. The reaction was swift and severe. No, Capote had nothing to do with it, I was told, and never say that to anyone from Monroeville. They take their native daughter very seriously, going so far as to never tell anyone from out of town where she lives. Apparently she lives there part time and has her main residence in New York. While she's in Monroeville she's treated like a queen and protected from any pesky reporters with questions.

Since the book, Harper Lee attempted a novel but never published it because she reportedly was having too many problems with it. It just doesn't seem to me that someone capable of To Kill a Mockingbird could have that much trouble writing a novel. After that book she probably could have published her shopping list in book form and been guaranteed a certain number of sales.

So, did Capote write it? Who knows? I think that if he didn't, he definitely helped her with it quite a lot. Where was he when I was trying to make that sci-fi novel work? Oh yeah- dead. But, Harper Lee is alive, and if any novel deserves the Medal, it's the one that has her name on it.

Writers' Guild Strike

The Writer's Guild strike is an interesting turn of affairs, particularly for writers of all types. The entire affair has gotten melodramatic much more quickly than I would have imagined, especially with no writers writing it that way (sorry, I couldn't resist). The producer's group spokesman has called the strike "irresponsible," which really made me laugh. Irresponsible? Are lives at risk? It's pretty much a few weeks of Leno jokes, right? Yeah, pretty much. Strikes like this never last long, so I can't see all new movies coming to a grinding halt. Producers make a nice bit on the venues they produce, and actors make entirely too much. So, why drag their feet over the writers' pay? I don't remember any producers getting upset over the latest overpaid actor getting $20 million plus residuals. But since actors get them, why shouldn't writers get residuals? I'd much rather see writers get them than actors.

Imagine if web content writers went on strike. I tried to do that, but I can't see that many people agreeing about anything. I wouldn't mind a piece of those ad dollars that people are bringing in thanks to my content. Nah. Residuals are dependent on someone else's marketing, and I don't think they make anyone a better writer. Flat-fee writing just makes more sense. If you want royalties, write a book. But, that's just my opinion, and I'm not going on strike anytime soon.

Oh. My. God.

You will never believe how low some "business people" are going now to get their cheap content. Apparently paying $2 to people in third world countries to write horrid content in broken English was just too much trouble. Now I've found this. It has to be the laziest thing I've seen since, well, I can't think of anything right this second, but it's pretty freaking lazy. What kind of crap are they going to end up with by using this method? Is it really so much to ask for people to pay for their content? No one is going to read their generic copy, and their $67 is worth nothing more than a tax deduction. Sheesh. What exactly is the internet coming to?